The outbreak of World War II, which began on Sept. 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland by the Nazi Third Reich, is one of the events annually commemorated throughout Europe.
However, Sept. 17, 1939, the date of the Soviet Union’s aggression against Poland, is not as widely known. This event needs to be remembered as it decided the fate of Poland and other countries of central and eastern Europe for the next half-century. Poles and other peoples of the region know Russia and understand its imperial ambitions through the historical experience symbolized by Sept. 17.
The Red Army’s incursion into Polish territory was the implementation of the secret part of the Nazi-Soviet pact signed on Aug. 23, 1939, by the heads of the two diplomacies, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov. Two totalitarian empires entered into an alliance and planned to divide the independent countries of central Europe among them.
The German sphere of influence was to include western Poland, Lithuania and Romania, while the Soviet control was to extend over eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
For Poland, the most important consequence of the pact was the joint liquidation of the independent Polish state and the division of its territory between two occupying powers, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Other provisions of the treaty were partially modified in the following two years. Finland managed to protect its sovereignty in the winter war of 1940.
However, after an episode of relative independence, Lithuania was absorbed by the Soviet Union. Various detailed amendments did not affect the critical principle of the pact — imperialism by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were to decide the fate of the peoples and states of that part of Europe.
Under German occupation, Poland suffered enormous human and material losses. The Nazis killed 6 million citizens of the Republic of Poland, including nearly 3 million Polish Jews.
They destroyed and burned thousands of Polish towns and villages, as well as the country’s capital, Warsaw. They stole countless material possessions and cultural assets, which were never returned. Only a few of the perpetrators of German genocide, extermination, war crimes, mass terror and looting were brought before the tribunals in Nurnberg and Warsaw to suffer the punishment they deserved.
Although Nazi Germany’s crimes were morally condemned by the free world, this does not apply to the crimes of Communist Russia, which went unpunished and often forgotten.
The Soviet occupation of more than half of Poland’s pre-war territory entailed the Katyn Massacre — the extermination of 22,000 prisoners of war: Polish Army officers, policemen, soldiers, civil clerks and other political prisoners. They were shot because Stalin regarded them as patriots loyal to their homeland and implacable enemies of communism.
It also entailed the deportation of half a million Poles to gulags and forced settlements in Siberia and the Asian part of the Soviet Union, a vast number of whom never returned and died in exile.
It entailed brutal terror and ideological indoctrination by the Soviet police, attempts to crush the Polish national identity and tradition, the coercive instillation of communist principles in children and the forced renunciation of faith.
Poles are not the only ones to have suffered. The Baltic nations, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, were equally afflicted. As were other nations that fell within the Soviet sphere of influence after Russia’s victory over the Third Reich.
The Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed less than two years after its conclusion, when Germany attacked Stalin’s Russia on June 22, 1941. Yet the fate of the central and eastern European countries was to be decided by the rulers of the imperial powers that remained in force.
The Soviets defeated the Nazis and in 1945 seized the entire territory of Poland and other states further to the west and south, as far as the rivers Elbe, Danube and Drava. Some of them were annexed directly to the Soviet Union as federal states — such was the fate of the Balts, Belarusians and Ukrainians.
In others, Russia installed puppet governments consisting of local communists subservient to Moscow — this happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany.
For the Poles, the defeat of the Third Reich did not bring freedom. The subjection to the Russian empire continued until the fall of communism — for another half-century.
It was not until the democratic changes initiated in 1989 by the Polish “Solidarity” movement that the Poles and other nations truly liberated themselves and regained the sovereignty of their states. Most gradually became full members of the EU and NATO.
However, the independence of any country from central and eastern Europe has always been a thorn in the Russian imperialists’ side.
As soon as Moscow recovered from the shock of losing its Stalinist sphere of influence, it started moving toward restoring the empire.
We remember the military assault on Georgia in 2008. We remember the brutal suppression of several freedom movements in Belarus and Ukraine.
We remember Russia’s hostile policy towards independent Ukraine, the military annexation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and the genocidal war against the sovereign Ukrainian state unleashed on Feb. 24 this year.
For people who remember the historical events symbolized by today’s date — Sept. 17 — there is no doubt that imperial Russia is seeking to take over other countries again.
It wants the same thing it wanted in 1939 and 1940, when it acted with Hitler’s Germany, and between 1945 and 1991, when it ruled those countries on its own.
Russia has always wanted to control central and eastern Europe, but a free Poland, a free Ukraine and all the other independent states in the region would never agree to it. It is a matter of life and death, of preserving identity and survival. It is a matter of future security and prosperity for us all.
Andrzej Duda is the president of Poland. This article was simultaneously published in the Polish monthly Wszystko Co Najwazniejsze as part of a project with the Institute of National Remembrance and the Polish National Foundation.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) on Thursday last week urged democratic nations to boycott China’s military parade on Wednesday next week. The parade, a grand display of Beijing’s military hardware, is meant to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. While China has invited world leaders to attend, many have declined. A Kyodo News report on Sunday said that Japan has asked European and Asian leaders who have yet to respond to the invitation to refrain from attending. Tokyo is seeking to prevent Beijing from spreading its distorted interpretation of wartime history, the report
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase