Putin's Polish room reignites battle over war memories
By Charles Clover in Moscow
Published: September 5 2009 03:00 | Last updated: September 5 2009 03:00
It is hard to get a straight answer in Moscow about exactly whose idea it was.
Last week, Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister, attended a meeting of world leaders in Poland commemorating the start of the second world war in 1939. So far, so good. But where did he get a hotel room? In the resort town of Sopot, in the Charles De Gaulle suite (with sea view) of the beachfront Sofitel Grand hotel. Seventy years ago, this was known as room 226, the very same room in which Adolf Hitler stayed to oversee the invasion of Poland.
The strange symbolism - gleefully highlighted in the Polish blogosphere - was all the more jarring as a war of memory erupted among the ceremony's participants.
Ostensibly devoted to a celebration of peace and reconciliation, the event instead sparked recrimination and acrimony as accusations of "rewriting history" flew back and forth among historians and politicians.
Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, accused the Soviet Union of "stabbing Poland in the back" by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, dividing Poland with Germany, and invading 17 days after Hitler in September 1939. He then compared the infamous Katyn forest massacre of 20,000 captured Polish officers following the Soviet invasion with the Holocaust.
Mr Putin did, somewhat obliquely, apologise for the past, as Poland has been pushing Russia to do. He said that all such pacts with Hitler - including the 1938 Munich accord - were "morally unacceptable", and pointed out that the Soviet parliament had condemned the pact in 1989, although it stopped short of an official apology.
He also harshly criticised recent efforts to equate Stalin with Hitler, or to accept any claim that the Soviet Union shared responsibility for starting the war.
Natalia Narochnitskaya, a historian who heads the Foundation for Historical Perspectives, a Moscow think-tank, says that even throughout the whole cold war, no one had questioned the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. "Now everything is being thrown open," she says.
In May, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, stepped into the fray by creating a commission of senior bureaucrats and historians, entrusted with fighting the "falsification" of history.
It is an awkward construction: a political commission, led by the president's chief of staff, charged with fighting the politicisation of history.
Their job is to fight the increasingly public battle over "memory", as highlighted by the intellectual fireworks at last week's commemoration.
Russian historians have been trying to show that Poland followed a "Germanophile" foreign policy in 1939 and was not an innocent victim of Hitler, as it portrays itself. Polish historians strenuously reject such suggestions.
Aleksandr Chubaryan, director of the institute of history at the Russian Academy of Sciences, points out that a committee of Russian and German historians was set up more than 10 years ago to reach a consensus on the war, but still had not produced anything.
"We have trouble arriving at a consensus among authors even in this country, let alone in co-operation with foreigners," he told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper.
The debates now have an added urgency in Russia, where the political present is increasingly tied to the Soviet past. While Boris Yeltsin, former president, frequently repudiated the USSR, today's Kremlin eagerly draws on Soviet imperial glory to buttress its own legitimacy.
Unfortunately the Kremlin's single-minded attempts to create an unblemished narrative of second world war heroism will almost certainly preclude an honest assessment of the past.
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