POLITICAL IDENTITY, public memory and professional history are being combined in a complicated and fractious way during this week’s commemorations of the beginning of the second World War in Poland 70 years ago.
These three dimensions of how to deal with a disastrous past are necessarily interwoven but often bitterly disputed. Political leaders project national interests when they interpret the past, public memorials are often based on inaccurate historical facts, while professional historians try to develop a more complete account but struggle to open archives and resist popular prejudices.
All the more reason to welcome yesterday’s commemorative ceremonies in Gdansk, where Polish, Russian, German, British and French leaders, along with those from 15 other states, spoke about the outbreak of war, how to account for it and what lessons can be learned. This was much more than a token retrospection. Polish representatives are rightly using it to assert their own specific history and identity against the partial accounts of the Germans and Russians who occupied their country (and the Baltic states) under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. They insist that responsibility for that twin occupation be accepted by those involved, including for the murder of 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals by Soviet troops in 1940.
In his thoughtful but argumentative article in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin says the Soviet Union had little option but to sign that pact if it was to avoid a premature war on two fronts in 1939 against Germany and Japan. He reminded his readers that Britain and Germany signed the Munich agreement the previous year and that Polish troops participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Both pacts were morally unacceptable even if politically explicable.
As Russian president he presided over a steadily growing glorification of the Soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany, with the loss of an estimated 25 million lives. Recent legislation in the Russian parliament seeks to criminalise statements and acts that deny the Soviet Union won the second World War, or claim it used poor tactics in battle or did not liberate eastern Europe. Such views are especially provocative for central and eastern European states that became part of the Soviet empire after 1945 and are now members of the European Union and Nato. Angela Merkel joined Mr Putin in making a plea for greater understanding of these events and fully accepted German responsibility for the second World War. But the German chancellor refused to accept that the post-war fate of the millions of German-speaking refugees should not be dealt with in the historical reckoning.
Progress was made yesterday when Mr Putin and Polish prime minister Donald Tusk agreed historians must have greater access to the relevant archives. Mr Tusk spoke movingly about collaborative investigations of the historical record. Such an approach will not erase the differences between history and public memory, or eliminate political disagreements, but it can help to civilise international relations.