Current Affairs

On 24^th February 2021, Putin ordered his army into Ukraine. An invasion of another sovereign nation had begun. The Russian army failed in its mission on this day, but what exactly is the argument that led to the attempted dismantling of a sovereign nation by Russia. The revanchalist reading of historical argument could be blamed on Putin’s own interpretation of history, which could be mistaken for just propaganda, but the ridiculousness of his claims are found in an interpretation that demotes classicists into the realm of mythical ideologues who cannot actually put a finger on a significant artefact without breaking it.

So where do you start, Putin blames Poland for the outbreak of the Second World War, but that itself could be argued, because Czechoslovakia could not be defended in 1938. He argues that the Soviets would have defended the Czechoslovakians, and that Stalin wanted to support the country by sending troops, tanks and aircraft through Poland to stop the invasion of the Czechoslovakia. But there is something quite revisionist about this argument. Poland refused to give the Soviets permission to pass through their territory, and President Putin cited a report dated 25^th May 1938, that Yakov Surits, the Soviet ambassador in Paris, in a conversation with Edouard Daladier, the French Prime Minister, whether Poland could be relied upon to defend Czechoslovakia against Germany. This is where the argument gets a bit murky, the French approached Juliusz Lukasiewicz the Polish ambassador and asked whether Poland would allow Soviet troops to pass through their territory so they could come to Czechoslovakia’s aid. Lukasiewicz, response was that Poland would not allow Soviets to pass through their territory.

This is very well documented by France’s archives, but the question itself was immaterial as Britain and France were fighting for time to rearm their military. The failure of any nation coming to the aid of Czechoslovakia, was that it was seen by both Daladier and Chamberlain as a war they could not win without a rearmed army and air force.

To review the history of Russia’s relationship with France between the conclusion of the 1935 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the 1938 Munich Agreement, it could be shown that Stalin seriously doubted France’s ability to repel German aggression. It could be argued that few in Paris would have defended the murderous Russian regime and that Paris did everything to negate the treaty. However, it would be a tenuous argument to believe that Stalin would have jumped at the chance to join France in a war against Germany in 1938. Putin argues that Britain and France were cynical in their approach to Czechoslovakia, but he is also unwilling to see that Stalin would have been overjoyed if France, Britain and other Western nations would have confronted Hitler and Germany at  this point.

Czech President Edward Benes never believed Stalin: “The truth is that the Soviets never wanted to help us.”

There is a deep disdain for Poland in Putin’s revision, he argues that Poland was determined by its own failures, because they did not just prevent the Soviets from helping, but colluded with Germany to partition Czechoslovakia, (Teschan Silesia 1938). There is a problem with this interpretation and that was that Poland relied tactically on Teschen Silesia not only nationalistically but also for national defence. The Polish-American historian Anna Cienciala argued that the Polish government kept its options open, and did not disagree with taking military action against Germany in Czechoslavakia, if Britain and France had been willing to fight too.

Putin rips into the fabric of Polish identity concerning the argument of minorities in Poland, he argues that Poland was as guilty as Germany for its behaviour towards minority groups, especially Jews. Poland was a country that had not existed as an independent state for over a century. It was home to large communities of Germans, Lithuanians, White Russians, Ukrainians and Jews. Polish nationalists were torn between two arguments, either ethic purity, or a multi ethnic commonwealth. Roman Dmowski stood for the nationalist argument, but opposing him was Jozef Pilsudski, and there were also Ukrainian and Jewish lobby groups in London and Washington. At the Paris Peace Conference, the struggle between these different interpretations of identity in an independent Polish state led to the Polish state granting minority rights. In the interwar years Poland was 66 percent Polish ethnically and included 4 million Ukrainians, three million Jews and one million Germans.

Prompted by President Wilson, the newly created New States Committee in Paris reviewed the ethnic arguments that challenged the rule of law in Poland. The committee dismissed Jewish demands for national autonomy, which resulted in the Polish government as a condition for recognition signing a treaty guaranteeing rights for minorities. These rights covered citizenship, equality of treatment and religious freedom. The treaty was guaranteed under the League of Nations, and as such complaints could be brought before the League’s Council, which then could take the appropriate action against the Polish government to safeguard minority rights.

But, this is where Putin falls down, the widespread anti-Semitism in Europe throughout the interwar years existed in central and eastern Europe, enabling Hitler to rise to power. Nazi Germany was not an anomaly, though it took anti-Semitism and attacks on minorities to an extreme, which sounded the death knell for the assimilation argument and the League. While ethnic nationalism was practised in most of eastern Europe, the institutionalised anti-Semitism in Germany undermined the whole basis of the League’s approach to minorities.

According to Hitler’s view of politics, the state was “a living organism, [that] reflected the writing of German geopoliticians. Hitler argued that boundaries could not be fixed; they were, ‘momentary frontiers in the current political struggle of the period.’” By the end of the war, after the extermination of jews, gypsies and others, mass exodus and refugees, only 3 percent of the ethnic minorities were left in Poland. (Mark Mazower)

Soviet leaders too shared anti-Semitic views, and Stalin himself took on anti-Semitic arguments. Putin’s view is hard to equate rationally and his outburst that led to him citing Lipski’s report at the CIS summit, and then again returning to the same argument a few days later at the Defence Ministry Board was shallow, as the Lipski report had been known since 1948.

Putin becomes more bizarre when he claims that the Soviet occupation was responsible for saving many lives in Poland, after its occupation of the East in September 1939. “If it wasn’t for the Soviets,” he claims, “the many Jews who lived in Soviet occupied Poland would have been sent to the furnaces.” Putin did not mention the victims of the Soviet occupation, the 22,000 Polish officers executed in the forest of Katyn, or that the Soviets lost these territories in 1941, nor did he mention the significance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, except that Russia had “Partitioned some territory”. It is impossible to compare the Munich agreement with Ribbentrop and Molotov’s pact which partitioned Poland. There is so much that Putin fails to mention, the available evidence of Soviet-German discussions from 1939-1940, and the Soviet territorial ambitions in Europe, which reveals Stalin as a tyrant.

Putin’s view that historically the Western alliance has belittled Russia’s contribution to Europe’s liberation from Nazism, challenges what is taught in Universities’ right through the world. His view of the historical perspective can be challenged, but the problem is that this view is corrupting the historical canon. But what is emanating from the nightmare that he has caused the Ukrainians, must be challenged. And though he feels that Russia has been sidelined by arguments historically, the reality is that he has bastardised, aggrandised and destroyed the true historical view of when and where and what are the main events that enabled and empowered Hitler. But the questions that Putin puts forward are off the mark and destroy the essence of his arguments for what is happening in Ukraine today.