Loaded with anti-Russian propaganda, Jerzy Hoffman's new movie about the 1920-1921 Polish-Russian war – The Battle of Warsaw 1920 – will no doubt resonate with the Western audience… The idea that movies should, above all, serve propaganda purposes, actually dates back to V. I. Lenin, and, unlike much of his legacy, it evidently survived into the XXI century. The global distribution of The Battle of Warsaw 1920 took a high-profile  start on September 30 with the inauguration attended by Polish premier B. Komorowski and his wife.

The conflict which erupted between Poland and Russia in the  1920ies was ferocious. The Red Army crushed the Polish resistance and essentially reached Warsaw, but suffered a debacle in the proximity of the Polish capital and had to roll back. As a result, Poland retained control over large chunks of West Belarus and West Ukraine. In Poland, the Red Army's defeat near Warsaw, a pivotal event that averted the collapse of the country, has been refereed to as the Miracle at the Vistula since the time. The whole early XX century Polish-Russian war seems to occupy a central place in Poland's historical self-portrayal, providing an ideological foundation for a Russophobic brand of Polish patriotism with its definitive myth of a country defending in recurrent conflicts with the “Russian barbarians” the frontiers of the Western civilizations.

Jerzy Hoffman, of course, credits the Miracle at the Vistula to the military talent of J. Pilsudski. The supposedly historical movie counts a standard set of blockbuster attractions from noisy battle scenes to a rosy love story. What it does lack is historical realism which was a priori missing on Hoffman's agenda.

It is a fairly commonplace observation that the Polish patriotism tends to draw verve from permanent re-readings of lists of historical grievances and slamming neighbors over real and imaginary offenses. Even in the case of Katyn, one feels tempted to ask why, for Poles, the drama overshadows even the much heavier death toll suffered at the Western front. The likely explanation behind the paradox is that toning down the rampant Russophobia would automatically leave the Polish patriotism deenergized.

Ethnologist and sociologist Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann coined the term ethnocentrum to describe an ethnic group's self-perception based on a whole array of the settings of its existence from preeminent landscape to policies, diplomatic ties, and statehood. In Poland's case, the ethnocentrum is permeated with hostility to Russia for fear of either getting absorbed by a bigger and more powerful neighbor or, at least, of facing an internal split as the predominantly Roman Catholic Poland would have to embrace the Orthodox part of its identity. Scores of Poles who were originally Orthodox or served the Russian Empire and the USSR – Gen. A. Rzewuski, Gen. F. Krukovsky, mathematician N.I. Lobachevsky, Russia's classic writer N.V. Gogol, Adm. Tziwinski, Soviet World War II marshal K.K.  Rokossovsky, or founder of the Bolshevik secret police F. Dzerzhinsky –  are in various ways presented as figures marginal to Poland's culture in its historical writings. Distancing themselves from all things Russian, particularly with the help of a never-ending propaganda campaign, is the Poles' way of safeguarding their national identity.

Jerzy Hoffman's movie, therefore, simply had to be centered around an anti-Russian message.  As a part of the design, Hoffman carefully avoided references to those of the 1919-1920 circumstances that might project badly on Poland. First, it has to be taken into account that from the outset Poland pursued markedly aggressive goals in the war – Warsaw nothing less than hoped to reestablish control over the territories the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth held before 1772, including Lithuania, Belarus, and a portion of Ukraine reaching as far as the Donbas industrial center. Secondly, Poland's number one hero J. Pilsudski was, judging by his writings, an ardent expansionist who made no secret of his anti-Russian agenda: „Locked within its XVI century borders, cut off from the Black and Baltic Seas, and deprived of the arable lands and mineral riches of its South and South East, Russia would easily become a background power unable to pose any threat to Poland's newly gained independence. In its turn Poland, as the biggest and most powerful of the new states, would secure a sphere of influence spanning from Finland to the Caucasus”. Thirdly, it was Poland who committed the first violent acts and de facto provoked the war. Polish forces rushed to occupy Belorussian and Ukrainian cities and attempted to claim permanent control over the corresponding territories. The Polish troops led by L. Żeligowski invaded Lithuania, to which the Soviet Russia had granted independence, and propped up in its place a puppet formation known as the Republic of Central Lithuania, with the same Żeligowski as a Warsaw-appointed autocrat. Some of Lithuania's territories were thus incorporated into Poland and things stayed that way till the 1939 collapse of the Polish statehood. Even these days Lithuanians feel bitter about the Polish-Russian war of 1920ies and Vilnius pushes for rebuilding the Lithuanian identity of the population forcibly allocated to Poland in the epoch. Fourthly, Pilsudski was a dictator and a proponent of „sanation” policies aimed at subduing the non-Polish part of Poland's population and generally suppressing political freedoms in the country. Under Pilsudski, Poland endured censorship, had opposition parties outlawed, and opened its first Bereza Kartuska concentration camp. Poland maintained the drastic sanation regime from 1926 till 1939. The historical truth, however uncomfortable to today's Poland, is that an iconic status is not exactly what Pilsudski deserves.

Any national history is saturated with myths, but in this regard Poland appears to  be a champion, occasionally making it hard to believe that the majority of Poles even realize what their country's past conceals. The Polish propaganda may endlessly repeat that the NKVD, Stalin's secret police and predecessor to the KGB, persecuted Poles, but most Poles are unaware how many of their countrymen used to serve in it. When West Ukraine was reinstated within the USSR in 1939 and shortly after the end of World War II, local Poles massively cooperated with the NKVD in fighting underground Ukrainian separatist groups which, whenever they could, exterminated Polish communities including women and children. The NKVD helped organize and armed Polish self-defense squads which operated under Soviet officers' command and hunted down Ukrainian nationalists in their forest hideouts. Some 30,000 Polish volunteers served in the NKVD.

Communists, especially those from the Soviet Union, are unpopular in Poland. What Polish historians never mention, though, is that in the early 1930ies the percentage of Poles in the Ukrainian branch of the USSR Communist Party was roughly twice that of Poles in Ukraine's population, and the Ukrainian Communist Party's secretary general S. Kosior was an ethnic Pole. Few people in today's Poland know that V. Menzhinsky, an offshoot of an aristocratic and reportedly Orthodox Polish family, headed the NKVD in 1926-1934. Actually, as NKVD chief Menzhinsky was a successor to NKVD founder F. Dzerzhinsky who was also Polish. In Poland, Dzerzhinsky is believed to be a Jew, which he was not.  In fact, as a young man Dzerzhinsky went to the same gymnasium as Russia-hater Pilsudski.

Jerzy Hoffman's The Battle of Warsaw 1920 opened the "Molodist" 41-th International Film Festival in Kyiv on October 22. Festival director A. Khalpakhchi praised the movie as an epic narrative showing Pilsudski's army stop the Trotsky-led Bolshevist attack against Poland, a glaring omission being that one of Poland's objectives in the 1920 campaign was to occupy Ukraine.