In late October the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) handed down a decision on the «Katyn case» in favor of Russia; its final ruling on the complaint of the Poles' relatives was that Russia did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights in the Katyn case. On the eve of the ECHR decision, which makes it impossible to further politicize the topic of Katyn, a scandal broke out surrounding the erecting of a «sculpture» in Gdansk of a soldier in a helmet with a star on it raping a pregnant woman with the barrel of a gun in her mouth…

One of the initiators of the campaign to desecrate the memory of the Soviet soldiers who freed Warsaw was the site Kresy.pl, created with the support of the Ministry of Culture and the Senate of the Republic of Poland and specializing in the topic of the «Western territories». An image was placed on this site which is offensive to Russians and Poles alike: a collage of the «monument to the Soviet rapist soldier» and the famous Warsaw memorial «Brothers in Arms», on the base of which is the inscription in Polish and Russian, «Glory to the heroes of the Soviet army, our brothers in arms, who gave their lives for the freedom and independence of the Polish nation». (The authorities of Warsaw took the latter memorial down 2 years ago under the pretext of the construction of a subway, promising to reinstall it in 2013; then rabble-rousers started collecting signatures against the return of the monument, but they were only able to get about ten thousand signatures from the almost 2 million residents of the Polish capital). Kresy.pl accompanied its collage with a mocking caption: «A new idea for reconstructing the «Four Sleepers» monument». That is what some local residents with short memories scornfully call the «Brothers in Arms» memorial, which consists of four frozen bronze figures of soldiers of the Polish and Soviet armies.

The European media immediately joined in the incendiary campaign. For example, the British Daily Mail, having noted with pleasure that «The statue, entitled Komm Frau (Come Here Woman), appeared on Gdansk's Avenue of Victory», poured out upon the reader a prurient stream of verbal filth containing such «pearls» as: «Millions of German women were raped by Red Army soldiers between 1944 and 1945…Polish women and even Russian women released from captivity were also raped…As well as the estimated two million rapes in Germany, there were between 70,000 and 100,000 in Vienna and anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 in Hungary, as well as thousands more in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia… In many towns, every female between 10 and 89 was attacked… Stalin explicitly condoned rape…»

Pouring out a muddy stream of such filth, today's Poles prefer not to remember that over 600,000 Soviet soldiers gave their lives to free their country from the Nazis, including the lives of the more than 20,000 Soviet soldiers and officers who fell in the battles for the Polish capital. 

They have forgotten the words of Winston Churchill: «Without the Russian armies Poland would have been destroyed or enslaved, and the Polish nation itself would have been wiped from the face of the earth. But the valiant Russian armies are liberating Poland, and no other forces in the world could have done so».

Photo 1 – the public executions of Poles during the German occupation, Krakow. Photo 2 – the execution of a Polish worker in Germany in front of his compatriots.

The representatives of the proud Polish nation have also forgotten the warning signs which the Nazis hung on the doors of the restaurants, cinemas and city parks of occupied Polish cities: «Für Hunde und Polen verboten!» («No dogs or Poles allowed!»).

The material assistance the USSR provided for the recovery of postwar Poland has also been forgotten; the Soviet Union renounced all claims to German property in Poland and yielded 15% of reparation payments and 15% of industrial equipment exported from Germany to Warsaw.

They have forgotten the fact that when bread was being rationed in the USSR, in January 1945 the Soviet Union started free shipments of 60,000 tons of grain to Poland. It is possible that many Polish Russophobes and their parents owe their lives to this very grain. 

They have forgotten that thanks only to the unbending position of the USSR, or of Stalin, to be more exact, the current Polish-German border was drawn through the Oder-Neisse line, which gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea and increased the country's territory by over 100,000 square kilometers.

They have forgotten that in the 1980s, so difficult for Poland, the USSR gave over 7 billion rubles in free assistance, and in the early 1990s Russia essentially forgave Poland's debt of 5.3 billion rubles, at that time not yet devalued, in foreign currency.

Today Polish politicians call all this the «Soviet occupation» and permit lowlifes to desecrate the memory and graves of fallen Red Army soldiers. They do not like to recall these and other facts, like the mass deaths of Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and German prisoners in Polish concentration camps in modern Poland. But the Poles themselves do not mince matters with regard to their neighbors' historical memory.  

They are brazenly removing the Soviet exposition in Oswiecim (Auschwitz-Birkenau) on the made-up pretext that it is «historically inaccurate», as some in Poland do not like the fact that people from Western Ukraine and Belarus are included in the lists of Soviet citizens who died in Oswiecim. They are trying to demand multibillion-dollar «compensation for Katyn» from Russia, like that the Poles receive in the form of reparation payments from Germany. They picture the president of the German Federation of Expellees, Erika Steinbach, in an SS uniform, and at the same time the Polish parliament is demanding that the government of Germany officially declare invalid the demands for reparations of the descendants of millions (!) of Germans, mostly old men, women and children, who were expelled, robbed, raped and killed by Poles. 

Today, as in 1939, counting on Britain and other «faithful friends» of Poland, some of its natives are passionately attacking Russia for the «crimes of the Soviet regime». But they are forgetting that post-Soviet Russia has no reason to help Warsaw wriggle out of answering the questions which are being asked increasingly loudly from the West. Russia has officially acknowledged its guilt for Katyn (although the investigation of the matter can hardly be called complete), and all documents have been handed over to Poland. However, there has been no corresponding response. But after all, for example, the extermination of tens of thousands of unarmed Russians in Polish concentration camps in the 1920s is not the fantasy of provokers dreaming of the «Western territories»; it is a crime against humanity.