The Polish Revolt
If in the Baltic states the decisions of the Yalta Conference were seen as a mere confirmation by the Western powers of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which delivered the Balts into the hands of Stalin, in Poland those decisions were discussed in a different context.
There the Yalta debate coincided with discussions about President Aleksander Kwasniewski's possible visit to Moscow for the VE Day celebrations. The tone and direction of the debate provoked strong criticism on the part of Moscow. As in the case of Russo-Latvian disagreements over the interpretation of the Soviet past, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs took it upon itself to present the Russian point of view on the matter. On 12 February 2005, sixty years to the day after the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, the Information and Press Department of the ministry issued a statement distributed by the government-controlled press agency ITAR-TASS. The authors of the statement took issue with those Polish authors and politicians who regarded Yalta as a symbol of Poland's betrayal by its Western allies and of the subsequent Soviet occupation. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested what it called an attempt to rewrite the history of the Second World War and take historical events out of context. It asserted that the participants in the Yalta Conference had wanted to see Poland strong, free, independent, and democratic. The fact that the Soviet Union did everything in its power to turn that country into anything but a strong, free, independent, and democratic state apparently was not considered by the authors of the statement to be part of the historical context. Another Russian argument in favour of the Yalta decisions dealt with the extension of the Polish borders to the north and west and the recognition of those borders by the Big Three at Yalta and Potsdam. The statement conveniently overlooked the fact that Poland lost its eastern lands, and, by incorporating western territories previously settled by ethnic Germans, became an accomplice in Stalin's partition of Europe.12It is not clear what the initiators of the Russian Foreign Ministry's statement expected, but it created a great deal of negative publicity in the Polish media. Critics immediately pointed out that as a result of the Yalta decisions, Poland found itself under the control of a totalitarian regime and not only gained but also lost territory. Still, the Polish media was not prepared to open the Pandora's box of the postwar European border settlements. Some observers even asserted that if Lviv had remained in Poland after the war, it would probably have become a Polish Belfast. Generally, when it came to countering Russian arguments on the significance of the Yalta decisions, the Polish media treated them with a kind of fatalism - what else could one expect of the Russians? Commentators stated that it would be unreasonable to think that Moscow could condemn the decisions made at Yalta with the participation of Roosevelt and Churchill if it still refused to admit its failure to support the Warsaw uprising of 1944 or release all available information on the Soviet execution of thousands of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn Forest in 1940.13
The Katyn massacre of more than twenty thousand Polish prisoners of war by Soviet security forces has always been high on the list of Polish grievances against Russia.14 In the spring of 2005, some commentators even suggested that Kwasniewski's visit to Russia for the VE Day celebrations would be justified only if he used the occasion to lay flowers at the mass graves of Polish officers in Katyn Forest. Even the last communist ruler of Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was invited to attend the celebrations in Moscow and intended to visit his father's grave in Siberia, stated that he did not understand why the Russians were reluctant to tell the whole truth about Katyn and publish the available documents.15 Opposition leaders in parliament, including the future president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, declared themselves against KwaSniewski's visit to Moscow.
But the Catholic Church hierarchy and majority public opinion supported the visit, as did the government, which maintained that it would not amount to a ratification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 or the Yalta decisions of 1945.In his interview with the German daily Die Welt in late February, Kwasniewski stated that he intended to go to Moscow to celebrate the end of the bloodiest dictatorship in human history but would not accept the invitation if it were for a ceremony marking either the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or of the Yalta Conference. Like the Baltic presidents before him, Kwasniewski noted President George W. Bush's earlier statements that Yalta had led to the partition of Europe and failed to bring freedom to significant numbers of Europeans. Kwasniewski believed that the anniversary of the end of the war in Europe presented Putin with an opportunity to remind the world of the contribution of the Russian and other Soviet peoples to the victory over fascism and to give a just assessment of what had taken place after the war. In early May 2005, before leaving for Moscow, Kwasniewski addressed his compatriots at the Polish VE Day celebrations in Wroclaw. According to the Polish State Information Agency (PAP), KwaSniewski stated: 'Yalta was painful... for Poles, above all because the declarations on independent and democratic Poland were not kept.' He added, however, that 'thanks to the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, our country built and continues to build its sovereignty and found new opportunities for development in the west and north.' Kwasniewski condemned the Soviet killings of Polish patriots after the war, stating that 'We remember with indignation and bitterness that when fireworks exploded in the Moscow sky to celebrate the victorious end of the war, sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground were incarcerated in the Lubianka Prison, and three of them were murdered.' Having calmed public opinion at home and countered his opponents' calls to turn down Putin's invitation, KwaSniewski was ready to depart for Moscow.16
There he was in for a major surprise that strengthened the hand of those who had opposed the visit from the outset and advised him not to go to Russia.
In his speech at the festivities President Putin omitted Poland from his list of nations that had contributed to the victory over fascism. This apparently came as a surprise not only to Mr Kwasniewski but also to his communist predecessor, Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had boasted before his trip to Moscow that he was going to Russia as a representative of the fourth largest army in the anti-Hitlerite coalition. Whether Putin's omission of Poland in his VE Day speech was deliberate or not, it helped bring Polish-Russian relations to a new low. As was later admitted by Artem Malgin, the coordinator of the Polish-Russian Forum on European Politics, official Russia lost a unique opportunity to improve its image abroad. In Poland, according to Malgin, Russian diplomats did not show sufficient flexibility, as they failed to shift discussion from topics harmful to Russo-Polish relations and focus on useful ones instead. One such topic, suggested Malgin, was the current status of veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who had fought not only against the Germans but also against the Poles and Soviets. In Malgin's view, Russia had failed to exploit the generally positive opinion in Polish government and society of the role played by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. In the Baltic states, where the governments adopted an 'anti-VE' stand, the best option for Russia was allegedly to ignore the historical debate altogether. Malgin warned his readers against assuming that there was a coordinated Western information offensive against Russia and called upon them to continue working for the improvement of Russia's image abroad. Given the degree to which that image had been damaged by the debates over the legacy of the Yalta Conference, Malgin's advice was timely indeed.17Meanwhile the Russian authorities preferred to put on a brave face and interpret the criticism of their country's post-Second World War role in Eastern Europe as an indication of the growing strength of the Russian state. Thus the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, stated that in 1995, when the world celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the victory over fascism, no one had bothered to present historical claims against Russia, since it was a weak state at the time. As Russia grew stronger, its neighbours became concerned about its new might and decided to advance their historical claims. According to Lavrov, one of the factors that worried Russia's detractors was its desire to lessen its treasury's dependence on energy exports. This was a peculiar claim to make at a time when much of Russia's economic recovery was fuelled by the country's energy exports and rising oil prices.18