![30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Kremlin repeats old lies [Promoted content] | INFBusiness.com](/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/98dad7bacaf08f437d8cce24cac4d32c.png "Anna Fotyga is a Polish MEP from the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Group, a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland.")
Anna Fotyga is a Polish MEP from the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) Group, a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland.
30 years ago, the decision of ending the functioning of the Soviet Union was formally taken, confirming the reality on the ground. Neither economy nor political reality could keep such an artificial empire together any longer. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought back freedom to the many nations on whose sovereignty and at expenses of which the Soviet empire was built. Despite the USSR’s experiment enslaved and crushed the independence of several nations in Europe and Central Asia, the aftermath of its collapse keeps shaping Vladimir Putin’s political vision, as well as his domestic and foreign policies. Today, Ukraine and the people of Belarus are paying the highest price. But we cannot be naive – the attempts of reversing the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and re-imposing its sphere of influence will have detrimental consequences for all of us. The longer we wait to address this issue, the higher will be the costs imposed by the Kremlin.
Let me remind it clearly: between 1919 and 1921, in their attempt to build the Soviet empire, the Bolsheviks crushed the independent states of the Belarusian Democratic Republic, Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Democratic Republic of Georgia, the Republic of Armenia, as well as emerging states of Central Asia and Caucasus. The Polish army stopped their march to the West in August 1920 in the outskirts of Warsaw. However, the Kremlin never gave up on its “go West” policy, and after finding an ally in Nazi Germany, the USSR attacked Poland once again in September 1939.
We heard many lies about the Soviet story, including justifications for external aggressions and internal oppressions. Today, 30 years after the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union, we keep hearing new waves of fake narratives coming from the new/old occupants of the Kremlin. Our work at the European Parliament is successful in combating Russia’s efforts to rehabilitate the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. One of our initiatives was the resolution on the Importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe, adopted on the 80th anniversary of the pact and its secret protocols – an evil agreement partitioning Europe and the territories of independent states between two totalitarian regimes – that eventually paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War. For years, the Soviet Union claimed that the pact was just a Western forgery and said there was no such document in the Soviet archives. In 2019, wannabe historian Vladimir Putin called the pact “a necessary realpolitik choice made by Stalin under challenging circumstances”. Remarkably, the Soviet propaganda claimed that Baltic States voluntarily joined the USSR after spontaneous and simultaneous working-class revolutions, while oppressed Belarusians and Ukrainians made the same decisions in “open and free” referendums. Surprisingly, just a few weeks after those “unanimous decisions”, hundreds of thousands of people were deported to Siberia.
Among the many “Soviet story” lies, let me focus on one that is perfect to understand the Russian strategy, but also the Western weakness: the Katyn lie. In the spring of 1940, approximately 22,000 Polish officers, soldiers and policemen interned in Soviet prison camps were murdered by order of the highest authorities of communist Russia. According to the recommendations, officers of the NKVD had to kill the Poles without trial. The ultimate goal of the genocide of the Polish elite was to conquer Poland and afterwards – the West Stalin did not hesitate to personally lie on the fate of missing Polish soldiers, assuring the Polish Prime Minster that all the Poles were freed, but could not be retraced because the Soviets “lost track” of them in Manchuria. Several months later, when the mass graves were found and the Polish government pressured for an international investigation, Stalin used it as a pretext to break off diplomatic relations. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decisions to push the problem away and conceal the truth became an established pattern for the Anglo-Saxon policy towards Stalin during WWII and its aftermaths. While the West was able to slowly accept the truth, all Soviet actions were aimed at maintaining the Katyn lie as a state policy. The entire state apparatus, from the highest levels of the Politburo and security services to journalist and teachers was involved in the cover up of this barbaric crime. Soviet mystification lasted for years in the communist-controlled public sphere, where even mentioning the word Katyn was considered a crime (and treated as such). The same happened with the Augustow Roundup of July 1945 – the largest crime committed by the Soviets after the Second World War. Moscow took the responsibility for the Katyn atrocity in the early 1990s, after decades of denial. Thanks to the brave historians of Memorial, we were able to get more information on the Katyn Massacre and Augustow Roundup. The current regime in the Kremlin is using all available tools to re-establish the policy of the Katyn lie, including the transformation of the memorial site.
Unfortunately, not only the archives are restricted to researchers in today’s Russia. It was also decided to deny access to compromising evidence of Soviet crimes and rewrite the dark pages of Russia’s past: the removal of Katyn plaques from buildings with brutal legacies, like the latest move by the authorities in Tver, is just another example. I find it exemplary that Memorial, which was founded to document political repressions carried out by the Soviet regime during its darkest times, is still working in Putin’s Russia. The attack on Memorial is another, and possibly a final, step in Vladimir Putin’s campaign to recast Soviet history, tie modern Russia’s identity to the former Soviet Union and steer towards a more totalitarian form of government. We can fully read Putin’s historical and contemporary lies only by knowing these facts. To a certain extent, Putin has been able to rebuild some key features of the Soviet Union: false narratives and a state policy of historical lies are certainly among them. Moreover, we can see that just like in the Soviet times, current events are not immune from the imposition of old narratives and propaganda. I always recall the fate of the Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of Crimea, whose deportation in 1944 amounted to a genocide against the entire nation. They suffered under the Soviet Union, and they are suffering under Putin’s regime.
80 years after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, we see that there’s nothing new in today’s wave of the Kremlin’s lies. Yet, not even the most extensive and sophisticated propaganda can turn occupants into liberators and transform oppressors into freedom guarantors. What happened in the 1940s in the Baltic States and eastern Poland is the same we are observing nowadays in Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas. The same methods, the same lies to justify belligerent goals. Vladimir Putin has been hardening his rhetoric over the situation in Ukraine, saying the war in the country’s east looks like genocide. He called it a genocide, but then blamed the Ukrainian state for it. At the same time, he is preventing Ukraine from regaining control over its territories by fuelling the conflict through pro-Russian separatists. He speaks about discrimination against Russian speakers beyond Russia’s borders, not mentioning the situation of those who speak Ukrainian in occupied Donbas or Crimea, and omitting the fate of those who speak up for the truth inside Russia. In the European Parliament, I hosted Iryna Dovhan and Oleksandr Khomchenko who gave their testimonies about cruelties in the occupied Donbas. I also presented a report on “Izolyatsia”, a secret prison that has become notorious for tortures. I continuously speak up for the dozens of Crimean Tatars being unlawfully held in Russian prisons, hostages of the Kremlin’s policy of intimidating and subordinating the whole nation. Among them, let me remind journalist Server Mustafayev. Similarly, let me remind the thousands of brave Belarusians who protested peacefully against their Kremlin-sponsored dictator and were tortured and imprisoned for their desire to live in a free and democratic country. Among them, Andzelika Borys and Andrzej Poczobut. The truth, free people and democracy remain major obstacles to the creation of a Soviet Union 2.0.
Nevertheless, even with all of the above in mind, I would also like to recall a positive message from the past. It was the message addressed to the working class of Eastern Europe by the First Solidarność Convention, in the name of a common fight for human rights. It said that we all share the same fate. The people of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova have chosen their own paths. 30 years after the Bialowieza Accords, unity and solidarity are the best cure to oppose the attempts to build the Soviet Union 2.0.
Source: euractiv.com
