[LINK] "Russia accuses Poland of starting Second World War"

[rfmcdonald]

Thanks to Pēteris on Facebook who alerted us to this striking article.

The Russian defence ministry posted a potentially inflammatory essay on its website which claimed Poland resisted Germany's ultimatums in 1939 only because it "wanted to obtain the status of a great power".

The lengthy diatribe, which is unlikely to be welcomed in Warsaw, also lashed out at Britain and France for giving the Poles "delusions of grandeur" by promising to intercede if the Nazis invaded.

"Anyone who has been minded to study the history of the Second World War knows it started because of Poland's refusal to meet Germany's requests," the statement read. "The German demands were very modest. You could hardly call them unfounded."

Appearing to take Germany's demands at face value, the defence ministry insisted that the Nazis were interested only in building transport links across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia and assuming control of Gdansk, which had been designated as a free city at the time.

Western historians largely recognise that if Poland would have lost its independence had it acceded to the demands, pointing to Hitler's policies of Lebensbraum and the creation of a Greater Germany as evidence.

Germany invaded Poland on Sept 1, 2009, prompting the British Empire and France to declare war over the next two days. Germany and the Soviet Union then carved up Poland under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The statement, written by Col Sergei Kovalev, a senior researcher at the defence ministry, appears to be part of a new Kremlin campaign to push its view of Soviet era history.

[. . .]

Col Kovalev's paper, which appears under a section titled History: Lies and Falsifications, claims that British support for Warsaw caused Poland to "lose all sense of reality."

It also attacked the Western press for suggesting that the Soviet Union carried some blame for the War by its alliance with Hitler under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which carved up Europe into two spheres of influence to be headed by Hitler and Stalin.

"No representatives of a Western democracy has the right to discuss any treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany," given that Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement of 1938 giving Germany control of the Sudetenland.

As for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Col Kovalev wrote, it was merely a time-buying mechanism after Britain refused to sign a mutual defence treaty with the Soviet Union.

It's worth noting that this essay is being promoted by the Russian Federation, which has claimed for itself the glory of the Soviet Union, apparently excluding anything--shall we say--antisocial that the Soviet state has done. Not that the Soviet state, with its purges and state-sponsored famines and tyranny, was in any way an unacceptable strategic partner for Britain or France or Poland, of course.