Since December, Vladimir Putin has been trying to prove that Poland should be blamed for the Holocoust. According to Leonid Bershidsky, a Russian journalist for Bloomberg, much of Putin’s foreign-policy activity this year will be directed toward trying to rebuild a more Russia-centric concept of the victory over the Nazis.
In Bershidsky’s article we can read about a debate among prominent Russian historians discussing how to shape the narrative of the Second World War to their benefit, making Poland Russia’s main adversary and Israel Russia’s main ally. The debate followed the resolution of the European Parliament from last year which equated the Soviet regime with Nazi Germany. The thinking behind this is clever in its own, twisted way. As the Polish government of the conservative Law and Justice party leads a firm historical policy of underlining the truth about Poland’s role in the Second World War, which was that of a victim of the Holocaust, not the perpetrator, Russia knows the global Jewish communities and the Israeli authorities won’t let that be, as they want the Jews to be perceived as the only victims of the terrible German genocide. It doesn’t matter that Poland lost most of its young generation and intelligentsia fighting the Germans and in concentration camps, the same way the Jews did. That allows Russia to brew up tensions between Poland and Israel, even though the Soviets were equally ruthless to both those nations during their invasion of Poland and during their occupation of Western Europe. It seems like Putin is becoming more and more obsessed with twisting the historical truth about his country and Poland, which may actually point to his weakening position and fear of Poland’s growing role in the Vysegrad group.