On February 2, we mark another anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, and Putin will certainly use it to celebrate a victory that, since the invasion of Ukraine, has taken on even greater significance for him. In April last year, the Russian president gave the name “Stalingrad” to the airport in Volgograd (which was renamed Stalingrad in 1961). Incidentally, when Putin went there in 2023 for the round, eightieth anniversary of the end of the battle, the authorities of Volgograd did everything, as in the old Potemkin days, to hide what was weak and build a “fairy tale” around it glorifying the victorious tsar – stray dogs were rounded up, and old, crumbling shacks were covered with large banner sheets. For the anniversary itself, for a decade now, the sign at the entrance to the city has also been replaced – Volgograd once again becomes Stalingrad. Using history to conduct current politics is one of the tools that Putin has long had “at hand” and often and skillfully uses. Completely unconcerned with how much any of it corresponds to the facts.
The victory over Germany at Stalingrad is currently being used, during the war in Ukraine, to remind people that Soviet Russia, under Stalin’s leadership, was able to defeat someone whom the rotten West had not been able to bite up to that point during World War II. Yes, the Germans and Italians were already dying out in North Africa at the time, but on the European continent Hitler ruled unchallenged.
Thus, in some measure, through the celebration of a historic victory, it is a wagging of a finger in front of Europe (and the Germany currently leading it) – “Do you remember how the Red Army kicked your asses at Stalingrad? Think about that before you start threatening us again, rearming, and rattling your sabers” – all of this can be added and read, as it were, between the lines.
What matters is that in precisely this reality, the Polish president is able, on the occasion of the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, to remind people that the red “liberators” were not much better than the Germans. Unfortunately, the efforts of the presidential camp to pursue a good politics of memory and good communication of historical-political narratives are not enough. Because on the other hand, media-state institutions in the hands of the ruling coalition will support such “scholars” who provide Germans with convenient arguments, making it easier to relativize guilt and shift it onto the conquered and exterminated nations, which are now being burdened with co-responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. Paraphrasing the title of the book around which a discussion on this subject has been ongoing for months, one could say that this is the “method for the mayor”.
And when articles appear in the German press saying that Germany was merely the great “architect” of the machinery of extermination, while the executors were already different, and on the other hand we have in Moscow a powerful despot and historical manipulator, the fundamental question arises: should we, as Poland, besides seeking military armaments for the army, not also begin to arm ourselves mentally and in the ways of our own historical propaganda? Because otherwise our neighbors, just waiting for our next falls, will eat us again.