"Prisoner of the Soviet mentality"

Polish press about the visit of the Russian Prime Minister

“Putin remained a prisoner of the Soviet mentality. Depending on what was more profitable, Putin either demonstrated continuity in relation to the Soviet Union and its power, or distanced himself from the Soviet regime, ”wrote the Polish Rzeczpospolita.
Poland feels triumphant by hosting a major international event to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. Twenty prime ministers, the President of the European Parliament, dozens of foreign delegations, a thousand journalists arrived on the Westerplatte peninsula in the Bay of Gdansk, whose border guards experienced the first blows of Nazi Germany. It was important for the Poles to remind the world that they were the first victims of treacherous aggression, that the war began on September 1, 1939, right here on Westerplatte, and not three days later, as they believe in Great Britain and France, who declared war on Hitler on September 3, and of course not June 22, 1941, as most Russians think.

The main intrigue of the meeting was the arrival of the Russian prime minister in Poland. His article in Gazeta Vyborczy had an effect: as ex-foreign minister, co-chair of the Russian-Polish Group on Difficult Issues Professor Adam Daniel Rotfeld noted, it was “fundamentally different from the vile campaign in the Russian media.” Nevertheless, everyone was waiting for Putin himself - what he would say publicly. The Russian prime minister noted that the state of Russian-Polish relations is changing for the better thanks to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his colleagues: "We have found in them a partner with whom we can work." Of the signed documents, the most important was the intergovernmental agreement on navigation in the Kaliningrad and Vistula bays, the coordination of which lasted almost two decades.

And yet, the interpretation of historical events has become a running thread of Putin's visit. Even despite the fact that Putin and Tusk agreed at the very beginning of the meeting that experts should find out the causes of the Second World War and this should not interfere with interstate relations.

The Poles expected Putin to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, apologize for the September 17, 1939 invasion and Katyn, disassociate themselves from historical manipulations in the Russian media. Putin also attacked the participants in the "Munich agreement", accusing Poland of partitioning Czechoslovakia. True, with regard to the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, he recalled its condemnation by the Russian parliament, but at the same time called on other European countries that agreed with Germany in 1934-1939 to do the same. Putin and Tusk had a separate conversation about Katyn. The premiers agreed on access to archival materials on a reciprocal basis, and this came as a surprise. Putin specified: "If our specialists have access to the Polish archives, then the Polish specialists will have access to the Russian ones." Janusz Kurtyka, chairman of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, in whose bowels the archives and documents of the state security agencies, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense are concentrated from July 22, 1944 to December 31, 1989, immediately declared: “All Polish archives, even the INP, are open to Russians. Putin fell into the trap of his advisers.”

We also agreed to establish two joint centers for the study of the Katyn tragedy. “There will be difficulties along the way: the film Katyn, which has been seen in dozens of countries around the world, has not yet hit the Russian screen, although this is not an anti-Russian, but an anti-Stalinist film,” Andrzej Wajda told The New Times.

Photo ITAR-TASS/Stanislav Krasilnikov