A view from Poland on Russian suffering under communism
Written Statement for the July 15 seminar at the Russian Academy of Sciences
By Tomacz Zarycki, Warsaw University
Most Poles have always made a clear distinction between Russians as individuals and the Russian state (empire) and in particular the Soviet Union. While Russians as individuals were usually perceived as culturally, or even spiritually close, and many of them were considered as friends of Poles and Poland, the Russian/Soviet state was usually treaded with at least suspicion if not fear and disdain.
Poles usually recognized that Russians were victims of communism, in many dimensions in a greater extend than Poles themselves. Communism, for example, lasted longer in Russia than in Poland and killed more people, in particular most of the old Russian elite.
At the same time Poles often see Russians as being victims of their own state, be it Soviet Union or Russia, as they allowed its institutions to act in a brutal way against its own citizens. Many Poles point out that without the Russian/Soviet help, communists would not rule over Poland a single day. In other words, there seem to be prevailing opinion in Poland that Russians as a nation are to a large extent responsible for their own and other nation’s suffering under the Soviet rule even if they have been too its victims.
Although many Poles are aware of the scale of suffering of the Russian nation under communism, they fear that recognizing the Russians as the main victim of communism would allow them to reject their responsibility for Soviet Union’s crimes and justify attempts to return to its imperial ambitions.
As the Polish experience shows, the issues of recognition of sufferings and responsibility for them are very complex. Poland is currently confronted with the German efforts to recognize its nation sufferings during the WWII. In particular a plan to built a museum commemorating the sufferings and looses of Germans exiled from their former Eastern territories (taken over by Poland and Russia) and those killed in these lands is at the centre of the debate between Poland and Germany. Many Poles fear that the construction of such a museum in the centre of Berlin just next to the Holocaust memorial, even if no one is denying that many Germans can be considered as victims of the war and the Nazi regime itself, may create a false image of history in which German responsibility for the war crimes will be reduced by the recognition of the German nation’s suffering.
In my personal view, recognition of the Russian nation’s status as a victim of communism will be legitimate only if communists as perpetrators, and in a way occupants of Russia, will be clearly condemned in Russia, irrespectively of their nationality or citizenship. Than their crimes should be investigated and made public and at least symbolically judged. Such a process of settling accounts with the communism is going on in Poland since 1989. As the Polish experience shows, it’s a very difficult, complex and painful process, but without it, without paying its price, overcoming of the terrible past and building of a healthy civil society seem impossible.