The Misconception of the Twentieth Century
Even many people with little sympathy for the Soviet Union admire its “heroic” role in World War II. What all too few people realize is that for the first twenty-two months of World War II, the Nazis and the Soviets were allies. Under the auspices of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler and Stalin partitioned the countries that lay between them, beginning with Poland. Here’s a nice map showing the original Nazi-Soviet deal, and its subsequent revision:
After they fell out with their Nazi allies, of course, the Soviets claimed they had just been protecting themselves from the future German invasion, but that’s nonsense. World War II might not even have started if Hitler didn’t have Stalin’s help. And if Stalin was expecting an invasion, he wouldn’t have ignored all the evidence that Hitler was about to invade.
For Hitler, no doubt, the Pact was just a marriage of convenience: He stabbed his ally in the back as soon as he had a chance. But many Nazis saw things differently. Here’s a fascinating passage I came across in Nazism, 1919-1945, vol. 4, from the daily German press conference of 2/2/1940:
[T]he German public must not now be given the impression, through a description of Russian domestic life, that we want to achieve an ideological merger and that we are more or less adopting and imitating Bolshevik terminology. There is an undoubted danger that such a merger will occur because our struggle against England and France is, after all, also directed against the plutocratic system and, as a result, certain Socialist conceptions have to be discussed quite often. But one must distinguish this propaganda and keep it clearly separate from the Bolshevik terminology. The reference in some newspapers to the German state as the workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ state must not be repeated.
Methinks they dost protest too much!
While in alliance with the Nazis, the Soviets claimed, as usual, to be “liberating” the countries they invaded. The reality was quite different. Most shockingly, during Stalin’s alliance with Hitler, almost two million Poles were deported to Siberia. Hitler’s double-cross was the only reason the Polish deportees didn’t all die in Soviet slave labor camps; in his desperation, Stalin allowed many to leave the Soviet Union via Persia to fight for the West.
The upshot is that there are many witnesses to the Soviets’ atrocities toward the Poles. Lately a lot of them – and their surviving relatives – have been contacting me. They’re known as the Kresy Siberia Group, and make it their goal to educate the world about what really happened to them.
It’s a tale that deserves to be heard for its own sake. But to understand what happened to Poland between 1939 and 1941 also puts all of twentieth century history in perspective. The Big Story of the century wasn’t a left-versus-right struggle, or a struggle of moderation versus extremism. It was a struggle of cosmetically different totalitarian socialisms to enslave the world. They fought freer countries to subjugate them; they fought each other out of lust for power. I’m still amazed that things didn’t turn out far worse.
The post appeared first on Econlib.
test comment
So I have sent you an email protesting against this post, and as you suggested, I just copy and past it here.
As a Polish person myself, I wanted to say that I disagree wholeheartedly with the equivalence between Nazi and Soviet crimes it tries to establish, and that you should be more careful when spreading these sorts of narratives around. They are historically false and politically dangerous. I imagine that you mean well, and I also understand why you find them appealing, so I only ask you to hear me out on this. And as a fan of your work (yes open borders!), I also thought it was my duty to raise my voice on this.
Let us start with why it is historically false. The only objective of the Soviet Union in Poland was to create and support a local communist government, mostly by astroturfing a Stalinist pro-Soviet agenda in its pre-war agrarian and communist movements, and by eliminating its landed gentry. The objective of the Third Reich on the other hand was the complete extermination of the Polish Jewry followed by the colonisation and elimination of Poles as a nation. Contemporary Polish historical narratives, mostly pushed by the state-controlled Institute for National Remembrance and organisations like Kresy Siberia (more on them below), have completely lost any sense of proportion in how they remember and compare both these objectives: they are obsessed with Soviet crimes like the Katyn massacre or the deportation to Siberia – horrible stuff, no doubt – but they have completely forgotten the even worse things the Nazis did like Intelligenzaktion, Aktion AB, Unternehmen Tannenberg, Herbert Backe’s Hunger Plan and so on, and this is even without mentioning the Holocaust itself (but more on this below). On Polish lands, Nazism was orders of magnitude more murderous, ruthless, and barbaric than the Soviet Union or the later Polish People’s Republic ever was, and this is just a fact, no matter what you think of communism.
Now why is this ‘equivalence narrative’ politically dangerous? Quite simply, it feeds contemporary Polish illiberalism, which is built on the idea that Poland is Europe’s eternal martyr. This is used by the current Polish nationalist government to push its aggressive pro-Catholic policies and curtail freedom of speech – see the 2018 law which criminalises any historical research on Polish participation in the Holocaust. It is also used to publicly justify its perpetual arm-wrestling with the European Union on issues like minority rights and the rule of law. The double (Nazi/Soviet) occupation narrative is also a pillar of Viktor Orban’s propaganda in Hungary by the way – see the controversies around the House of Terror Museum and the Liberty Square in Budapest.
Worse, it also prevents any frank and open discussion about Polish responsibilities in the Holocaust and post-war pogroms, which is a taboo in Poland without any equivalent elsewhere in Europe to the best of my knowledge – and I imagine most Poles would be outraged that I even suggest such responsibilities could exist. Research on this topic is so stiffed that most high-profile Polish historians working on it have to conduct it abroad. Coincidentally, two of them have recently published an article on how a group of Polish nationalists have completely skewed the coverage of the history of the Holocaust in Poland on Wikipedia in English: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. They have also, not coincidentally, tried to blame the Soviets for crimes which were specifically committed by Poles, like the 1946 Kielce pogrom.
Finally, I should also add that the organisation you have given free advertisement to, Kresy Siberia, repeats all the classic tropes and cliches of contemporary Polish nationalism, for instance:
- The very use of the words ‘Kresy’, which designates the eastern lands Poland colonised after the Peace of Riga, and which were mostly inhabited by non-Poles (Jews, Lithuanians, Ukrainian, Belarusians). Almost no one uses this term in Poland today unless they come from a … particular political milieu, let’s say.
- The presentation of the Volyhn massacres committed by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists as an act of genocide – this is simply a lie. There is no evidence of genocidal intent (not every mass murder is a genocide).
- Again, almost exclusive focus on Soviet crimes, while Nazi crimes only get a passing mention, despite having been incomparably worse on almost every scale and measure as committed on the territories which the webpage covers.
- The extermination of Jews only comes third in the list of the Nazi crimes the webpage does mention, below for instance ‘depriving Poles of their rights’, whereas it should be first. Trivializing the Holocaust or insisting on the Polish rather than the Jewish character of its victims is also a staple of Polish contemporary nationalism.
I shall add that while I am as much an anti-communist as you are, I am even more anti-fascist, as every Pole aware of their history should be. And so if the dominant narrative of the World War 2 Eastern Front is one of a struggle of moderation versus extremism as you say, or of one of an extremism which was much less bad than the other, then the dominant narrative is correct indeed.
Pozdrawiam,