Denis MacShane: Russian revisionism is our best guide to Putin's priorities
[Denis MacShane is the Labour MP for Rotherham and was Minister for Europe, 2002-5.]
In a remarkable gesture, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be in Gdansk today to commemorate the 70 years since a German warship opened fire on Polish soil, thus beginning the Second World War. Her predecessors, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl, made symbolic gestures of reconciliation as they sought to acknowledge past evils. Brandt fell to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 and Kohl stretched out and took hold of François Mitterrand's hand at Verdun 15 years later.
In politics, as in life, saying sorry is often the hardest thing to do. Germany has sought to make amends to Poland by supporting Polish entry into Nato and the EU. Despite customary protests from Eurosceptics last week about Britain's help via the EU for Poland and other new EU member states, it is the German taxpayer who pays the lion's share of EU solidarity help to Poland.
The other visitor to Gdansk will be Vladimir Putin. As Russian president and commander-in-chief, Dmitry Medvedev should represent Russia at key international events. But depite it being 20 months since Putin stood down as president he is still clearly in charge. It is Putin who defines the new Russia. So what he has to say at Gdansk is of capital importance. Will he mention the K word?
Katyn was the site of the first major extermination of the Second World War. The Nazi Holocaust, in the sense of the organised and engineered transportation of millions of Jews from all over Europe to be killed in death camps, followed on from the mass shooting of Jews, Roma and others after the invasion of Russia.
But as a single act of extermination, the Russian killing of an estimated 26,000 unarmed prisoner of war officers, lawyers, doctors, professors, civil servants, and journalists who fell into Russian hands after Russia invaded and occupied eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 remains the biggest one-off act of murder in the early part of the war. Andrej Wajda's moving and slow-build film, Katyn (2007), is witness by a great European artist to what happened.
For decades Russia pretended that the extermination of an entire generation of Polish leaders had been carried out by Germans. Sadly, successive British governments accepted this fiction in the belief that appeasing a lie would help promote good relations with the Kremlin.
Will Putin now apologise for this Russian crime against humanity? The signs are not good. He has banned any showing of Katyn in Russia. Moreover, there is now a sustained effort to re-write history by proclaiming the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which gave the green light to Hitler to invade Poland as a master-stroke of Russian statecraft...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
In a remarkable gesture, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be in Gdansk today to commemorate the 70 years since a German warship opened fire on Polish soil, thus beginning the Second World War. Her predecessors, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl, made symbolic gestures of reconciliation as they sought to acknowledge past evils. Brandt fell to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 and Kohl stretched out and took hold of François Mitterrand's hand at Verdun 15 years later.
In politics, as in life, saying sorry is often the hardest thing to do. Germany has sought to make amends to Poland by supporting Polish entry into Nato and the EU. Despite customary protests from Eurosceptics last week about Britain's help via the EU for Poland and other new EU member states, it is the German taxpayer who pays the lion's share of EU solidarity help to Poland.
The other visitor to Gdansk will be Vladimir Putin. As Russian president and commander-in-chief, Dmitry Medvedev should represent Russia at key international events. But depite it being 20 months since Putin stood down as president he is still clearly in charge. It is Putin who defines the new Russia. So what he has to say at Gdansk is of capital importance. Will he mention the K word?
Katyn was the site of the first major extermination of the Second World War. The Nazi Holocaust, in the sense of the organised and engineered transportation of millions of Jews from all over Europe to be killed in death camps, followed on from the mass shooting of Jews, Roma and others after the invasion of Russia.
But as a single act of extermination, the Russian killing of an estimated 26,000 unarmed prisoner of war officers, lawyers, doctors, professors, civil servants, and journalists who fell into Russian hands after Russia invaded and occupied eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 remains the biggest one-off act of murder in the early part of the war. Andrej Wajda's moving and slow-build film, Katyn (2007), is witness by a great European artist to what happened.
For decades Russia pretended that the extermination of an entire generation of Polish leaders had been carried out by Germans. Sadly, successive British governments accepted this fiction in the belief that appeasing a lie would help promote good relations with the Kremlin.
Will Putin now apologise for this Russian crime against humanity? The signs are not good. He has banned any showing of Katyn in Russia. Moreover, there is now a sustained effort to re-write history by proclaiming the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which gave the green light to Hitler to invade Poland as a master-stroke of Russian statecraft...