Soviet Aims and Actions concerning Poland, 1939: Reply to Steven Miner

By Grover Furr, Montclair State University

Steven Miner's criticism of Geoffrey Roberts' response to Roger Moorhouse's book repeats Cold War falsehoods now revived by today's Polish nationalists.

The transcripts of the Soviet-British-French negotiations for "collective security"-- a military alliance against Germany -- were published in Mezhdunarodnaia Zhizn' in 1959. It is clear from those documents that the Soviets genuinely desired an agreement that would bind the U.K. and France to attack Germany, not leave the USSR to fight Hitler alone.

Subsequent events proved the Soviets were right not to trust the U.K. and France. Despite their declarations of war the U.K. and France did not attack Germany. Since they betrayed their ally Poland they would likely have betrayed the USSR even with a collective security treaty.

Nevertheless, the USSR offered to put approximately one million men in the field against Germany. [1] In sabotaging collective security by forbidding Soviet forces to enter Poland in order to engage an invading Germany army the Polish leadership guaranteed its own defeat.

Had Poland not rejected collective security, and assuming the British and French attacked Germany as they agreed to do, Hitler could have been stopped in 1939. That would have saved tens of millions of lives and prevented the Holocaust.

On September 17, 1939 the Polish government abandoned its own country without appointing a government-in-exile. Germany had already declared that without a functioning government Poland was no longer a state. But the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, including the secret protocol making Eastern Poland part of the Soviet sphere of influence, was an agreement concerning the state of Poland! German ambassador Schulenburg informed Molotov that, if the Red Army did not come in, new states could be formed in Eastern Poland. In fact the Germans were planning to form a pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist state there. [2]

Molotov was correct when he claimed that the state of Poland had fallen apart, thus necessitating the entry of Soviet forces. Winston Churchill agreed, stating that the Red Army's entrance into Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine was in Great Britain's interest as well as that of the USSR. [3]

Prof. Miner claims that, like the Nazis, the Soviets were "conquerors." In fact it was Poland that had "conquered" - seized by force -- Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine from an exhausted Soviet Russia. These areas were east of the Curzon Line. Poles were a minority of the population.

Poland had no right to these areas except by conquest - just like Vilnius, which Poland seized by force from Lithuania in 1920 or the Teschen area of Czechoslovakia, seized by force in 1938. In tacit recognition of its past imperialism today's Poland claims none of these lands.

The interwar Polish regimes viciously suppressed the rights of the Belorussian and Ukrainian inhabitants. They also sent many thousands of ethnically Polish "settlers"-- osadnicy -- to "Polonize" these non-Polish areas. It was this Polish imperialist infrastructure that the Soviets deported in 1939-41.

Prof. Miner claims that both the Nazis and the Soviets "unleashed" "unparalleled savagery" in what had been Poland. But the Soviets did no such thing. The Germans were deliberately murdering the Polish elite in their "AB-Aktion." The Soviets did not murder the Polish osadnicy. Meanwhile, in acts of unparalleled savagery Poles, including the Polish Home Army, were murdering Polish Jews, often without any urging from the Germans. [4]

The conventional Cold War / Polish nationalist narrative of the "Katyn massacre" is a fraud. Drafts of the forgery of the so-called "smoking gun" documents, including the "Beria letter," were presented to the Russian Duma in October 2010 and widely publicized. There is a significant scholarly literature challenging the bona fides of these documents. [5]

In 2010-2011 a joint Polish-Ukrainian archeological team at a mass murder site in Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy, Ukraine discovered that some Polish policemen supposedly killed by the Soviet in April-May 1940 as part of the "Katyn massacres" were really murdered by German and Ukrainian Nationalist forces at least 15 months later and 700 miles away. This discovery explodes the "mainstream" narrative of Katyn. It is simply hushed up. [6]

Contemporary Polish nationalism is firmly committed to the now-disproven "mainstream" Katyn narrative because it is viewed as essential to the demonization of the USSR and, now, of Russia. Katyn is also central to the renewed, and dishonest, effort to equate Stalin's USSR with Nazi Germany.

In this whole disastrous period only the Soviet Union's actions appear proper in historical retrospect. A pity that such views are virtually unmentionable given the renewal of Cold War shibboleths associated with efforts of Poland, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states to recast the histories of their prewar and wartime regimes.

As for today's Ukraine crisis, a topic raised by Prof. Miner, Pres. Putin's response has been very restrained by world standards. Faced with a far smaller threat to American security the United States openly invaded tiny Grenada in 1982 and Panama in 1989. I recommend Professor John Mearsheimer's realistic analysis, "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault," in the September-October 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Grover C. Furr Montclair State University

For fuller documentation of the statements in this article see Grover Furr, Blood Lies. The Evidence that Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands Is False. New York: Red Star Publications, 2014.

NOTES:

[1] The promise is cited in Mezhdunarodnaia Zhizn', No. 3, 1959, p. 141. See "Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'". The Telegraph (London) October 8, 2008. At http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3223834/Stalin-planned-to-send-a-million-troops-to-stop-Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact.html

[2] See "The Reich Foreign Minister to the German Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Schulenburg)", September 15, 1939. At http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ns072.asp On the Nazis' planned use of Ukrainian Nationalists if the Soviets did not enter see Julius Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus. Berlin: Vlg. der Nation, 1971: 122, 124.

[3] Churchill's statement that the Soviet intervention was in the interest of Britain and France as well as of "Russia" see The New York Times October 2, 1939, p. 6.

[4] On the massive murders of Jews by Poles, including the Home Army, see Stepan Zgliczynski, Jak Polacy Niemcom Zydów Mordowac Pomagali ("How Poles Helped the Germans Murder Jews") Warsaw: Czarna Owca, 2012. Zgliczynski is the editor of the Polish edition of Le monde diplomatique.

[5] An overview of the Katyn controversy and citation of a good many of these works is on my page "The Katyn Forest Whodunnit," at http://tinyurl.com/katyn-the-truth

[6] Grover Furr, "The 'Official Version' of the Katyn Massacre Disproven? Discoveries at a German Mass Murder Site in Ukraine." Socialism and Democracy 27, 2 (2013), 96-129. Now ownline at http://sdonline.org/62/the-official-version-of-the-katyn-massacre-disproven/