War in the Middle East could also be roiling markets and testing world stability, however one precedence endures for Vladimir Putin’s Russia: rewriting historical past.
Last week, the state-backed Russian Military-Historical Society unveiled a brand new exhibit in western Smolensk area entitled “10 Centuries of Polish Russophobia.”
The exhibit, a information launch mentioned, targeted on “the hatred of the Polish state elite at various periods of history toward Russia and the Russian people, and how this hatred manifested itself in concrete actions. Specifically, in the seizure of Russian territory and the extermination of the Russian, Belarusian, and Little Russian peoples.”
Leave apart the nationalistic language (“little Russians” being the Russian imperial time period for Ukrainians) and the politics of grievance, the exhibit itself is an affront to historical past. It stands on the grounds of the Katyn Memorial, the place greater than 20,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and prisoners of war had been executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. And Smolensk was additionally the scene of another traumatic occasion for Poland, the 2010 airplane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and high Polish officers together with senior protection officers who had been on their solution to Katyn to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the bloodbath.
Soviet authorities lined up that crime for many years, blaming the Nazis for the bloodbath. And the exhibit – known as “shocking” by one Polish newsweekly – opened just some days earlier than an official commemoration of the victims of the bloodbath.
While the Russian authorities has taken steps in the previous to acknowledge the culpability of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his regime, some Russian-language commentators see the show as an enormous step again towards denying the crimes of totalitarianism.
In a post on X , the editor-in-chief of the impartial Novaya Gazeta Europe, Kirill Martynov, described the transfer as “shameful.”
“Together with Hitler, the USSR authorities dismembered Poland, deported and killed countless people, and in 1940 executed Polish prisoners of war. After which, for decades, they pretended they had nothing to do with it,” he mentioned.
Konstantin Sonin, a professor on the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, drew comparisons with newer symbolic acts by the Russian authorities, similar to giving an honorary title to a Russian brigade accused of war crimes in the Ukrainian metropolis of Bucha.
“For Putin, this kind of symbolism — defiling others’ sacred sites or places of memory — is very characteristic,” he wrote on X. “Exactly the same thing happened when Putin bestowed the ‘Guards’ title on that division whose soldiers and officers were killing civilians in occupied Bucha.”
The war in Ukraine, unsurprisingly, seems foremost in the minds of the exhibit’s organizers. The Russian Military-Historical Society says the exhibit pays “particular attention to the issue of Russophobia in modern Poland. Today, the Polish authorities are pursuing an aggressive anti-Russian policy, demolishing monuments to Soviet soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War, and supplying weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
The chairman of the Society is Vladimir Medinsky, a promoter of Putin’s imaginative and prescient of Russian historical greatness who has additionally served as a negotiator in talks geared toward ending the Ukraine war. And that war has additionally been an train in making an attempt to rewrite historical past, with Putin’s navy attempting – to this point with out success – to extinguish Ukrainian statehood.