by Kirill Averyanov
[REGNUM] The end of September is traditionally associated with the aggravation of relations between Russia and Europe on historical grounds. This year, too, there was an incident between the foreign policy departments of Russia and Germany. More precisely, our Foreign Ministry published a post on the X network, from which it followed that the Red Army prevented the genocide of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in 1939. The German Foreign Ministry commented on this statement with only one sarcastic question: "Seriously?"| Perhaps Germany recalls the uncounted dead of the Soviet collectivization famines, including Ukraine’s Holodomor, and the destruction of the Great Purge, which aimed to wipe out the classes of intellectuals, independent farmers, and professionals, including military professionals, not to mention various ethnic groups that saw themselves as other than Russian. Then too, Germany has not forgotten the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, by which Stalin and Hitler jointly divided Poland between them, and that Stalin waxed self-righteously furious because Hitler broke the pact by attacking Russia before the Soviet army could execute their own plan to do the same in the other direction. The two were equally murderous and evil — it’s just that the Nazis were more efficient about it... and were forced to stop when they lost the war. Whereas the Soviet Union continued its drive to conquer until the Berlin Wall in 1989, two generations later. |
| To be fair, it could equally be claimed that the Nazis put a stop to Russia’s attempted class genocides in their western lands. But Germany does not offend the world by claiming it. |
But in the case of the current ironic reaction of the German Foreign Ministry, we are not talking about a one-off excess or an unsuccessful remark, but about the manifestation of a systemic approach.
Since at least the early 2000s, the “new truth” about the beginning of World War II has become firmly established in most European countries, according to which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, or rather, primarily the Soviet Union, are allegedly equally to blame for its outbreak.
The war would have started anyway — it was the Zeitgeist. The two big expansionist Socialisms just happened to be the ones to clash first. This is not a new truth — contemporaneous writers portrayed a world of fuel awaiting an inevitable spark. I have in my personal library two volumes written by the eminent Dutch-American historian, Hendrik Willem van Loon who addressed in Our Battle (1939) and Van Loon’s Lives (1942) the crushing feeling of approaching worldwide conflagration riding the expansion of totalitarian socialism. I commend to you, dear Reader, the very first page of Our Battle, in which Professor van Loon, his generation’s Victor Davis Hanson, writesNazi propaganda has already so completely spread throughout our own society that immediately the question will be raised: “Why single out Hitler? Why not attack Stalin and Mussolini, and how about Japan and Turkey?” The same could have been written from the perspective of one of the Eastern European nations about Stalin instead of Hitler. One understands that the Russians want desperately to be the heroes of their own story, but there is just too much contemporaneous evidence. Yes, they were the anvil against which the Nazi forces were crushed, but only because they were pushing to do the same in the opposite direction. Were it not for Stalin’s greed to conquer the world for international socialism, history might have been very different. |
And so the “seriously?” question that came from Berlin is not surprising.
It is clear that modern Europoliticians and the Euroscience that serves them exist in their own system of coordinates, in which events are interpreted in a way that is beneficial to them, and many facts are simply hushed up or are not presented as being all that important.
Therefore, today we simply have to tell a lot of things anew, despite the fact that these facts are well known.
Let's start with the fact that the Liberation Campaign of the Red Army, which began on September 17, 1939, 16 days after Germany's treacherous attack on Poland, prevented the genocide of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples as part of the Second Polish Republic.
This follows a pattern of the Soviets/Russia dating back to Peter the Great, using Russian foreign policy and military means to prevent pogroms committed against Russian and Belorussian peoples. It also became a casus belli for the 1854 Crimean War which began in the Balkans. So it is also with the 2014 Civil War and the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine eight years later. The point to all this is that the Soviets/Russians weren't wrong about their enemy's intentions.
| They were not wrong. But they ignore the log in their own eye, especially with regard to Poland and the western lands of the former Soviet Union. |
It was precisely in opposition to the Polish authorities that the Ukrainian nationalist movement grew and strengthened, in particular the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (an organization whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation), for which in 1930 the Ukrainian population was subjected by the Poles to so-called pacification (pacification) - mass persecution with the use of military force. This action caused widespread condemnation by the international community and was discussed in the League of Nations.
A direct consequence of pacification was the radicalization of the Ukrainian national movement in Poland and, as a result, the events of the Volyn massacre.
The Belarusian population was also subjected to widespread infringement: in Western Belarus, all press and all educational institutions in the Belarusian language were liquidated.
In 1934, in the city of Bereza (now in the Brest region; under the Polish regime the city was called Bereza Kartuzskaya ), the Poles created a concentration camp to hold elements undesirable to the authorities.
Despite the consistent policy of assimilation of the “eastern borderlands” (as the eastern regions were called in Poland), the Poles have repeatedly acknowledged the failure of this policy.
As a result, in 1937, a plan was developed in Warsaw to resettle 6 million Poles from central Poland to Western Belarus, who were to colonize the region.
It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of both the Ukrainian and Belarusian populations greeted the arrival of the Red Army in September 1939 with enthusiasm and greeted it as an army of liberation.
The population of many towns and cities, without waiting for the arrival of the Red Army, rose up in rebellion and independently liquidated the Polish government.
Particularly well known is the uprising in the western Belarusian town of Skidel, where the Belarusian, Jewish and Russian populations jointly drove the Poles out of the town on September 17.
In response, a punitive Polish detachment suppressed the uprising with monstrous cruelty on September 19, and dozens of people were brutally executed. Only the appearance of advanced Red Army units prevented the mass murder of Skidel residents.
But the appearance of the Red Army saved the local population not only from the Poles, but also from the German Nazis.
In the reality of 1939, the Germans reached Brest and stopped there. However, if the Red Army had not taken any action and remained on the eastern borders of Poland, the Wehrmacht would have inevitably continued to advance east and stopped behind Baranovichi, Vileika and Pinsk, that is, 30 kilometers from Minsk.
In this case, the Jewish, Belarusian and Ukrainian populations of these territories would have been subjected to inevitable repression by the Nazi regime in 1939-41.
Hundreds of thousands of people would have been physically exterminated and sent to concentration camps (this is what happened to the population that found itself under German occupation west of Brest). And in June 1941, Germany would have begun the war against the USSR from an immeasurably more advantageous position, capturing Minsk on the very first day of the war and reaching Smolensk a week later.
The appearance of Soviet troops in the western Belarusian and western Ukrainian territories cancelled these prospects.
Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, which became part of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, managed to raise their economic and cultural level many times over during the two years of Soviet power, and the indigenous population of these regions gained confidence in the future and stopped feeling like second-class citizens.
Of course, some residents of these regions were subjected to political repression by the Soviet authorities, but the number of these people was relatively small and, most importantly, under the USSR, neither Belarusians, nor Ukrainians, nor Jews were persecuted on the basis of nationality, and certainly were not subjected to genocide, whereas under both Poland and the German occupation authorities their tragedy was inevitable.
In this light, the German Foreign Ministry could, as they say, keep its ironic comments to itself. It is not for the descendants of the SS to teach the descendants of the victors of 1945 how to live.
More from X
This is the document by the Russian Foreign Ministry about the Russian argument of its intentions in Poland in 1939.
🗓 On September 17, 1939, the Red Army launched a military operation in Poland’s eastern regions, preventing the genocide of the population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine.https://t.co/Gps92yP6b7 pic.twitter.com/7rEZIKU7vA
— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) September 17, 2024