Putin’s dictatorship adopts the propaganda of the Soviet communist dictatorship
Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship continues to wholeheartedly embrace the lies repeated for decades by Soviet propaganda.
Putin wants Poland to thank the dictator Stalin, who invaded it in 1939
The lie of the Russian government to justify the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939
Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide part of Europe in a secret protocol
This Wednesday, September 17, is the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of the eastern half of Poland in 1939. An invasion that was carried out in an agreement with Nazi Germany, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23, 1939, which included a secret protocol by which Hitler and Stalin divided up Eastern Europe, agreeing on which part of Poland each of those totalitarian dictatorships would keep and awarding the USSR both Finland (invaded by Stalin on 30 from November 1939 such as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Romanian regions of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (invaded and annexed by the USSR in 1940).
This division of countries was embodied in a secret additional protocol to that pact. The Western Allies found the documents of this secret protocol in Germany at the end of the war, finally revealing the alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939, but the USSR denied it and continued to deny it until August 1989, when Argumenty I Fakty, a publication of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, finally published the document 50 years after it was signed, as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness.
The Kremlin’s lies to justify the Soviet invasion of Poland
Despite these facts, Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship has revived the lies of Stalin’s propaganda. Today, at 2:31 PM CET, the Russian Foreign Ministry, via its Telegram channel, justified the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, claiming that on September 17 of that year, “the Red Army launched a military operation in Poland’s eastern regions, also known as the Red Army’s Polish Campaign.” Significantly, the Kremlin is using the same terminology it uses to disguise its unprovoked aggression against Ukraine.
In its message, a pamphlet lacking any historical rigor and concealing key facts, the Kremlin states the following:
“Certain (pseudo)academic circles and mainstream media in the West intentionally promote an excessively biased interpretation of these events seeking to equate the Third Reich and the USSR and cast our country as an aggressor.”
The Kremlin also claims that the German invasion of Poland “compelled the Soviet leadership to take decisive action aimed at eliminating the threats emanating from the Polish bridgehead seized by the Reich.” After a further round of propaganda, the Kremlin offers the following conclusion: “the advance of the Nazi troops towards the western borders of our country was halted.”
The joint German-Soviet parade in Brześć Litewski
In reality, it was all a farce previously agreed upon between Germany and the USSR, as revealed by the telegrams exchanged by both dictatorships at the time. The idea that the Red Army invaded Poland to stop the Germans is graphically refuted by a fact that some continue to deny: the joint parade held on September 22 by Germans and Soviets in the Polish town of Brześć Litewski (today Brest-Litovsk, Belarus), to celebrate their joint victory over Poland:
The boycott of the communists loyal to Moscow to the defense of France
On the other hand, the pact signed between Germany and the USSR not only allowed these dictatorships to divide up the eastern part of Europe, but also the communist parties loyal to Moscow boycotted the defense of France against the German invasion of 1940, a boycott carried out not only by the French Communist Party: the Communist Party of Spain attacked the exiled Spanish republicans who wanted fight against the Germans.
The crimes of the USSR in Poland and the Soviet role in the Holocaust
The Kremlin’s lies about the Soviet invasion of Poland include the following claim that the Red Army’s timely campaign helped save the population of eastern Poland “from genocide.” This is a statement laden with cynicism, which conceals the complicity of the USSR with Germany in the beginning of the Holocaust, a complicity that included acts such as the handing over to the Gestapo of some 4,000 German communists and Jews who had taken refuge in the USSR.
We must also not forget the extermination of 22,000 Polish officers by the Soviets in the Katyn massacre, war crimes whose investigation has been blocked for years by Putin’s dictatorship, which has no interest in the crimes perpetrated by the Soviets against the Polish people becoming known, because they contradict the Kremlin’s lies. on that issue.
Let us also remember that between 1939 and 1941, the Soviets deported 1.2 million Poles to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR, in a total of four waves. Some 150,000 Poles died, executed or from the harsh conditions of deportation during that first Soviet occupation. Let us also remember that both Nazi Germany and the USSR attempted to erase Polish culture, prohibiting the printing of books in Polish and teaching in that language (one side imposed German and the other, Russian). This persecution of Polish culture ran parallel to the Nazi and Soviet persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland.
The Kremlin hides the 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin
It is curious to note that in the message published today by the Kremlin there is no mention of the 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin, nor of the other agreements signed by Germany and the USSR at that time, agreements that showed a genuine alliance between these two dictatorships, by which Germany received from the USSR 1.6 million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of oil, 500,000 tons of iron ore and other large quantities of raw materials that served to fuel its war machine and also its plans for genocide. Of course, the Kremlin text also makes no mention of the Katyn massacre or the other crimes committed by the Soviets in Poland. It is yet another example of the dictatorship’s falsification of history, mimicking what Stalin did during his reign of terror.
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Colorized photo by Mirek Szponar. German and Soviet soldiers at the joint German-Soviet parade in Brześć Litewski to celebrate their victory over the Poles in September 1939.