Warsaw Uprising (Image from History Place)From Seattle PI/AP:
MOSCOW -- As the Kremlin presses a campaign to recast Russia's 20th century history in a more favorable light, a research paper published Thursday on the Defense Ministry's Web site blamed Poland for starting World War II.
The unorthodox reading of history appears to be the latest effort by Russian historians to defend the Soviet Union and its leaders, especially their role in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Poland condemned the research paper.
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My Comment: In the past this may have made an impact, but in today's world with the internet and other means to obtain information .... this revision of history is going to go nowhere.
3 comments:
Unfortunately Russian society tends to agree with that kind of interpretation of history. It's worth noticing that randomly asked Russian citizen will claim that the II World War truly started in 1941, with implementation of operation Barbarossa. In my opinion this proves that such reinterpretations of history still do have an impact.
I asked my father this same question a few years back. He served in the Soviet Army in the Second World War, and to him the war started in June 1941.
He of course knew that Europe was undergoing a terrible war, but he was grateful that the Soviet Union was out of it .... a point that was always driven to him by Communist propaganda at the time.
Everything (of course) changed when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union at the end of June of 1941.
To his dying days, my father always believed that the European part of the war was really a German - Soviet Union conflict. Certainly the casualties suffered by both sides bear this out.
Is my father right .... to a point he is. But just like the Americans who believed the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, every country has a different interpretation of when the conflict started.
For myself .... I always believed that the seeds of the Second World War started with the Spanish Civil War, and in Asia it was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
I agree, certainly every country has different interpretation. I'm from Poland, so naturally my interpretation is way different than the Russian's. Hitler's demands for exterritorial corridor and anexion of Danzig meant a loss of sovereignty for Poland and I don't see how the fact that polish authorities refused to meet those demands can lead to the conclusion that Poland was guilty of IIWW. Doesn't it always happen this way that before declaring the war, agressor make outregous demands?
But that from the polish point of view. I would definitely understand other points of view, f.e. claiming that occupation of Czechoslovakia was a start of IIWW.
BTW: I really like you blog :)
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