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OPINION: Russia’s Poland problem isn’t new — and it isn’t going away

26.08.2025 08:15
Russia harbors a durable complex about Poland, fueling propaganda, historical myth-making and staged provocations—from screens to airspace—in a bid to erase or diminish a neighbor it cannot forget.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.Photo: EPA/VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV

Russia’s deep-seated complex about Poland is on constant display—in propaganda blasts, feature films and literature, and even in how Moscow frames real-world incidents. The pattern is simple: wish Poland away, or at least shrink its standing on the international stage.

The recent drone that violated Polish airspace and exploded near Osiny was a case in point. It was a clear provocation, tied to negotiations led by Donald Trump over ending the war in Ukraine. One apparent goal was to prod Warsaw into a reaction Russia could then parade to Trump as “hysterical”: Poland cast as an infantile, irresponsible warmonger—consumed by “Russophobia” and allegedly trying to sabotage peace efforts out of pique at not being invited to the talks.

Many in Poland would be surprised at the scale and reach of modern anti-Polish propaganda. A few months ago, Russia Today produced a multi-hour, dramatized pseudo-documentary on Polish-Russian relations—in Arabic. The purpose, like that of many similar productions, is obvious: seed a negative image of Poland wherever possible. In this narrative, Poland is eternally aggressive, war-provoking and, at the same time, treacherous, cowardly and irresponsible. We supposedly sought to destroy Orthodoxy before it even existed, while the partitions of Poland were recast as a humanitarian operation.

The roots of these Russian complexes stretch back to the mid-19th century and deeper still. Russia is a relatively young state that imposed a dubious storyline making itself the sole heir to Kievan Rus. In truth, if Russia has a founder, it is Alexander Nevsky rather than Rurik. While the Tatars burned Kyiv and killed Rus princes, Nevsky bowed to the khan instead of joining the defense. For centuries afterward, as Poland’s power grew, Muscovy remained subordinate to the Asian Golden Horde. Rus lands were then divided between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; contrary to Russian myth, Poland never “conquered” Rus. Under Polish-Lithuanian rule, those lands flourished as part of Europe’s cultural community—a community Moscow only joined in the 18th century.

Russian statehood began to take shape only in the 15th century, under Ivan III, and—after throwing off Tatar dependence—advanced largely by seizing territories under the Polish-Lithuanian state. The project was driven by figures such as Ivan the Terrible, who in a few days slaughtered tens of thousands in Novgorod, then the richest city of Rus, and later beat his own son to death over disapproval of his wife’s attire.

Moscow’s answer has long been to declare all this Polish slander—and to claim recurring salvation by the “Mother of God.” In Pavel Lungin’s film “Tsar,” a little orphan, Masha, tosses an icon into a river, miraculously halting King Sigismund Augustus’s army. When Stefan Batory besieged Pskov in 1581, the “Mother of God” is said to have appeared to a sleeping “pious elder, Dorotheus,” instructing him to move a monastery icon onto the city walls to defeat the Poles. A stone commemorating this supposed supernatural intervention—against “satanic Poles”—was duly set up outside the local fortress.

While the tsar butchered Novgorod, the “Mother of God” was apparently off duty, but she reappears in 1612: the Icon of Our Lady of Kazan allegedly helped a levy drive a Polish garrison from the Kremlin. In 2004, Russia declared the date a national holiday, Unity Day. Three years later came the lavish yet crude film “1612,” which portrays Poles as near-monsters. In reality, late-17th-century Russia lived under immense Polish cultural influence.

Russia’s greatest grievance, however, is that when Poland fell under tsarist rule, our forebears refused to help build an empire with them. We are accused of “ingratitude”: after the Napoleonic era, Tsar Alexander I supposedly did us such kindness by creating the “Congress Kingdom of Poland,” only for Poles to rebel. The truth is that Russia’s young liberal elites hoped Poland would soften Russia’s steppe-Asiatic instincts, teach an appreciation for liberty and inject a European element into Russian identity. Hence, in the second half of the 19th century, writers like Dostoevsky and Gogol combined intense hatred of Poles with a need to assert superiority.

Today, the sight of a tidy, prosperous Polish countryside alongside a Russian landscape of poverty only deepens this frustration. And Russians cannot blame themselves—that’s not how their narrative works. Years ago, I spoke with a Russian journalist, a Don Cossack by origin. He told me the West destroyed Russia by sending Lenin to launch the revolution, and Poland stabbed Russia in the back by not helping the “Whites” defeat the Bolsheviks. When I asked why, then, Lenin still lies on Red Square, he replied that the West doesn’t get to dictate whose mausoleum may stand there. When I noted that in 1920 Poland primarily defended its own independence, he called us “egoists.”

That exchange captures the mindset. Russia’s complex about Poland mixes grievance, myth and projection. It depends on inflating Poland’s alleged sins while canonizing Russian wounds—sometimes literally, via icons hauled onto city walls or into the cinema. It recasts history to claim exclusive inheritance of Kievan Rus while downplaying long centuries of Tatar domination and the later, largely predatory consolidation of the Moscow state at the expense of Polish-Lithuanian lands.

The strategy persists because it serves a political need. Whether through Arabic-language pseudo-documentaries or by baiting Poland with a drone, the aim is to belittle, to provoke and to narrate us out of Europe’s story. Yet the facts of our shared past—and Poland’s present—tell a different story, one Russia cannot quite silence, however loudly it chants its myths.

Witold Repetowicz