In an interview published on the rightist wpolityce.pl website, historian Andrzej Nowak, a professor at the Jagiellonian University in the southern city of Kraków and at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said that such media “emphasized that the alliance does not result in anything good for Poland” and that “it is argued that it would be best if we again reached an understanding with Vladimir Putin just as [former Polish Prime Minister] Donald Tusk did ten years ago.”
Nowak referred to publications which appeared in Poland when Putin visited the country’s Westerplatte World War II memorial site in 2009.
“That’s when probably the most shameful and scandalous text in the history of Polish journalism after 1989 was published in terms of publications about history,” Nowak was quoted as saying by the website.
According to Nowak, the article, published in the Gazeta Wyborcza daily back in 2009, whitewashed the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
The pact was an agreement signed by the German Nazis and Soviets prior to carving up eastern Europe into spheres of influence. It came ahead of the invasion of Poland by Germany from the west and the Soviets from the east, and the bloody 1940 Katyń massacre, which saw over 20,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia slain by Stalin's secret police.
“The author of the article went even further than Putin’s propagandists for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact because he said that it was a normal political agreement, of which type dozens or hundreds had been signed in the history of international politics,” Nowak said.
“It was argued that bad memories connected with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact should be erased, because it is normal that strong neighbours talk with each other and settle their interests. And if Poland is so stupid that it cannot adjust then it is its own fault,” Nowak told the website.
On September 28, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union drew up boundaries under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between the two countries a month earlier.
The pact included a secret protocol in which the countries agreed on spheres of influence within Poland, effectively snuffing out the independence the country won in 1918.
The protocol was made public during the Nuremberg trials in 1945.
Following the Soviet invasion, around 15,000 Polish officers were deported to camps in Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk.
Under Stalin's decree of March 1940 the officers were executed by Soviet NKVD security forces, and their bodies were buried in mass graves in Katyń, Kharkov and Mednoye.
Mass deportations followed to Siberia, which included, according to various estimates, from 550,000 to nearly one and a half million Poles.