Wars in the Middle East may disrupt markets and test global stability, but one of the priorities for President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to rewrite history.
Last week, the state-backed Russian Military Historical Society unveiled a new exhibition in the western region of Smolensk entitled “10 Centuries of Russophobia in Poland.”
According to a news release, the exhibit focuses on “the hatred of the Polish national elite towards Russia and the Russian people at different periods in history, and the concrete actions that this hatred translated into, specifically the occupation of Russian territory and the extermination of Russians, Belarusians and Minor Russians.”
Aside from the nationalistic language (“Little Russians” is the Russian imperial term for Ukrainians) and the politics of grievance, the exhibition itself is an affront to history. The monument stands on the site of the Katyn Monument, where more than 20,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and prisoners of war were executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. Smolensk was also the site of another shocking event for Poland: a plane crash in 2010 that killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and other Polish officials, including a senior defense official who was on his way to Katyn to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre.
Soviet authorities covered up the crime for decades, blaming the Nazis for the massacre. And the exhibition, which one Polish weekly called “shocking”, opened just days before the official memorial service for the victims of the massacre.
The Russian government has previously taken steps to acknowledge responsibility for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his regime, but some Russian-language commentators see the exhibit as a major step backwards in denying totalitarian crimes.
Kirill Martynov, editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe, called the move “shameful” in a post on X.
“The Soviet authorities collaborated with Hitler to dismantle Poland, deport and murder countless people, and in 1940 executed Polish prisoners of war. For decades afterwards, the Soviet authorities pretended they had nothing to do with the problem.”
Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, drew comparisons to recent symbolic acts by the Russian government, such as awarding honorary titles to a Russian brigade accused of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
“For Putin, this kind of symbolism that desecrates other people’s sacred places and places of memory is very characteristic,” he wrote to X. “The exact same thing happened when Putin gave the title ‘guard’ to a division whose soldiers and officers were killing civilians in occupied Bucha.”
Unsurprisingly, the war in Ukraine is the first thing that comes to the minds of the exhibition’s organizers. The Russian Military Historical Society said the exhibition “pays particular attention to the problem of Russophobia in modern Poland. Currently, the Polish authorities are pursuing an active anti-Russian policy, destroying monuments to Soviet soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War and supplying the Ukrainian army with weapons and ammunition.”
The association’s president is Vladimir Medinsky, a champion of President Putin’s vision of Russia’s historical greatness and a negotiator in the negotiations aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. And this war is also an exercise in rewriting history, with President Putin’s military attempting to eliminate the Ukrainian state, without success so far.
