Letter to Russian Ambassador over Russian falsifications

22 January 2020
His Excellency Mr Andrei Kelin,
Russian Ambassador,
6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens
London W8 4QP


Dear Ambassador,

The Federation of Poles in Great Britain which has represented the Polish community in this country since 1946 wishes to express the anger and dismay of its member organizations, and particularly those representing Second World War veterans, at remarks made before Christmas by President Vladimir Putin concerning the role of Poland at the outbreak of the Second World War and his suggestion that Poland collaborated with Hitler.

While President Putin is right to draw attention to the harmful impact of the Munich Agreement in 1938 in encouraging Hitler to pursue his aggressive policy towards Czechoslovakia, the Polish government and the Polish people played no part in the making of that agreement. Once Germany had decided to break the Agreement and invade Czechoslovakia, the Polish government felt it incumbent to prevent the Germans from taking over the Cieszyn district which had been Polish ethnic territory seized illegally by the Czechoslovak army in 1919. However, Poland can take no responsibility for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Western Powers.

In the meantime, may we remind you that it was Poland that had first wanted to remove Hitler with a joint military operation with France in 1933, although the French government did not support the proposal. At this time a resurging German Army was actually being trained and equipped in Russia. France’s refusal to stop Hitler caused Poland to maintain non-aggression pacts with both Germany and Russia in order to retain a balanced peace in Eastern Europe. Later it sought to protect Russia from invasion by refusing to support Hitler’s plan for a joint invasion of Russia by Germany and Poland.

However, the immediate catalyst for the outbreak of the Second World War was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which encouraged Hitler to invade Poland aware that the secret protocol would cause the Soviet government to assist Germany in a joint invasion of Poland. It is Russia’s cooperation with Hitler, and not Poland’s, that was the final cause for the outbreak of war and Russia must take its share of blame, along with Germany, for the death of more than 6.5 million Polish citizens, both military and civilian, who perished in that war and for the devastation that left Poland in ruins.

May we also remind you that during the Second World War at least 560,000 Polish citizens perished at the hands of the Russian government. These included the 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and other members of the Polish elite who were brutally shot by the NKVD directly on the orders of the Politburo in Katyn, Mednoye, Kharkov and other execution sites. However, these statistics did not include the 111,000 Soviet citizens of Polish ethnic origin executed with equal brutality by the NKVD in the genocide of 1938/1939 which immediately preceded the War. Also, at least 1.2 million Polish citizens were brutally deported in the first two years of the War to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other outlying areas of the Soviet Union and barely half survived. These Russian crimes were coordinated in a common policy with Nazi Germany of destroying Poland’s elite and removing Poland from the map.

We are aware of the great suffering and eventual heroic struggle of the Russian people against Nazi Germany’s invasion after 1941 when 25 million Russians perished. We are aware too of the role of Russian soldiers in pushing the German army out of Polish territory and liberating the German death camps. This common struggle and suffering could have caused Russia and Poland to resist and defeat Nazi Germany together. Instead the Soviet Government chose to introduce a reign of terror in Poland, having earlier betrayed the Polish freedom fighters and the civilian population during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. With extraordinary cynicism the NKVD kidnapped the 16 leaders of the Polish Underground state, which had resisted the German occupation since 1939, and accused them of being German agents. Soviet Russia imposed a puppet regime on Polish territory and forced Poland to introduce a moribund economic system that only augmented the massive material losses incurred during the War. Poland was only free after Russian troops finally left Poland in 1993.

We are very concerned that President Putin’s comments undermine the improved Polish-Russian relations that had grown during the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. We fear that President Putin’s latest remarks could be seen as an example of the negative way that Russian government spokesmen and Russian media are reinterpreting Russia’s role in the War. We remember that President Putin has already expressed regret in the past at the abolition of the Soviet Union, even though to all the countries neighbouring Russia the existence of the Soviet Union was seen as a threat to their sovereignty, their culture and their economy.

We hope very much that Russian and Polish relations can improve but we are concerned that such a hostile attitude to Poland’s past could reflect a more hostile attitude to Poland today. We fear that unless such misinterpretations of the past are re-evaluated it will cause the Polish community in the UK to continue to distrust Russia’s present day intentions towards Poland, its neighbours and the United Kingdom.


Yours sincerely,

Włodzimierz Mier-Jędrzejowicz, Ph.D.
Acting Chairman
Federation of Poles in Great Britain C.I.O

“Scotland and Aye” by Sophia Wasiak Butler

This is a cheeky title for a jewel of a book. Concise yet filled with a cocktail of worldly wisdom that bubbles and delights but belies the mere 25 years of the young author’s life span until now.
She begins the story as an adventurous city bred ingenue, enriched by her mixed Polish-Scottish heritage, embarking on a new relationship both with a somewhat older Scottish boyfriend and with the call of nature in a lonely farmhouse embedded in the rolling terrain of the Scottish lowlands. Unlike perhaps other cautious young people finishing university, anxious to start a career somewhere, she seizes opportunity with both hands to satisfy a dream of country living, prepared to undergo whatever hardship it takes to make a success of it for herself and her new partner. It begins with the expected delights and traumas, including the arrival of a pair of mischievous goats who consume all the new plants she had laid out in her grow bags and littered her whole garden with their droppings. Eventually their tiresome presence and head-butting abilities in breaking down the surrounding fencing leads to the nightmare of an incursion by a cow into their little paradise and the subsequent need to palm off the animals to some helpful nuns.
The goats are but a sample of her rural vicissitudes and strengthens her philosophical acceptance that where there is the pain of failure there is also the reward of experience. She has the same approach to other aspects of her life, whether physical, emotional or spiritual as she continues her quest for self-discovery. She seeks it not only in her relationship with her partner, William, and not only in the rural retreat which she had hoped to idealize, but also in lavish therapeutic sessions, including on a remote Greek island, in the wilds of Canada, in Hawaii and earlier in the mountains of Poland. Each ordeal is grasped in full, celebrated and then analysed as she absorbs the energy of nature’s seasons and the wisdom of her teachings and readings. She sucks out any new experience to the full and wrings it dry in her colourful description of each sensation.
She is not old enough to be an Earth Mother. That is more the role of her worldly and sensuous mother. But she is an Earth Princess, delighting in each manifestation of nature’s beauty and cruelty, and reflecting the changing moods of the season, but displaying at the same time a true knowledge of the fauna and flora that surrounds her. She draws too on the wise comments of her barefoot Scottish neighbourly guru, Hamish, who invades her life and appears like a deus ex machina to guide her in moments of doubt.
Yet the text is also peppered by a massive lists of “bon mots” from authors and song writers, steeped in Eastern as well Western traditions, with which she can comment on her musings on weddings, on fatherhood, on the need for elegance, on friendships, particularly with her delightful collection of Polish “mongrels” in the Snob Club, on unexpected catastrophes such as the plane crash which kills the Polish president, on death and on the breakup of a relationship (as William fades further and further away in the course of her story). Although it would not suit the nature of such a short book, one could imagine that she could have provided a two-page index simply of people she has quoted in her text. She scatters this eclectic mix of quoted pearls of wisdom like a coating of raisins to enrich the literary cake that she has baked and presented between the covers of this delightful and imaginatively illustrated book.
Wiktor Moszczynski