War in the Middle East may be roiling markets and testing global stability, but one priority endures for Vladimir Putin’s Russia: rewriting history.
Last week, the state-backed Russian Military-Historical Society unveiled a new exhibit in western Smolensk region entitled “10 Centuries of Polish Russophobia.”
The exhibit, a news release said, focused on “the hatred of the Polish state elite at various periods of history toward Russia and the Russian people, and how this hatred manifested itself in concrete actions. Specifically, in the seizure of Russian territory and the extermination of the Russian, Belarusian, and Little Russian peoples.”
Leave aside the nationalistic language (“little Russians” being the Russian imperial term for Ukrainians) and the politics of grievance, the exhibit itself is an affront to history. It stands on the grounds of the Katyn Memorial, where more than 20,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and prisoners of war were executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. And Smolensk was also the scene of another traumatic event for Poland, the 2010 plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and top Polish officials including senior defense officials who were on their way to Katyn to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre.
Soviet authorities covered up that crime for decades, blaming the Nazis for the massacre. And the exhibit – called “shocking” by one Polish newsweekly – opened just a few days before an official commemoration of the victims of the massacre.
While the Russian government has taken steps in the past to acknowledge the culpability of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his regime, some Russian-language commentators see the display as a massive step back toward denying the crimes of totalitarianism.
In a post on X , the editor-in-chief of the independent Novaya Gazeta Europe, Kirill Martynov, described the move as “shameful.”
“Together with Hitler, the USSR authorities dismembered Poland, deported and killed countless people, and in 1940 executed Polish prisoners of war. After which, for decades, they pretended they had nothing to do with it,” he said.
Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, drew comparisons with more recent symbolic acts by the Russian government, such as giving an honorary title to a Russian brigade accused of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
“For Putin, this kind of symbolism — defiling others’ sacred sites or places of memory — is very characteristic,” he wrote on X. “Exactly the same thing happened when Putin bestowed the ‘Guards’ title on that division whose soldiers and officers were killing civilians in occupied Bucha.”
The war in Ukraine, unsurprisingly, appears foremost in the minds of the exhibit’s organizers. The Russian Military-Historical Society says the exhibit pays “particular attention to the issue of Russophobia in modern Poland. Today, the Polish authorities are pursuing an aggressive anti-Russian policy, demolishing monuments to Soviet soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War, and supplying weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
The chairman of the Society is Vladimir Medinsky, a promoter of Putin’s vision of Russian historical greatness who has also served as a negotiator in talks aimed at ending the Ukraine war. And that war has also been an exercise in attempting to rewrite history, with Putin’s military trying – thus far without success – to extinguish Ukrainian statehood.
