Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Communist Crimes: A Legal and Historical Study, by Wojciech Roszkowski. 2016. Instytut Pamieci Narodowej (IPN)

Wojciech Roszkowski: Poland Consistently the Victim of Soviet Russian Aggression

Most of this book consists of familiar topics. I focus on those items that I find to be infrequently mentioned in other works.

POLAND NOT IMPERIALIST. THE SOVIET UNION, AND NOT POLAND, STARTED THE 1920 POLISH-BOLSHEVIK WAR

Communist propaganda has always portrayed Poland the aggressor. Nowadays, some lewaks (leftists) try to portray Poland as some kind of expansive colonial power.

Author Wojciech Roszkowski blows away such accusations against Poland. He trenchantly states, “There is a quite popular opinion that in 1920 Poland attacked Russia. This is simply not true. First, Russia had held a big part of Polish territories for more than a century, so any independent Polish state would have to detach some pre-1914 Russian territories. On the other hand, there was no Polish plan to recover all territories lost in the partitions at the end of the 18th Century. While the Soviets had no particular limitations on their plans in the west, the Poles followed one of two major plans. Józef Piłsudski and his followers advocated a wider federation of Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine in which Poland would play a central role. The National Democrats would have rather seen a more limited territory in the east but supported the assimilation of the Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian minorities.” (p. 84).

NO MYTHICAL “COUNTER-KATYN” INVOLVING RUSSIAN VICTIMS

It was about 1990. The Soviets finally admitted that they had been lying for 50 years about Katyn, and belatedly admitted their responsibility for this heinous crime. But they still did not come clean. They invented a false equivalent–that of Poles killing Soviet POWs during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War.

Wojciech Roszkowski calls the Communists’ bluff. He comments, “The treatment of POWs by both sides left much to be desired. The Bolsheviks, who did not recognize the international status of POWs, usually murdered captured Polish officers and sent rank-and-file soldiers to concentration camps, while the Poles frequently killed Bolshevik commissars and sent officers and soldiers to POW camps. In 1990, while preparing to accept the Soviet guilt for the Katyn Forest Massacre of 1940, Mikhail Gorbachev ordered elaboration of a legend of the 1920 mass murder of Soviet POWs by Poles. It was a total hoax since the fate of Soviet POWs in interwar Poland was well documented: some died of cholera, others returned to the Soviet Union and the rest stayed in Poland or elsewhere in the West.” (p. 90).

CONFRONTING THE SOVIET BETRAYAL OF THE POLES’ WARSAW UPRISING (1944)

Nowadays, the sudden halt of the Red Army on the outskirts of Warsaw, for nearly five months (August 1944–January 1945), is treated as some kind of ambiguity. Roszkowski will have none of this contrived equivocation. He writes, “The Soviet decision to halt cost thousands of Polish lives during the Warsaw Rising and is hard to define. Stopping the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw resulted not only in Polish losses but also in the deaths of thousands more Soviet soldiers in later fighting to finish off the Third Reich. What kind of war crime is it when you not only do not help your ally (or an ally of your allies) but also at the cost of so many lives on your side for the sake of a remote imperial interest? And what kind of crime is it to call General Bór-Komorowski and other Polish Home Army commanders who fought against the Nazis ‘war criminals’, which the Soviet Tass Agency did?” (p. 115).

GREAT TERROR. GENOCIDE OF SOVIET POLES (1937-1938): A MUCH GREATER DEATH TOLL

The Communist genocides are customarily swept under the rug at the behest of the Jews’ Holocaust. It is high time that they get better known. Roszkowski not only calls attention to the genocide directed against Poles of the interwar Soviet Union, but notes that the number of Poles murdered may be much higher than usually realized. He comments, “While the Soviet census of 1926 recorded 782,000 Poles, the 1939 census recorded only 626,000 Poles. A more precise number would be very difficult to present, but Mikołaj Iwanow, a unique expert in this matter, estimates that the Polish community in the USSR lost about 30 percent of their number, which would be about 500,000 people.”  (pp. 259-260).

SOVIET ARCHIVES ARE, OR MAY BE, UNRELIABLE

The opening of Soviet archives has pointed to a much lower number of Polish deportees (1939-1941) than previously indicated, and too many scholars have accepted the Soviet archives as gospel truth. In contrast, Wojciech Roszkowski realizes that, “…the official Soviet data may be misleading.” (p. 186).

For more on the unreliability of Soviet archives, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/06/24/ruthless-communism-not-exterminatory-pioneering-forced-labor-happened/