Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]


What the hell man? I like that you think it's insulting to accuse Poles of Russophobia (I agree). However, I gave Poland more compliments than I did to Russia, and the purpose of my post was to show that there is in fact grudging respect. I didn't expect this, and was remarking on it. The original question was a joke to begin with - essentially are Polish people the ones that have the worst opinion of Russians amongst all the peoples of the world? I do think that the answer to this is affirmative. It's a curious fact, when you consider that there is an active Russian military presence in Ukraine, a frozen conflict in Moldova, similar issues in Georgia, etc, etc. I haven't recently checked opinion polls, but I remember that despite those issues sentiment regarding Russia remains split in those countries, while Poland is pretty monolithically anti-Russian.

Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]


Seriously? I don't think you have to be biased against Poles to be able to state that they are generally dismissive of all things Russian. This is true across the political spectrum. You don't have to look for a Smolensk-conspiracy nut to find a Russophobe. This forum is good proof, that the perception of Russia is of a country that has zero to offer the world except oil and gas, political assassinations, and nuclear sabre rattling. The general sentiment is that Europe would do quite well if Russia just disappeared off the map.

Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]

I read the article on Lurkmore.to

Here's a link for others interested: lurkmore.to/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8F%D0%BA%D0%B8

I don't think Poles get an unfair treatment, all things being said. The article is written much more respectfully than those for some other nationalities. Specifically it treats honestly the periods when Poland was "on top", and acknowledges the fact of Poland's more ancient provenance - and this surprised me. Poland's relative geographic misfortune is also given a decent treatment. All in all, I think the article actually reveals some things about Russian attitudes towards Poland, which I was not aware of. In the same way that Poles are dismissive of all things Russian, I assumed it would be the same in the other direction. Instead, there seems to be a grudging respect to the "number 2" country in the Slavic world, with allowances for the fact that it was not always number 2. Very surprised!

Edit:

Response to Pawian: To my own regret - yes - I did imagine this scene in my mind. It made me laugh even harder.

Life / The Pole, as an example of a perfect Russophobe, in a spherical vacuum [42]

@pawian


Fortunately/unfortunately - one has not witnessed such a thing personally. But it's hard to say what happens behind closed doors.

Life / Who's the best looking (and acting/singing) celebrity in Poland? [32]

@pawian
What a beautiful man.

Life / Do you know these characters from Polish movies? [223]

Is this some kind of Polish Baron Munchausen, or some Pan Kleks title when he time travels?

History / Heritage of partitions still present in Poland [107]

I don't know.

Pavian wrote: "...next one was Russian with medium level of advancement and the poorest Austrian where people actually starved to death." I understood he means that Russian lands were more developed, and thus people that vote there have more progressive views (albeit, still PiS voters), than those in Austro-Hungarian lands, where people literally starved.

You're probably right. It did seem strange to me too. Not only because of an anti-Russian bias, but because of demographics too. The population density in the west, and rate of urbanization had always been higher. Historically, and at present, urban dwellers are more liberal in their views than their rural cousins.

History / Heritage of partitions still present in Poland [107]


From Mr. Pawian above.

History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

Guys, let's not have the mod shut down our thread.

How do you feel about Ukraine's direction at present? Georgia? Moldova? As Poles, do you feel any commonality with these peoples - as Christians, as Europeans, as Democrats?

Where does Russia fit into this picture? Will we ever see a Europe stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, as Putin sometimes says? Is Russia destined to always play the role of the spoiler and the playground bully? Can it be brought into the fold through something like German Ost-Politik.

So many more questions. Let's not get derailed with discussions of Nationalism and interventions in the Middle East.

History / Heritage of partitions still present in Poland [107]

The fact that Russian lands are better developed than Austro-Hungarian ones is certainly puzzling.

Completely off-topic, but the part of China that experienced the greatest growth '79 to roughly '00 was the former Russian, and then Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Similarly, Korea turned into the Tiger it is today, in large part due to 40 years of Japanese occupation, however unpleasant it is to admit to modern day Koreans.

History / Heritage of partitions still present in Poland [107]

Fascinating. Thanks very much for this.

History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]


Damn, that sentence is straight from Putin's speechwriter, if you just substitute the word "Ukraine" for "Poland and the Baltics", and "missed" for "used". Props for calling it like it is.

Russian officials always reference informal agreements between Gorbachev and Bush Sr. regarding no further enlargement of NATO to the East following the fall of the Wall. The admittance of former Eastern Bloc countries is thus interpreted as the West exploiting Russia's temporary weakness.

This Russian line of thinking is usually dismissed out of hand by Washington and Brussels as nothing other than Moscow's paranoia. Thus, the official Western line for why NATO didn't just close shop following German reunification (like the Warsaw Pact did), is not because it is inherently an anti-Russian alliance, but because the organization's mandate had transformed with the times to be able to answer to new challenges. This is probably how... even though NATO did not take part in a single military operation throughout the entire duration of the Cold War, it has since 1991 intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya. New mandate. New realities.

History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]


Sorry, no, but I see how what I wrote is confusing (mind you, a lot of Ukrainians do think Russia will fall apart any day now). I just wanted to use the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the disintegration of the USSR as spectacular illustrations from recent history of how it's dangerous to dismiss certain hypotheticals as totally unlikely. Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO is just such a hypothetical - seemingly impossible, but given past volatility not improbable.

To Ukrainian minds it's pretty preposterous to say that they have to wait decades more before being allowed into the club. Poland joined NATO in 1999, and the EU in 2004. Being 20 years behind Poland is a fair enough number to Ukrainians, I think, though they would have liked things to happen even faster of course. If they were told they were going to be 50 years behind Poland, that would certainly be very hard for them to swallow. One of the tropes you hear most often from politicians and laymen that lament the current state of affairs on UKR tv is - "in 1991 Ukraine had 50 million people, a territory larger than France, and an economy larger than Poland's". That is, it's immensely embarrassing to Ukrainians how Poland has leapfrogged them in development and now plays a much weightier role in Europe. If they need to wait 50 years, they just might do an Erdogan and go back to Russia/China.

Ukrainian politicians talk every single day about how they are the "Shield on Europe's Eastern Frontier", "the only thing between Europe and the Horde", and all sorts of other points about how the Euro-Atlantic community basically owes Ukraine a big one for doing all the heavy lifting in combating Russian malign influence. They definitely expect to be let into NATO soon, not decades from now. When and if the realization that that is not happening sinks in, there'll be a nasty, nasty backlash.

History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]


Ouch! Don't tell any Ukrainians this. The outgoing president, Petro Poroshenko, had been promising NATO and EU membership by 2024. (pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/3/7205633/)

I agree with you, Pawian, that membership is a very distant prospect. First and foremost, because of the unresolved territorial conflicts in both countries (Donbas, Crimea; Abkhazia, South Ossetia). Admitting these countries while the conflicts remain unresolved means putting NATO on a collision course with Russia. This is totally unpalatable for the French and Germans. However, there may be some appetite for this in the States, the Baltics, and Poland.

I didn't want to premeditate the result of the thread by opening with the above, disqualifying facts. This is because, you and I could be completely wrong. In 1985, very few would have predicted the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of the USSR into 15 countries just 5 years into the future. Similar things can happen in the not so distant future. We live in an interesting world.

History / Polish attitudes towards ex-Soviet republics joining NATO [116]

Obviously, Ukraine is not in NATO at the moment, and thus Poland is under no legal obligation to defend it. That would not be the case if Ukraine were to be admitted.

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Sorry to say, Pilsudski was not a huge fan of Jews either, and was only slightly less Nationalist than Dmowski.

To a great extent it was the noises that Pilsudski was making about building an Intermarum that provoked the Soviets to act on the scale they did.

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]


In very early 1919 perhaps, but by the beginning of 1920 the Bolsheviks had defeated their enemies on practically all fronts.

The Whites had been crushed by the Reds in the South, and no longer presented a credible threat. The British, French, American and Czechoslovak forces of the "Allied Intervention" also gave up and started pulling out through the port of Vladivostok. Peace was made with Estonia and Lithuania. Central Asian separatist movements were crushed.

By the Spring of 1920 Poland had become the main focus of the Bolsheviks. They were able to put together a front consisting of more than 700,000 men and thousands of pieces of artillery.

Basically, I want to point out that this was a much closer call than you describe. Indeed, at one point Poland's fortunes in the war looked so bad that Pilsudski's government was teetering on the verge of collapse, as Roman Dmowski's opposition grew in power. They don't call it "The Miracle on the Vistula" because it was a miracle how the Soviets made it so far, but because it was a miracle Poland survived.

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Goddammit.... My precious thread has become derailed... once again.

Folks! Distilled - the question boiled down to: "Would Poland be better off if it never gained independence in 1921?" Not whether or not Hitler would attack anyway, as suggested by Lyzko. Not whether or not Poland belongs to the West. Not even regarding the geographic origins of the Enlightenment, and so on and so forth. Bah!

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]


I'm not saying Poland is the West, but that it protected the West from further communist encroachment by erecting a sort of cordon sanitaire on the USSR's western border. In the first years of the Soviet state worldwide revolution was the number one driving force. It was considered an accident that Communists had first triumphed in an agrarian and semi-feudal Russia, rather than the much more industrial Germany or GB (workers > peasants for Communists). From this, came the thinking that if a major industrial nation could not be flipped to join the communist international in the very nearest future, then the project of the Soviets in Russia was doomed. It was considered that the two systems (capitalism and communism) can not coexist, and one would have to defeat the other. This is present in Marx and Engels' writing, all the way through to Lenin and Trotsky, and then even young Stalin.

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Not sure if you're trolling Jon, or are just an avowed socialist ;)

There's an argument out there, that Poland's victory in that war is what saved the West from Bolshevism (see: "Miracle on the Vistula"). Weimar Germany was in a very weak state, and was the true target of the Polish campaign. If Germany fell, France with its enormous communist electorate would have been the next target to flip.

The other argument is that the Bolsheviks didn't give up on the idea of exporting revolution all around the world up until Roosevelt and Churchill asked Stalin to stop, because... you know... it's not cool to try to overthrow the government of your allies. At that point, Stalin decided on the idea of first building "socialism in one country".

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Poland had been independent from Russia for all of three years at that point. I think assimilation would be no problem. Many prominent Poles in Soviet government at the time. Foremost among them, Dzerzhinsky.

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

So... what do you think now? ;))

Apologies for the confusion. I thought the headline would be sufficient. In English language historiography the name of the war is "Polish-Soviet War".

History / Would Poland be better off if it had lost in the Polish-Soviet War? [44]

Lyzko,

I meant the Polish-Soviet war of the 1920s, not the war in 1939.

History / What are Polish opinions regarding Felix Dzerzhinsky? [17]


It seems that he was a more complex character, than the way he's been popularly remembered. I was surprised to read in his wiki biography, what Pilsudski wrote about him in his memoirs: "[He] distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon... Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie."

In other places, he is described as a peculiar murderer, in that he wasn't driven by any of the usual impulses, i.e. lust for power, or banal cruelty/sadism. The consensus being that what defined him was his fanaticism. Now whether this makes much of a difference is a different question.

It's interesting to me that you say he is remembered in Poland as Bloody Felix, when in fact he spent very little time involved in Polish affairs, and for most of the duration of him being a member of the Soviet government Poland was an independent entity outside of his reach (remember, he died in 1926). I thought that the Polish people may have a sort of grudging respect for a former compatriot that had laid the foundations for one of the most powerful and feared intelligence agencies of the 20th century. On the other hand, another thing he is famous for is being a Great Russian chauvinist and an opponent of the right for self-determination for the varied peoples of the Russian Empire. Even Lenin once accused Dzerzhinsky of crass Great Russian chauvinism, to which Dzerzhinsky replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists."

It's quite hilarious imagining Lenin, a Russian, accusing Dzerzhinsky, a Pole, of being a Russian nationalist and getting "well you're a Polish nationalist" thrown back at him!

News / Future of Polish-Ukrainian relations [669]

Latest developments:

m.dw.com/en/poland-and-ukraine-in-spat-over-wwii-exhumations/a-41440197

News / Future of Polish-Ukrainian relations [669]


That's not accurate, to say the least. You're most likely referring to Lenin statues. Most statues of Stalin were torn down in the late 1950s during Khruschev's de-Stalinization era. Those few that remained were all torn down, even in Russia, in those frenzied months in 1991 when the Soviet Union was collapsing. Now there's even a cute park in Moscow where you can go and look at all the old Stalin statues that were torn out of their foundations from squares all around the city.

Now Lenin is a completely different story. Still plenty of statues of him in Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and until recently in Ukraine. It's his statues that the Ukrainians have been tearing down with abandon. And truthfully, there are a lot of butt-hurt Russians who are pissed that the Ukrainians are disrespecting the Leader of the World Revolution.

That being said, there is a weird Stalin-worship revival in Putin's Russia during the last two years, and not all Russians are happy about this. Specifically the millions and millions who had relatives in their family perish during the Stalinist repressions. The Kremlin is trying to subvert his image as a national saviour who kept the country together in one piece, albeit through the use of brutal tactics, in the face of an existential threat, as a way of reminding Russians of the importance of keeping in-line as the country is involved now simultaneously in two wars (Ukraine and Syria) and chafing under Western sanctions. Outside of domestic purposes, Putin has been using Stalin to subtly troll Ukrainians by reminding them that a good third of their country is theirs because Stalin cut it off from Poland. Ukrainians only seem to remember the Holodomor, and prefer to imagine that Lviv simply materialized inside Ukraine on one fine day.

News / Future of Polish-Ukrainian relations [669]

Looks like a shared hate for Russia isn't enough to keep Ukraine and Poland on friendly terms any longer.

After returning from a recent trip to Lviv, on Nov 2 Polish FM Witold Waszczykowski told TVP1 that "both countries have a different notion of reconciliation."

He went on to say in that interview that the Ukrainians are basically exploiting Poland, because they know how important they are for Poland's geopolitical security. In response, Waszczykowski announced that unless Ukraine changes it's behavior, official Poland will launch procedures with serious consequences, including banning certain Ukrainian officials entry into Poland.

The reaction in Ukrainian media has been howling. The general consensus seems to be that Poland has taken it's mask off, and is behaving like the magnates of old. Basically pany trying to punish the chlops for raising their heads. Some are talking about how Ukraine now has to fight old imperial masters on two fronts.

In the most recent days the Polish FM's office has actually begun rolling out those travel bans, and the first ban was against Vladimir Vyatrovich, head of the Ukranian National Institute of Historic Memory. This has obviously incensed the Ukrainians even more, making it very hard for their President to make amends with the Polish government without looking like Kaczynski's poodle. So the ****-slinging continued.

Now finally - yesterday, the Polish deputy FM Cichocki told the state broadcaster that Ukraine is pursuing a destructive path in its relations with Poland. He said the current issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations are old, and were raised by previous Sejms not just the current one. These issues include use of Soviet-era terms like Polish occupied territories in relation to certain parts of Western Ukraine, the non-return of property to Polish Roman Catholic churches, the rehabilitation and glorification of the UPA, and insufficient contrition over the question of Katyn. It's not really clear to me how he expects the Ukrainians to apologize for Katyn. Perhaps he misspoke and actually meant Volhyn.

newsweek.pl/polska/polityka/relacje-polska-ukraina-coraz-gorsze-stosunki-polsko-ukrainskie,artykuly,418731,1.html