Ancient cities on the Crimean peninsula. Ancient cave cities of Crimea
Disputes around relations between Poland and Russia flared up with renewed vigor. I can not participate, especially since recent years thirty we are constantly told about how small and defenseless Poland was attacked by two terrible monsters - the USSR and the Third Reich, who agreed in advance on its division.
You know, now it has become very fashionable to compile various tops and ratings: ten facts about pointe shoes, fifteen facts about orgasm, thirty facts about Dzhigurda, the best pan coatings in the world, the longest-lasting snowmen, and so on. I also want to offer you my "Ten facts about Poland", which, in my opinion, you just need to keep in mind when it comes to our relations with this wonderful country.
Fact one. After the end of World War I, Poland, taking advantage of the weakness of the young Soviet state, occupied Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. The offensive of the Polish troops in Ukraine in the spring of 1920 was accompanied by Jewish pogroms and mass executions. For example, in the city of Rovno, the Poles shot more than 3 thousand civilians, in the town of Tetiev about 4 thousand Jews were killed. For resistance to the seizure of food, villages were burned, and residents were shot. During the Russian-Polish war, 200 thousand Red Army soldiers were captured by the Poles. Of these, 80 thousand were destroyed by the Poles. True, modern Polish historians question all these data.
Liberate captured territories Soviet army succeeded only in 1939.
Fact two. In the period between the First and Second World Wars, small, defenseless and, as you can imagine, pure Poland dreamed passionately of colonies that could be plundered at will. As it was then accepted in the rest of Europe. And it is still accepted. Here, for example, is a poster: "Poland needs more colonies"! Basically they wanted the Portuguese Angola. Good climate, rich lands and subsoil. What, you're sorry, right? Poland also agreed to Togo and Cameroon. Looked at Mozambique.
In 1930, even public organization"Marine and Colonial League". Here are photographs of the Day of the Colonies celebrated on a grand scale, which turned into a demonstration demanding Polish colonial expansion in Africa. On the poster of the demonstrators it is written: "We demand overseas colonies for Poland." Churches devoted masses to the demand of the colonies, and colonial-themed films were shown in cinemas. This is an excerpt from one such film about the Polish expedition in Africa. And this is a solemn parade of future Polish bandits and robbers.
By the way, a couple of years ago, Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said in an interview to one of the largest Polish publications: “Talking about Ukraine without the participation of Poland is akin to how to discuss the affairs of colonial countries without the participation of their mother countries.” And although Ukraine was not particularly indignant, dreams are still dreams ...
Fact three. Poland became the first state to conclude a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. It was signed on January 26, 1934 in Berlin for a period of 10 years. Exactly the same as in 1939 Germany and the USSR will conclude. Well, the truth is, in the case of the USSR, there was also a secret application that no one had ever seen in the original. The same application with a forged signature of Molotov and the real Ribbentrop, who, after the surrender of Germany in 1945, was held captive by the Americans for some time. The same application in which the phrase "both sides" is used three times! The same application in which Finland is called the Baltic state. Anyway.
Fact four. In October 1920, the Poles captured Vilnius and the region adjacent to it - only about a third of the territory of the Republic of Lithuania. Lithuania, of course, did not recognize this capture and continued to consider these territories as its own. And when on March 13, 1938, Hitler carried out the Anschluss of Austria, he desperately needed international recognition of these actions. And in response to the recognition of the Anschluss of Austria, Germany was ready to recognize the capture of all Lithuania by Poland, except for the city of Memel and the area around it. This city was to enter the Reich.
And already on March 17, Warsaw presented an ultimatum to Lithuania, and Polish troops concentrated on the border with Lithuania. And only the intervention of the USSR, which threatened Poland with breaking the non-aggression pact of 1932, saved Lithuania from Polish occupation. Poland was forced to withdraw its demands.
By the way, I hope the Lithuanian people remember that it was the USSR that returned both Vilna and Memel with the regions to Lithuania. Moreover, Vilna was transferred back in 1939 under a mutual assistance agreement.
Fifth fact. In 1938, in alliance with Nazi Germany, small, defenseless, “long-suffering and peace-loving” Poland occupied Czechoslovakia. Yes, yes, it was she who started that terrible massacre in Europe, which ended with Soviet tanks on the streets of Berlin. Hitler took the Sudetenland for himself, and Poland - the Teszyn region and some settlements on the territory of modern Slovakia. Hitler then received at his full disposal the best military industry in Europe at that time.
Germany also received significant stocks of weapons from the former Czechoslovak army, which made it possible to equip 9 infantry divisions. Before the attack on the USSR, out of 21 Wehrmacht tank divisions, 5 were equipped with Czechoslovak-made tanks.
According to Winston Churchill, Poland "with the greed of a hyena took part in the robbery and destruction of the Czechoslovak state."
Fact six. On the eve of World War II, Poland was far from being the weakest state in Europe. It had an area of almost 400,000 sq. km, where about 44 million people lived. Military treaties were concluded with England and France.
And therefore, when in 1939 Germany demanded that Poland open a “Polish corridor” for it to access the Baltic Sea, and in return offered to extend the German-Polish friendship treaty for another 25 years, Poland proudly refused. As we remember, it took the Wehrmacht only two weeks to bring the former ally to its knees. England and France did not lift a finger to save their ally.
Fact seven. The introduction of units of the Red Army into the eastern regions of Poland on September 17, 1939 and into the Baltic countries in the summer of 1940 was carried out not according to some terrible "secret pact" that no one had ever seen, but in order to prevent the occupation of these territories by Germany. In addition, these actions strengthened the security of the USSR. The famous joint "parade" of Soviet and German troops is just a procedure for the transfer of Brest-Litovsk to units of the Red Army. We can see the arrival of the Soviet reception contingent and some of the working moments of the transfer of the citadel thanks to the preserved photographs. Here is the organized departure of German equipment, there are photographs of the arrival of the Soviet, but there is not a single photograph that would capture their joint passage.
Fact eight. In the very first days of the war, the Polish government and the president fled abroad, leaving their people, their army still fighting, their country. So Poland did not fall, Poland self-destructed. Those who fled, of course, organized a "government in exile" and dried their pants for a long time in Paris and London. Please note that when the Soviet troops entered Poland, de jure such a state no longer existed. I would like to ask all those whining about the Polish occupation by the Soviets: do you want the Nazis to come to these territories? To kill Jews there? For the border with Germany to come close to the Soviet Union? Can you imagine how many thousands of dead would be behind such a decision?
Fact nine. Poland's dreams of colonies, of course, did not come true, but as a result of bilateral agreements with the Soviet Union, as a post-war reparation, Poland received the eastern regions of Germany, which had a Slavic past, which make up a third of the current territory of Poland. 100 thousand square kilometers!
According to German economists, during the post-war period the Polish budget received more than 130 billion dollars from mineral deposits in these areas alone. This is approximately twice as much as all reparations and compensations paid by Germany in favor of Poland. Poland received deposits of hard and brown coal, copper ores, zinc and tin, which put it on a par with the world's major miners of these natural resources.
Of even greater importance was the acquisition by Warsaw of the coast of the Baltic Sea. If in 1939 Poland had 71 km. sea coast, then after the war it became 526 km. The Poles and Poland owe all these riches personally to Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Fact ten. Today in Poland, monuments to Soviet soldiers-liberators are massively demolished and the graves of Soviet soldiers who died in the battles for the liberation of Poland from the Nazis are desecrated. And they died there, let me remind you, 660,000. They even demolish those monuments on which there are inscriptions of gratitude from Polish citizens to Soviet soldiers. Even those that were cast in 1945 from the metal of German ammunition, specially brought from fallen Berlin.
Why am I doing this? Maybe we, like the tiger Amur, will already have enough to endure an annoying and arrogant neighbor who has completely lost touch with reality?
Egor Ivanov
.Russia and Poland. Two peoples, close in blood and language. However, it so happened that for a long time of its existence, the Polish state was most often hostile to the Russian. In our country, an inferiority complex is intensively cultivated: to repent for the partitions of Poland is the duty of the “Russian intellectual”, to remember the Time of Troubles and the Polish occupiers in the Kremlin is a manifestation of vindictiveness. The book by Igor Pykhalov, author of the bestsellers The Great Slandered War and Why Stalin Deported the Nations, is dedicated to the history of Russian-Polish relations from the time of Kievan Rus to the Second World War.
The work belongs to the genre of Documentary Literature. It was published in 2019 by Peter. This book is part of the Exploration Series. On our site you can download the book "Poland: hyena of Eastern Europe" in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. Here, before reading, you can also refer to the reviews of readers who are already familiar with the book and find out their opinion. In our partner's online store you can buy and read the book in paper form.
Polonophobia, or antipolonism, is a manifestation of a hostile attitude towards the Polish people and Polish history. Judging by the fact that books of Polonophobes are readily published in Russia, and on the Internet there are a lot of Russian-language articles and statements saturated with hatred for the Poles, anti-Polonism in Russia has become the norm for many people...
Can this be considered "normal"?
Every nation, like every person, has its own negative traits. In the history of most countries there are shameful facts and crimes. And there are people who pay attention mainly to flaws and vices and do not notice the good either in the historical past or in the present. I am not one of those people, but in the end, everyone has their own shortcomings ...
But Russian literary Polonophobes, for the most part, are not seriously interested in history. They call themselves "Russian patriots", and draw their knowledge mainly from books translated from in English. For example, they annoyingly repeat the words of Sir Winston Churchill about how Poland in 1938 "with the greed of a hyena took part in the robbery and destruction of the Czechoslovak state", but they do not say a word about how the future law-abiding citizens of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1918-1920 looted Russia on a grand scale.
Lieutenant General of the White Army Grigory Semenov recalled this as follows:
“According to the recognition of the commander of the Czech troops, General Syrovy, the discipline in the Czech regiments was so shaky that the command had difficulty holding back the units. The robbery of the civilian population and government institutions along the route of the Czechs reached levels of absolutely incredible. The looted property in military trains was delivered to Harbin, where it was sold quite openly by the Czechs, who rented the building of the local circus for this purpose and set up a shop from it, which sold household items taken out of Siberia, such as: samovars, sewing machines, icons, silver utensils, carriages, agricultural implements, even copper ingots and machines taken out from the factories of the Urals.
In addition to open robbery, organized, as can be seen from the previous presentation, on a broad, purely commercial basis, the Czechs, taking advantage of impunity, released counterfeit Siberian money on the market in huge quantities, printing them in their echelons. The Czech command could not or did not want to fight this evil, and such connivance had the most corrupting effect on the discipline in the regiments of the Czech troops.
Semyonov also claimed that for the extradition of Kolchak to the Bolsheviks, “in Chita, Russian officers handed over to General Syrovy, against receipt, 30 silver two-kopeck pieces - a symbolic payment for betrayal.” Most likely, this is a bike, but the bike is very eloquent.
But the fact that this very General Jan Syrovoy during the occupation of the Teszyn region by Poland served as prime minister and minister of national defense in Czechoslovakia and did nothing to protect Czechoslovakia is pure truth ...
Sir Winston Churchill writes of this with sorrow: “Immediately after the conclusion of the Munich Agreement on September 30, the Polish government sent an ultimatum to the Czech government, which was to be answered in 24 hours. The Polish government demanded the immediate transfer of the Teszyn border region to it. There was no way to resist this rude demand.
With all due respect to the opinion of Sir Winston, I will allow myself to doubt that Czechoslovakia did not have the opportunity for military resistance. At the end of 1939, Finland - with a population four times smaller than in Czechoslovakia - answered "No" in response to territorial claims from the USSR, fought for three months and defended its independence.
What prevented Czechoslovakia from saying “No” to the Poles?
Before answering this question, we need to understand why the so-called Munich Agreement of 1938 took place. IN modern Russia There are two main versions: "Soviet" and "Hitler".
According to the "Soviet" version, Great Britain and France betrayed Czechoslovakia in order to set Germany against the USSR. The main drawback of this version is that it is completely incomprehensible why the British and French, less than a year later, provided guarantees to Poland and got involved in a war with Germany.
The "Hitlerian" version of 1938 - promoted by contemporary Russian neo-Nazis without any objection from the public - states that Western countries they simply “made a mistake” in 1919 by including the German Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 they “corrected the mistake and returned” German lands to Germany. Russian General Anton Denikin commented on this “deep thought” back in 1939:
“If we take into account the public mood of 1919, then only a madman could then make a gift from the Sudetenland to the defeated Reich, recognized by the whole world as the culprit of the World War, from areas that, moreover, never belonged to the Reich ...”
All this is so. The Sudetenland was never part of Germany, and before it became "Czechoslovak", it was part of Austria-Hungary. Sudeten Germans lived in general, not so bad. The famous American historian William Shearer, who worked as a journalist in Germany in the 1930s and repeatedly visited neighboring countries, writes:
“Undoubtedly, compared with the situation of national minorities in Western countries, even in America, their situation in Czechoslovakia was not so bad. They had full democratic and civil rights, including the right to vote, they had their own schools, their own cultural institutions. The leaders of their political parties often held ministerial posts in the central government.
The Germans in Czechoslovakia had their own Sudeten German Party, which defended the rights of the German population. And those Germans who did not like the order in Czechoslovakia at all could freely leave the country and go to Germany for permanent residence ...
The political leaders of Czechoslovakia had enough arguments to defend in the eyes of international public opinion the right to the territorial integrity of their country. Only one thing was missing: the determination of the majority of the population to defend the borders with weapons in their hands.
William Shearer naively believed in the presence in 1938 of "35 Czechoslovak well trained and armed divisions stationed behind impregnable mountain fortifications".
... Armament, most likely, was good. As for education, it's a tricky one. It is not a fact that General Syrovoy and his associates with their "Siberian military experience" could teach their subordinates a lot. And the fortifications are made “impregnable” by persistent and courageous people who are ready to fight the enemy. There were too few such people in what was then Czechoslovakia. This was the fundamental difference between Czechoslovakia and Finland.
The “appeasers” Chamberlain and Daladier were quite typical mediocrities and did not hatch any insidious plans in relation to Russia. They simply had nothing to answer to the words spoken by Hitler on September 27, 1938 to Chamberlain's representative Horace Wilson: “If France and England want to attack us, let them attack! I don't care at all! Today is Tuesday, next Monday we will already be at war!” Great Britain and France did not want to fight, and Great Britain and a decent land army did not have to fight on the continent. But the main thing is that Czechoslovakia itself was by no means going to fight. Pan President Edvard Beneš would not turn his tongue to say: “Let them attack…”
As a result, Hitler obtained the consent of England and France to revise the borders of Czechoslovakia in favor of Germany. The “appeasers”, according to Churchill, achieved the following: “The year of respite, which was allegedly won in Munich, put England and France in a much worse position compared to Nazi Germany than they were at the time of the Munich crisis.”
And Poland took advantage of the Munich Agreement for its own benefit. Of course, it was very ugly, one might even say "disgusting" ...
The only question is, who can say this with a clear conscience?
To be honest, Churchill did not have the moral right to compare Poland with a “greedy hyena” ... Now, if Sir Winston had also compared Great Britain and France with “stupid donkeys”, and Czechoslovakia with a “cowardly polecat”, then it would be another matter ...
But the "zoological epithet" from the great Briton "deserved" only Poland.
Why?
Speaking on October 5, 1938 in the British House of Commons, Churchill was indignant:
“What happened in Warsaw? The British and French ambassadors visited the Foreign Minister, Colonel Beck, in any case they tried to meet with him in order to ask for some mitigation of the cruel measures that are being applied against Czechoslovakia in connection with the problem of the Teschen region. The door was slammed in front of them. The French ambassador never received an audience, while the English ambassador received a very sharp answer from one of the officials of the ministry. The whole affair is portrayed by the Polish press as a political faux pas on the part of both powers…”
Churchill's indignation is not difficult to understand. The door that slammed shut in the nose of the British ambassador hurt the national vanity of all respectable Britons. Here, you will start calling names not only “hyena” ... Of course, if you are a British patriot.
But the patriots of most other countries, including Russia, will never take offense at the Poles for this diplomatic incident. Because Britain fully deserved such an insult both for the “Munich policy” and for many other not very beautiful deeds ... And those who clumsily imitate Churchill thoughtlessly repeat the words about Poland “The hyena of Europe! Hyena of Europe! they do not look like Russian patriots, but like Russian-speaking parrots.
NOTES:
Churchill W., Second World War. (In 3 books). - M.: Alpina non-fiction, 2013. - Book. 1. S. 159e
Semenov G.M., About myself: Memoirs, thoughts and conclusions - M .: AST, 2002. - S. 234-235.
There. S. 233.
Churchill W., Decree. op. - Prince. 1. S. 149.
Denikin A.I., World events and the Russian question // Denikin A.I., The path of the Russian officer. Articles and essays on historical and geopolitical topics - M .: Airis-press, 2006. - P. 470.
Shearer. U., Rise and fall of the Third Reich - M: Astrel, 2012. - S. 404.
There. S. 509.
There. S. 441.
Churchill W., Decree. op. - Prince. 1. S. 155.
Churchill, W., Muscles of the World. - M.: Eksmo, 2009. - S. 81.