Russia warns Poland not to touch Soviet WW2 memorials
82 replies, posted
[URL="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40775355"]BBC News[/URL]
[Quote]The Russian government has warned Poland that it will face sanctions if it removes monuments glorifying the Soviet victory in World War Two.
Last month Poland updated its "de-communisation" legislation, banning "totalitarian" symbols, which would include Soviet propaganda monuments.
Now Russian foreign ministry officials have warned of "asymmetric measures" if Poland removes Soviet war monuments.
Russia could refuse visas for Polish officials or downgrade trade relations.
The officials, quoted by the Russian daily Izvestia, were not named.
The Red Army's defeat of Nazi German forces on Polish soil in 1944-1945 remains a thorny issue in Russian-Polish relations.
Many Poles viewed the Red Army as an occupation force, not as liberators, as the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact had carved up Poland between two dictatorships.
The Russian foreign ministry has also expressed anger at Poland's decision to exclude Russia from an international project to build a museum at Sobibor, site of a notorious Nazi death camp.
The ministry said Russia had been invited to join the project in 2013, but this month it was told that the Polish government wanted to keep the original group involved, from Poland, Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
The ministry accused Poland of "Russophobia" and of "striving to belittle the USSR's role as liberator". In 1943 a Soviet Jewish prisoner-of-war, Lt Alexander Pechersky, led a desperate uprising against the Nazi SS corps by Jewish inmates at Sobibor.[/quote]
You know I don't like the current Polish government but unless I'm missing something: fuck off Russia. This is about as ridiculous as the Brits threatening sanctions to us for removing statues of Cromwell for example.
EDIT: Cleaned up formatting.
Russia is running out of allies. First us and now Poland's diplomats can be thrown out. It still sucks that they own so much gas and oil, otherwise Europe wouldn't have to care about their nonsense.
They ought to paint them like the Bulgarians have in the past for the Ukraine, Pussy Riot, etc.
[t]https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/images/102017/54/1020175448.jpg[/t]
And then blow them up. The Soviets behaved atrociously towards the Poles and deserve no respect or commemoration.
Yes Russia you totally "liberated" the Polish people by waiting for the SS to finish off the Warsaw Uprising before moving in to take over the city. You further "liberated" the Polish people from the tyranny of free speech and democracy by locking them behind a giant wall akin to an abusive boyfriend preventing his girlfriend from seeing her friends but that's totally different in your case.
[QUOTE=Govna;52526019]They ought to paint them like the Bulgarians have in the past for the Ukraine, Pussy Riot, etc.
[t]https://cdn2.img.sputniknews.com/images/102017/54/1020175448.jpg[/t]
And then blow them up. The Soviets behaved atrociously towards the Poles and deserve no respect or commemoration.[/QUOTE]
And then ship the remains to the Kremlin.
[QUOTE=Govna;52526019]And then blow them up. The Soviets behaved atrociously towards the Poles and deserve no respect or commemoration.[/QUOTE]
No. If they do take it down (and I believe they should), it is art and should be preserved somewhere, in a museum perhaps. It should be kept for future generations
Seriously? You're going to threaten retaliation over statues? We should just rename Russia "North North Korea" if they're going to get all pissy like this.
They should take them down and send them to Russia since they want them so bad
[QUOTE=gman003-main;52526124]Seriously? You're going to threaten retaliation over statues? We should just rename Russia "North North Korea" if they're going to get all pissy like this.[/QUOTE]
No.
We should rename North Korea to South Russia.
While I'm not against destroying those Soviet statues and I understand why Poles hate USSR but you guys need to dig deeper.Polish government is really unpopular,especially among the youngsters,they tried to introduce the anti-abortion bill and failed because of protests,they wanted to introduce some repressive laws recently and failed plus the current conservative party has a conflict with EU so they need to unite Poland under something that will bring them votes\popularity and helps their image ourtside of Poland.I guess it's like Crimea for russians so it's not that hard to unite both conservative and liberal if you fight against common foe.I hope if Russian government will implement new sanctions against Poland it will not hit our tourists from Kaliningrad region which buy those tasty sausages and cheese in Poland.
Get those statues into museums where they belong.
[QUOTE=AmberFox;52526194]While I'm not against destroying those Soviet statues and I understand why Poles hate USSR but you guys need to dig deeper.Polish government is really unpopular,especially among the youngsters,they tried to introduce the anti-abortion bill and failed because of protests,they wanted to introduce some repressive laws recently and failed plus the current conservative party has a conflict with EU so they need to unite Poland under something that will bring them votes\popularity and helps their image ourtside of Poland.I guess it's like Crimea for russians so it's not that hard to unite both conservative and liberal if you fight against common foe.I hope if Russian government will implement new sanctions against Poland it will not hit our tourists from Kaliningrad region which buy those tasty sausages and cheese in Poland.[/QUOTE]
I fairly understand that You want to blame gov for all of it.
But all these monuments, let's say, not only they look so ugly, many of them still praise Red Army for liberation, in various cities.
These just remind us, as the nation, of Your opression for half a century. Ribbentrop-Molotov, Katyn, muppet government and steal of our natural resources for decades - many of us don't really believe in any good that came from Your presence within our country. You are perceived more like another agressor instead of liberator.
You simply can't udenrstand how people feel when they even know that somewhere in the country are such monuments because You, as a country, were never really conquered.
[QUOTE=Knurr;52526244]because You, as a country, were never really conquered.[/QUOTE]
In recent history at least, because if we want to be technical, Rus has been under jurisdiction of Golden Horde.
As in regards to the topic, Poland should threaten those memorials - and then sell them off to Russia.
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;52526209]Get those statues into museums where they belong.[/QUOTE]
Weren't many of them mass produced, though?
[QUOTE=Knurr;52526244]I fairly understand that You want to blame gov for all of it.
But all these monuments, let's say, not only they look so ugly, many of them still praise Red Army for liberation, in various cities.
These just remind us, as the nation, of Your opression for half a century. Ribbentrop-Molotov, Katyn, muppet government and steal of our natural resources for decades - many of us don't really believe in any good that came from Your presence within our country. You are perceived more like another agressor instead of liberator.
You simply can't udenrstand how people feel when they even know that somewhere in the country are such monuments because You, as a country, were never really conquered.[/QUOTE]
Yes,I blame your current government because they use this sensitive theme when they have so low rating which is why I don't believe in their official motives.I know about USSR opression of Poles but USSR was an opressive country itself and it killed and jailed a lot of Russians,Ukrainians too and no one elected any of those USSR officials who did all those things to you.We had stronger censorship in Russia so it was way harder to know anything about outside world and only tiny fraction of people visited Poland during the Soviet rule.Also you had 30 years to destroy those monuments so why do it now?Even ordinary people could destroy them if they wanted to since they had 30 years for it,iraqis for example destroyed Saddam's statues on their own on day 1 after American invasion.
Just like with the Southern Civil War statues here, I hope they just remove them and place them somewhere to be viewed as historical art. Would be cool as a sculpture park showing history. Sucks whenever stuff is just destroyed, but I can see why with all the negative feelings/history between Russia and Poland
[QUOTE=Potus;52526436]Just like with the Southern Civil War statues here, I hope they just remove them and place them somewhere to be viewed as historical art. Would be cool as a sculpture park showing history. Sucks whenever stuff is just destroyed, but I can see why with all the negative feelings/history between Russia and Poland[/QUOTE]
Yes,I like it more because they maybe will even earn some money by using those statues in museums like Lithuanins do.
[QUOTE=153x;52526108]No. If they do take it down (and I believe they should), it is art and should be preserved somewhere, in a museum perhaps. It should be kept for future generations[/QUOTE]
We have thousands of photographs of them and video footage. That's good enough. There's absolutely no reason to preserve them, especially given what they represent. It's no different than when we went into Germany and destroyed Nazi iconography.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTodK24KG6E[/media]
That was de-Nazification, this is de-communisation. Both are deserved.
People need to stop having this mindset that literally everything that has even the remotest historical connotations needs to be preserved. That's not true, especially in this situation given the politics surrounding it. I love history, and even I understand that not everything is worth physically preserving just because it can be.
[QUOTE=Marbalo;52526477]It's a tricky situation.
On one hand, those statues are meant to commemorate and immortalize the men who gave their lives fighting Germany, defending their nation and liberating Poland.
While the Red Army atrocities in Poland are well documented, you cannot honestly think that literally every single Soviet soldier only came to Poland to rape, plunder and wreck havoc. What the Soviet Union did post-war is also abhorrent, [I]but that should not erase or overshadow the efforts of the men who fought honorably and died honorably. [/I] They do not deserve to be forgotten, and I understand where Russia is coming from.
Remove every monument that praises the Soviet Union or public figures like Lenin, Stalin, etc, (if they haven't been removed already), but Poland should definitely keep the monuments that are meant to represent the soldiers who died for something greater, and who scarified literally everything to stop Germany from being an aggressive expansionist cunt. I think this should be preserved.
[editline]31st July 2017[/editline]
Like seriously posts like these;
Are doing more harm than good. You are literally lumping every single Soviet soldier into one big blob of authoritarianism, and while I understand what the leadership of the Soviet Union did, when they aggressively trampled Poland in the name of their own personal political agendas, and even the lowest Soviet soldiers committed terrible crimes in their own respective ways, the majority of Red Army soldiers were there to push Germany back into their own borders, and inflict upon it the same destruction that it wrecked upon the Soviet Union, the civilians, and the homes of the soldiers who have now taken the fight to them. This -majority-, should not be brushed aside and definitely should not be forgotten or pushed to the sidelines of history. An afterthought. A "PS" at the bottom of a long letter. I dont see how you can rationalize it otherwise.[/QUOTE]
There's a lot of misrepresentation of history here, which doesn't surprise me coming from you since you've had an odd sympathy with Russia for a long time now. The idea that the Soviet troops were there just to liberate Europe from the Germans is a falsehood. While this was certainly the case for [i]some of them[/i], the majority by no means behaved nobly or honorably.
Initially after the Soviets split Poland with the Germans, there were massacres and deportations. Between 1939 and 1941, more than 1.5 million people in Eastern Poland were deported and sent to labor camps (few of which survived the ordeal). Of the 320,000 Polish prisoners of war they took, they killed more than 100,000. After Operation Barbarossa, they killed thousands of prisoners they'd been holding at the time.
After their return to Poland in 1944, it was hell. As somebody else mentioned, there was of course their decision to not help the rebellion in Warsaw against the Nazis (they allowed them to be exterminated instead)-- which was bad enough. Soviet troops formed bands of roving murder squads who also engaged in mass rape and looting. [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_rapes_in_Poland_(1944-1947)]They actually raped so many women so often that it led to a pandemic of STDs affecting somewhere around 10% of the country's population[/url]. They plundered entire villages, robbed trains, and made the Polish people absolutely despise them. The majority of Soviet troops didn't care about the Poles and viewed them as being only marginally better than the Germans. As far as they were concerned, there wasn't any reason to care about what happened to them-- especially when it was possibly to enrich themselves at their expense. A lot of the Polish women who were evacuated to Germany as slave laborers were raped at the end of the war by the Soviets too.
Stalin's response to all of this was typical. Milovan Djilas wrote to him about the mass rapes, looting, and murder occurring in Yugoslavia, to which he replied, "Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a wench or takes some trifle?"
The truth of the matter is that ordinary Soviet troops (never mind the brutality of the NKVD and the political aspect of things, which is what you're attempting to deflect attention towards) in Poland didn't behave much better than a bunch of filthy barbarians towards the natives. They do not deserve to be commemorated. There should be no statutes standing for them, especially if the Russians think that they can go around making threats like this over said statutes and monuments.
The monuments should be pulverized and sent back to Russia piece by piece. Fuck Putin and fuck the legacy of the Soviets
[QUOTE=Marbalo;52526477]Remove every monument that praises the Soviet Union or public figures like Lenin, Stalin, etc, (if they haven't been removed already), but Poland should definitely keep the monuments that are meant to represent the soldiers who died for something greater, and who scarified literally everything to stop Germany from being an aggressive expansionist cunt. I think this should be preserved.[/QUOTE]
The problem is after the war was over the Red Army was used as a tool to oppress Poland and impose the Soviet Union's will on Poland. They were also used to do what Germany could not: Destroy the Poland resistance one and for all, which they had achieved in the 50's. Although the resistance by then had been severely weakened and was a shell of what had fought Germany due to Soviet cleanup of resistance fighters at the end of World War 2, and the loss of British and Allied support.
During the Warsaw Uprising, the Soviets allowed the Nazis to exterminate the resistance before taking the city ruins. As soon as the war was over the Soviets launched a massive operation to track down and capture many Home Army fighters.
-basically said this already-
Remember Katyn; Russia will pay for crimes.
Yeah I usually side on the side of keeping up memorials, but Russia was nothing but deliberately horrible towards the Polish.
At best I'd offer Russia to have them transported to back home at Russian cost before they're removed.
Unless they're actively glorifying the subjugation of Poland, then they aught to be destroyed. There are very, very few things about the Soviet Union and their Communism worth veneration, and that isn't one of them.
[QUOTE=153x;52526108]No. If they do take it down (and I believe they should), it is art and should be preserved somewhere, in a museum perhaps. It should be kept for future generations[/QUOTE]
We simply put most of our communist statues in a separate park where you can still see them. Some are worthless like the usual Lenin busts, but there are a few with some actual artistic value like the cubist Marx-Engels statue.
[t]http://zoldkalauz.hu/sites/zoldkalauz.hu/files/xxii.szoborpark_felulrol.jpg[/t]
The Soviet Union never fell comrades.
[QUOTE=Itsjustguy;52526082]Sounds like a dare they could follow.[/QUOTE]
If any eastern euro nation is ready to take on Russia I have no doubt it's Poland.
They've done it before and can do it again.
[QUOTE=CP-26;52526020]Yes Russia you totally "liberated" the Polish people by waiting for the SS to finish off the Warsaw Uprising before moving in to take over the city. You further "liberated" the Polish people from the tyranny of free speech and democracy by locking them behind a giant wall akin to an abusive boyfriend preventing his girlfriend from seeing her friends but that's totally different in your case.[/QUOTE]
And hell, basically the very first thing the USSR did after ending the civil war was invading poland (and failing)
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