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You cannot keep talking about the dark sides of a nation: Prof. Norman Davies

I won’t say that I love Roman Dmowski. He is not the type of politician I have a taste for. But it is necessary to take an honest approach to how influential he was in the period when Poland was regaining its independence and what merits he had at the time, says Professor Norman Davies. In December 2022, the Znak Horyzont publishing house published the historian’s latest book ‘Little Europe. Polish Sketches’.

TVP WEEKLY: 60 years ago you came to Poland for the first time. What did a young lad from the land of football and the Beatles find most surprising about our country?

NORMAN DAVIES: It was 1962, the era of Sputnik, and the Soviet Union was fashionable as an interesting place and few people still knew the dark side of its history. I was a fourth year student at Oxford and with a group of colleagues we decided to go to Moscow. However, it turned out that entry for British students into the USSR was not easy. We were not given visas. And we had already bought train tickets to Terespol. Another thing was that none of us knew where this Terespol was. Once we had checked, the idea came up to go to the communist consulate in London and try to go to that country. The Polish official, when he heard of our predicament, said warmly: “you are welcome, anyone who has not been granted a visa to the USSR will be welcome in Poland”. It was then, I think, that I understood for the first time that Poland was not the same as the Soviet Union, and that the people behind the Iron Curtain were not a monolith.

The young people of communist Poland, however, were perhaps a little different from you?

When we arrived in Warsaw it was, of course, grey, but the young people at the same time were very energetic and open. We started cracking jokes right away: “do you know why Poland is like a radish? Because it is red on the outside, but white on the inside”. People did not lose their spirit and had a sense of humour, although when we toured the ruins of Warsaw, no one wanted to tell us what had happened here. The guide, only when she made sure no one could hear her, started to talk about the Warsaw Uprising and the events of 1944. At that time we really knew little about Polish history. When I turned up in Kraków and stood in front of the Wawel Castle I thought: “damn, something was happening here through all these centuries”.

Your first topic of interest at the Jagiellonian University fell into the category of “forbidden history”.

The Polish-Soviet war was a taboo subject. When we visited Polish schools it turned out that it was not even mentioned in the history books. At the same time, people who had fought in it were still alive, such as my future father-in-law, at the time only a teenager. Due to the fact that I had already started learning Russian and Polish in England, I was able to tackle the subject. Although, of course, the very title of the thesis was a ploy: “Britain’s policy towards Poland in the period after the Treaty of Versailles, 1919-1920”. Meanwhile, I was writing about the Soviet invasion of Poland. None of the censors of this work had read it, of course; they approved it just by looking at the title.

We can talk about censorship in the communist Poland, but, after all, among British historians, both 100 years ago and after the Second World War, many were sympathetic to the USSR, as you interestingly describe in Mała Europa. Szkice polskie [Sketches from Poland].

Bolshevik propaganda was very effective from the start, and Russian Panslavism dominated geopolitical thinking. When Piłsudski entered Kyiv in the spring of 1920, even the British Foreign Secretary was convinced that it was aggression on Russian territory. Besides, this view was later shared by many British historians believing that Kyiv had always been Russian and overlooking the fact that Ukraine had previously been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Western world did not realise that Ukraine also wanted to gain independence, and the headlines shouted “Hands off Russia!”

The notorious “useful idiots” are the result of stupidity, ignorance or the skilful efforts of Bolshevik agents of influence?

Sympathy for Russia did not emerge in Britain during the First World War, but long before it. For the British Empire, the state of the Tsars had always been a counterweight to Prussia or France, and before that also an ally during the Napoleonic wars. Therefore, even after the October Revolution, many people were willing to believe what the Russians said about Eastern Europe. Even Stalin’s crimes entered the consciousness of scholars and the public very slowly.

Read the full article here.

– Cezary Korycki
– Translated by jz

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