September 17th 1939Sixty percent of Poles believe that the Red Army invaded Poland on September 17 in consultation with Nazi Germany - but one in five believe the invasion was to protect the Soviet Union from attack.
As Poland remembers the Soviet invasion 70 years ago today, a poll by CBOS shows that 19 percent of Poles believe that the Soviet Union invaded from a defensive motive, with Stalin believing that Hitler was about to attack Russia.
This is not the result of propaganda efforts by Polish communists pre-1989, however, as the view is most common among 18 to 24 year-olds, who were not born then. Thirty six percent of young Poles responded that they did not know what the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was.
The majority of respondents also said that they thought that Nazism and Communism were equally harmful to world peace (58 percent) while 30 percent thought Fascism more harmful to seven percent Communism.
The poll was taken between September 3 to 9 from a sample of 1086.
Musical tribute to Katyn
Rock musician Pawel Kukiz, leader of the band Piersi, has commemorated the victims of the Katyn massacre. Kukiz recorded the song, along with several others, as a form of expressing the truth rather than the falsification of history by presenting certain facts.
Below is our English language translation of the song and see the video, too. (pg/mg/mmj)
Related stories:
Anniversary of 1939 Russian attack on Poland, thenews.pl, 17.09.2009
President to make ‘sharp’ Soviet 1939 invasion speech , thenews.pl, 17.09.2009
1939 Russian invasion anniversary, thenews.pl, 15.09.2009
17 September by Pawel Kukiz
A hen, not a bird,
Poland – not abroad*
So pour the vodka, Grisha,
Because once you shoot,
In the back of the head,
It’s to the trench.
Bodies thrown on bodies,
Sasha, you must knead them
Because the bulldozer broke down on us,
So pour the vodka, Grisha.
Same from the soul,
For Sasha, because the bulldozer won’t move.
How many of them are left,
We want to sleep.
There is a lot of work to be done,
The supervisors are angry.
The weather’s crap,
And there are still so many left.
The bulldozer broke on us,
And some on the bottom are moving.
Let’s drink, Grisha, bottoms up!
April’s abomination is ending,
May’s greenery is beginning.
And we’re still shuttling new ones,
They’re not giving us a break.
Hey Grisha, what’s wrong with you,
Are you sorry for them?
A hen, not a bird.*
It is just a Polish landlord.
Wasya, pour the lime on them,
On that last pile,
The lime dissolves the memory,
Our conscience sleeps inside us,
And then, so it won’t hurt,
We’ll plant a forest here.
And the truth will not come out,
And Stalin will honour us.
* A popular saying ("Kurica nie ptica, Polsza nie zagranica") which refers to the Russia treating Poland as a part of its territory, not an independent state.