We are hearing again from Moscow that in 1939 Poland was Hitler's ally and together with the Germans wanted to attack the Soviet Union.

This time of the role of the recon historian was played by Natalia Narochnitskaya, member of the presidential Committee Against Historical Distortions Harmful to Russia.

Ms Narochnitskaya is a very professional force. Her day job is running the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, which for the Kremlin's money monitors the state of democracy in the West. So she is an experienced soldier of the ideological front, baptised by fire in positions deep in enemy territory.

Yesterday, the readers of Komsomolskaya Pravda found in the tabloid an interview in which Ms Narochnitskaya exposed the historical truth, praising Stalin for 'revising' Hitler's 'timetable of war.' According to her, Poland in 1939 between March and August secretly conspired with Hitler against the Soviet Union.

'There are documents which prove that the date of the invasion of Poland was set on 1 March 1939. And do you know what the Poles did for the next half-year?' asks Ms Narochnitskaya. And she answers herself, 'The Russophobe foreign minister Józef Beck negotiated with Hitler to become his ally, offering assistance in invading Ukraine so that Poland could stretch from a sea to a sea.'

Ms Narochnitskaya then assures the readers of Komsomolskaya - the only Russian newspaper to have had the honour of hosting and interviewing Vladimir Putin as president - that Poland in the interwar period occupied its eastern territories and the Soviet Union only restored historical justice by capturing the lands for itself in 1939.

The readers were also able to learn that the Katyn massacre was NKVD doing but that there is also a trace of 'Nazi crime' in it, though no details were offered. According to Ms Narochnitskaya, the Poles have no right to consider themselves 'innocent victims' because they themselves allegedly murdered some 100,000 Red Army soldiers taken prisoner in 1920 and did so in camps that 'in fact' were 'prototypes of the Nazi death camps.' So it is Poland that should apologise to Russia for that crime and also for the occupation of the Kremlin in 1612.

Nor should we bear a grudge against the Soviet Union, Ms Narochnitskaya says, for installing communism in Poland, because rather than imposing anything by force, Moscow simply presented us with what it had best.

Are these just prances by commentators and pseudo-scientists who, on orders from the Kremlin, are putting together similar theories with a mixture of ignorance, lies, and hatred? Should we not care about them? And wait patiently until Mr Putin arrives for the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII and tells us something important because, after all, it is only what he says that matters?

Unfortunately, I have a personal experience of talking to Mr Putin and I know that he likes to say something that will please his interlocutor and then, in different circumstances, to say the opposite.

I also have no doubts that it is the state propaganda that is feeding Russians today with hatred and contempt towards Poles, just as it has previously done towards Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians or Georgians. People like Ms Narochnitskaya attack us in newspapers and TV stations where every single word is closely controlled by the Kremlin. Working in Moscow, meeting people here, I feel on my own skin how hostility towards Poles is growing.

That is why we should be demanding from Russia a historical debate based on open archives rather than on closed ones - like the Katyn archive. A debate involving open-headed experts rather than narrow-minded ideologists. On the same Committee Against Distortions sit historians such as Andrei Sakharov or Alexandr Chubarian, people whose views we don't have to share but who have profound knowledge of subjects of common interest.

Let alone Nikolai Svanidze who in his historical articles calls Stalin a murderer and Katyn openly an NKVD crime. And we also have a partner in the Russian Orthodox Church which speaks openly about the Bolsheviks' bloody rule.

So there are people we could talk to in Russia. We have a duty to oppose the aggressive campaign of anti-Polish propaganda. Because what matters is not what Mr Putin tells us on 1 September. It is, above all, what ordinary people in Russia think.

Source: Gazeta Wyborcza