Recalling Katyń: Poland, Russia, and the Interstate Politics of History

Abstract

This article explores the role played by the 1940 Katyń massacre in structuring foreign relations between post-communist Poland and Russia. In so doing, it offers a theoretical model through which to understand the combative politics over history that have burgeoned in Eastern and Central Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Tracing how political discourse over the massacre has evolved from the late 1980s to the present, it examines the impact of exogenous influences and changing geopolitical realities on how this event is recalled within these two states, which exhibit markedly different relationships to their shared past. Questions of regime type, relative standing within the region, and how—as well as by whom—interstate discourse over contentious historical events is initiated are all central to the model of dispute origination developed herein, as is the presence of various institutional factors, chief among them membership in the supranational European Union (EU). A shadow study of Polish–Ukrainian relations concerning history, focusing on the mass killing of ethnic Poles that took place in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in the period 1943–1945, is also undertaken in order to illuminate the significant differences in how the past has been politically activated in relations between the respective post-Soviet dyads of Poland–Russia and Poland–Ukraine.

How to Stay Popular: Threat, Framing, and Conspiracy Theory Longevity

“…This stance upset Poles seeking social justice. When Putin invited Polish officials to the seventieth commemoration of the massacre in 2010, it signaled a potential opening in Russo-Polish relations (Drzewiecka and Hasian 2018;Soroka 2022).…”

When the Past Is Not Another Country: The Battlefields of History in Russia

“…31. This "whataboutism" figures prominently in Polish-Russian relations over Katyń (Soroka 2021a). It is likely somewhere between 16 and 28 thousand of the Red Army POWs held in Polish internment camps perished, though the historical evidence indicates their deaths were not deliberately inflicted but rather the result of communicable diseases and poor sanitation (see Soroka 2021a, 24 n. 30 for sources).…”