LETTER FROM WARSAW
Sign of a relationship as lively as it is ambiguous to its history, Poland has become queen in the art of bringing down and rebuilding statues and historical symbols, as well as in the instrumentalization of the past in the political fight. In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, the debate on the “decommunization” of public space, recurring since 1989, has just experienced a new upheaval. Against the background, faced with the revelations of abuses committed by Russian soldiers and a few days after the celebrations of May 8 and 9, the eternal question, a sea serpent in Polish collective memory since the fall of communism: the Soviet army did it constitute, in 1945, a force of liberation or of occupation?
Ten days after the start of the war, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) announced that it had spotted 60 monuments across the country which still glorify the Red Army, calling on the local authorities concerned to destroy them. “It is high time to catch up on our delays in this area. Instead, we must remember our true heroes,” affirmed, on March 4, the president of the IPN, Karol Nawrocki. However, many believed the issue was settled, when the most conspicuous communist symbols were removed from public space in the 1990s and in 2016 a final decommunization law led to the dismantling of nearly 560 monuments and the change of 1,300 street names.
“Soviet symbols in the public space are an incentive for today’s executioners to murder even more. » Karol Nawrocki, President of the IPN
Since February 24, a dozen other monuments have therefore been dismantled in Poland, in a context of an upsurge in acts of vandalism, already frequent in times of peace. In the village of Chrzowice, in the south-west of the country, the IPN financed and inaugurated, on May 11, on the rubble of an obelisk to the glory of the Red Army, a monument “in memory of the victims of the two totalitarianisms” Soviet and Nazi, recalling that it is “the alliance between these two totalitarianisms which led to the outbreak of the Second World War”. The monument, adorned with two imposing crosses, Catholic and Orthodox, aims to unify in a long corrosive debate. In retaliation for the initiatives of the IPN, the Russian authorities have also left the threat of an attack on the monument in tribute to the 22,000 Polish officers killed during the Katyn massacre in 1940.
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