Pawel Machcewicz on disputes over Soviet war memorials

The Polish government has postponed a proposed law for the removal of Soviet war memorials in Poland, in order to avoid exacerbating current tensions with Russia. Historian Pawel Machcewicz of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun finds this good, and emphasises that the Estonians were under more pressure from the Soviet Union than were the Poles. "The Poles are in an incomparably better situation. We don't have to shake off a colonial yoke, or an inheritance of decades of Russification. We don't have millions of Russians in our country whose identification with the Polish state is debatable. There also is no current mood in our society that would justify such spectacular moves aimed at the few remaining memorials to Russian soldiers… So we don't have to start our own memorial war against Russia. Especially because it would not only be a fight with the government of the Russian federation, but also with millions of Russians whose memory of those who fell in the war against Germany remains holy, the most important element of their patriotic tradition."

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