WARSAW, January 1: Polish regional authorities continue to fight for the preservation of about 30-35 monuments dedicated to the Red Army, Jerzy Tyts, head of the Kursk memorial organization told TASS.
The Kursk organization works to repair and restore monuments and resting places of Red Army soldiers in Poland.
"The situation now looks a little different than in 2017, when the law on decommunization (provides for the demolition of the Red Army monuments) just came into force. Then this phenomenon was widespread, dozens of monuments were pulled down. Later, the process was stopped," Tyts explained.
"Many local governments said that they would not destroy the monuments. The next step depended on the governors of the regions, who issued demolition orders. Some local authorities, under pressure from the leadership, complied with them, and some nevertheless opposed them, going on to fight them in court," Tyts said, pointing out that currently there are about 30-35 monuments left.
As he previously reported, out of the 650 monuments described in the 1997 annex to the Russian-Polish intergovernmental agreement from February 22, 1994 on burials and war monuments and repression memorials, about 40 remain now. The memorials have disappeared gradually, but in 2017, their demolition went into overdrive. According to Tyts, within a short period of time more than 100 monuments had vanished.
Kursk volunteers and their achievements
The Kursk Commonwealth is a donation-based organization operating in Poland, which works to preserve Red Army memorials and burial sites. Its activists have already listed more than four dozen repaired and updated memorials among their accomplishments.
"2019 was declared to be the year of preparation for the 75th anniversary of the Victory [over Nazism in WWII], Tyts said.
"In February last year, our volunteers restored a monument dedicated to Soviet soldiers in Abkhazia, and a monument honoring Polish and Soviet sailors in Swinoujscie in May. In addition, in September [we] completed the repair of a monument marking a mass grave of Soviet prisoners near Radom, as well as a grave and monument to a member of the Young Guards Ivan Turkenich in Rzeszow," he said.
"We began to renovate two large Soviet cemeteries. One is located in Bieszczady, and the second is a very large cemetery of Soviet prisoners in the Olsztynek area. These works are ongoing and will be completed this year," he pledged.
Poland’s ‘decommunization’ law and Soviet memorials to fallen WWII heroes
On October 21, 2017, an updated law on decommunization came into force in Poland, which provides for the demolition of monuments and memorials that pay "tribute to persons, organizations, events or dates symbolizing communism or another totalitarian system." The organization, which helps local authorities decide what monument, falls under that law, is the Institute of National Remembrance. It’s experts said that about 230 monuments to the Red Army in the country belong to those promoting communism. Most of them have already been demolished.
The Polish authorities claim that the Russian-Polish agreements on the memorial sites concern only cemeteries and military graves, assuring that the memorials installed in those places will not be dismantled. However, monuments located outside these cemeteries, the country's leadership calls symbolic, and reminiscent of the communist period in the history of the republic. According to the interpretation adopted recently in the country, the Red Army did not liberate Poland from fascism, but rather brought about ‘a new occupation’, so the monuments in honor of the Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Nazi occupiers should be eliminated.
Nearly 630,000 Soviet soldiers laid down their lives to liberate Poland from the Nazi yoke. Russia has repeatedly protested Poland’s actions that take aim at the historical memory of WWII, emphasizing the inadmissibility of rewriting history.
