Poland should pay Russia $750bn for WW2 “liberation”, says chairman of State Duma

The chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, has called for Poland to pay Moscow $750 billion for “liberating” it at the end of the Second World War and then helping it rebuild.

Vyacheslav Volodin, who is a leading figure in Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, also said that “Poland must return” lands that it received as part of the postwar settlement and called for a ban on Polish trucks entering Russia.

The official’s remarks are part of a longstanding revisionist interpretation of history presented by leading figures in Russian politics, most notably Putin himself.

While the arrival of the Red Army did end the wartime Nazi German occupation of Poland, it ushered in decades of Soviet-imposed communist rule that lasted until 1989. Moreover, the war had begun in September 1939 when Stalin and Hitler colluded to invade Poland and divide it between themselves.

As part of the postwar settlement, Poland did receive land from Germany in the west. However, at the same time, it lost an even greater amount of land in the east, which became part of the Soviet Union.

In his remarks today – made in a Telegram post that has been viewed over 1.5 million times – Volodin claimed that “Poland has forgotten that its liberation from the fascist invaders” came “at a high price for the Soviet people”.

“A third of the current Polish territories…became part of [Poland] after the Second World War only thanks to our country,” claimed Volodin, who did not mention that an even larger part of Poland’s prewar territory went to the Soviet Union.

He then claimed that the Soviets spent the equivalent of over $750 billion in today’s terms on rebuilding and developing Poland after the war. While the Soviets did contribute to Poland’s postwar recovery, they also used their control over the country to prevent it from receiving aid under the US Marshall Plan.

Decades of Soviet-imposed communist rule also saw Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries economically fall behind the West, a gap that Poland has been able to close since regaining independence in 1989.

Volodin went on to accuse Poland’s current authorities of demolishing Red Army monuments, closing Russian schools, and “stealing Russian property”. Poland has recently seized properties previously used by the Russian embassy, but it has done so on the basis of earlier court orders ignored by Moscow.

Given that Poland has “abandoned common history and desecrated the memory of our soldiers”, wrote Volodin, it “must return the territories acquired as a result of World War Two and reimburse our country for the funds spent on it in the war and postwar years”.

Additionally, the Duma chairman proposed that Russian ban Polish trucks from entering its territory. Doing so, he said, would cost Poland €8.5 billion and force 2,000 Polish firms employing 20,000 drivers to go bankrupt. He says the issue will be discussed by the Duma on Monday.

There has so far been no official response from the Polish government to Volodin’s statement.

In 2020, the leader of Poland’s ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński, called for Russia to pay Poland reparations for the Soviet invasion and occupation in World War Two. Russia’s ambassador responded by suggesting that Poland should in fact pay Russia for liberating it from Nazi German occupation.

Poland has been one of Ukraine’s closest allies since Russia’s invasion last year. As well as providing Kyiv with military and humanitarian aid, Warsaw has also pushed for the international community to impose tougher sanctions on Moscow.

Main image credit: Duma/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 4.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.