Poland hindered Soviet efforts to prevent WWII, claims head of Russian state archives

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The head of Russia’s Federal Archive Agency, a body subordinate to President Vladimir Putin, has claimed that historical documents show how Poland hindered efforts by the Soviet Union to prevent the outbreak of World War Two, which began with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.

His remarks echo a longstanding revisionist narrative promoted by Putin and other senior Russian figures that Poland, which was one of the greatest victims of the war, was itself to blame for causing it. The Polish authorities have repeatedly rejected such claims as distorted or outright false.

Speaking to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, Andrey Artizov, who has led the archives agency since 2009, said that, “at the behest of the Russian president, we conducted a major study on the history of World War Two”.

Among the material they examined were documents from French archives seized by the Germans in 1940 and then in turn taken by the Soviet Union at the end of the war.

They included files from the French embassy and military attaché in Warsaw that showed “the Poles’ opposition to negotiations between France, Britain, and the USSR for an alliance against the Nazis, against Hitler”, said Artizov.

“The Poles interfered right up until the very end” and “we couldn’t reach an agreement”, he told RIA Novosti in an article titled “Poland hindered the USSR’s efforts to prevent World War Two”.

Artizov noted that these materials had helped inform an essay written by Putin in 2020 marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. In that text, the Russian president claimed that Poland “did its utmost to hamper the establishment of a collective security system in Europe” in the years leading up to the war.

“The blame for the tragedy that Poland then suffered lies entirely with the Polish leadership, which had impeded the formation of a military alliance between Britain, France and the Soviet Union…throwing its own people under the steamroller of Hitler’s machine of destruction,” wrote Putin.

He argued that the failure of those efforts to form a united front against Nazi Germany forced the Soviet Union into a non-aggression pact with Hitler. That was echoed by Artizov, who told RIA Novosti that “there’s no need to be ashamed of the policy pursued by Stalin, Molotov, and others” at the time.

In reality, however, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was more than a non-aggression treaty. It contained a secret protocol dividing up central and eastern Europe, which then saw the Soviets invade Poland shortly after the Germans in September 1939.

The Polish authorities have not yet responded to Artizov’s comments. But they have in the past repeatedly sought to debunk revisionist claims about the war made by Putin and various Russian institutions.

In 2019, when Putin declared that Poland was responsible for causing the war and claimed the Soviet occupation of Polish territory helped save lives, the Polish foreign ministry condemned his “false picture of events”, which echoes “propaganda from the time of Stalinist totalitarianism”.

Poland’s state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) noted that the war began with the aggression of Germany and the Soviet Union against Poland in September 1939, and that the Soviets had carried out mass arrests, deportations and killings in Polish territory.

In 2024, when Putin promoted his historical narrative in an interview with American commentator Tucker Carlson, Poland’s foreign ministry published a statement correcting his various falsehoods, including the claim that Poland was itself responsible for Nazi Germany’s decision to invade it.

Last year, the Auschwitz Museum, a Polish state institution, also debunked material published by Russia claiming that Poles were among the perpetrators of atrocities at the Nazi-German camp.

Diplomatic tensions between Moscow and Warsaw have recently been particularly high due to Russia’s campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks against targets in Poland.

The Kremlin has also condemned Poland’s recent detention of a Russian archaeologist wanted by Ukraine for carrying out illegal excavations on occupied Crimea. Russia this week warned its citizens against travelling to Poland due to “Russophobia” and “persecution”.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

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.