By Matthew Day in
Published: 6:00AM BST 01 Sep 2009
A rose and a Polish flag is placed on the grave of Major Henryk Sucharski who defended
As world leaders gather in the Polish city of
In the days leading up to anniversary, Russian media has aired a string of accusations against Poland, claiming that Warsaw intended to collaborate with Hitler in an invasion of the Soviet Union, and that Jozef Beck, Poland's foreign minister in 1939, was a German agent.
The squabbling has threatened to overshadow today's ceremonies, in which Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin was due to join other European heads of state on the small peninsula of Westerplatte, which guards the entrance to Poland's Gdansk harbour.
On the morning of September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein ushered in WWII when it opened fire on the 180-strong Polish contingent stationed on Westerplatte. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, and Lech Kaczynski, the nation's president, were due to lay wreaths at a memorial to the garrison at 4:45am, 70 years to the minute that the ship's shells first tore into the Polish defences. Later in the day there was scheduled to be a formal memorial ceremony, attended by dignitaries including British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Many Poles claim to detect the hand of the Kremlin in the recent Russian media broadside, and see it as an attempt to absolve
On Sunday, Dmitry Medvedev,
The disputes endanger attempts to use the solemn and reflective ceremonies in
While
But in what has been seen as a gesture to placate anger in
"Our duty is to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past in Polish-Russian relations," wrote Mr Putin, who went on to describe the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as "immoral", and also thanked Poland "from the bottom of my heart" for the 600,000 Poles who fought on the Eastern Front under Red Army command.
But while some Poles welcomed Mr Putin's comments, others were dismissive. Andrzej Przewoznik, a historian on the Polish government's committee organising the 70th-anniversay events, said that the Russian prime minister was "repeating communist propaganda".
In particular, he took exception to Mr Putin's comparison of the Katyn massacre to the deaths of thousands of Red Army prisoners in Polish POW camps during the 1919-20 war between
Poles have pointed out that the 22,000 Polish PoWs and public officials who died at Katyn were murdered in cold blood, while most of the Red Army victims died from disease epidemics that also inflicted significant casualties on fighting troops and civilians.
版权所有:中国社会科学院俄罗斯东欧中亚研究所
地址:北京市张自忠路3号 邮编:100007 信箱:北京1103信箱
电话:(010) 64014006 传真:(010) 64014008 E-mail:Web-oys@cass.org.cn