A Letter to Putin
Written and directed by Mirosław Bork
History teaches us that humanity has learned nothing from it.
Is Hegel’s idea—that every historical situation is unique and that the past offers no solutions for the present—true? Does the commonplace assertion that everyone writes their own history not take on an ominous meaning in the third decade of the twenty-first century?
In 2020, Vladimir Putin published an article in “The National Interest” interpreting the most important events of the past century in the spirit of imperial Russia. He later repeated its main arguments in an interview with Fox News, a network associated with Donald Trump. The aggression against Ukraine has shown that the Russian dictator’s reflections directly invoke the assertion contained in “Mein Kampf” that the German Reich has the right to enter by force any territory where even a single German lives in order to protect him.
To fully understand Russia’s contemporary plans, it is worth returning to Versailles, where the First World War formally ended, and to Rapallo, where an alliance between the Bolsheviks and the most conservative German politicians emerged as early as 1922. We know that Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and his determination to overturn the European order also created new opportunities for Stalin. The official Soviet narrative began to consider the annexation of Poland, while German diplomacy set about partitioning Europe. The Second World War began on 1 September, but by 17 September the world had learned that there were two aggressors, as demonstrated by their joint victory parade through the streets of Brest. The fate of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, as well as the Soviet Union’s aggression against Finland, resulted from this earlier cooperation. The outbreak of the German-Soviet war finally brought the alliance between the USSR and the Third Reich to an end. At the conferences in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin appeared as a full partner in the anti-Hitler coalition, while Soviet lawyers acted as prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. How was this possible?
Increasingly, we are unable to recognise historical manipulation or simply acquiesce in lies. And yet films remain. Sometimes forgotten, sometimes deliberately concealed. Unique footage preserved in archives around the world reveals how Soviet Russia and fascist Germany cast a shadow over the entire twentieth century. Historians and writers provide us with the tools to interpret it: Anne Applebaum, Yuri Felshtinsky, Krzysztof Fudalej, Marek Kornat, Jan Lipinsky, Grzegorz Nowik, Kimmo Rentola, Piotr Skwieciński and Ruslan Szoszyn.
Can the lessons of twentieth-century history help us avoid the mistakes of our ancestors?
