Poland is preparing a lawsuit against Russia for reparations for crimes committed during Soviet rule in the country during the Second World War and the Cold War.
Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has said that at Potsdam in 1945, the Soviet Union was meant to pass on part of Germany’s reparations to Poland but kept the lot. Therefore, he said, Russia, as the legal successor to the USSR, is carrying the balance of Germany’s obligation.
Justifying the move, Sikorski’s deputy Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski, told Polish daily Rzeczpospolita: “The Polish Government has never recognised the issue of war reparations for Poland for personal and material losses resulting from the USSR’s aggression against Poland and Stalinist crimes as closed.”
The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East on September 17, 1939, just over two weeks after the German attack from the west had triggered the Second World War.
After the war, Poland fell under Moscow’s political control and lost its eastern territories with a complex historical provenance, which are now largely in Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus.
The Polish Government has tasked the Institute of War Losses with investigating Russia’s historical crimes, a complex task given the long period of history concerned.
The director of the institute, Bartosz Gondek, on February 17 told the Financial Times that calculating the losses will be much harder than it was in the case of Poland’s recent claim against Germany because Polish historians cannot be expected to have access to confidential Russian archives.
The report commissioned from the institute will require it to calculate the costs of “long-term economic and social consequences of Soviet systemic domination” during the Cold War and the loss of eastern territories taken by the USSR when it invaded Poland in 1939.
The government says the new research on Soviet losses is about historical accountability.
“By recognising the legitimacy of the institute’s work, the authorities are sending a clear signal that the time has come to address this long-neglected part of Poland’s history and to seek accountability, not only from Germany, but also from the legal and political heirs of the USSR,” Gondek said.
Poland already has a contentious and unresolved reparations claim against Germany. That was filed by the previous Conservative (PiS) administration for $1.3 trillion (€1.1 trillion) to compensate for the damages sustained by Poland because of Germany’s invasion in 1939 and occupation of Poland (1939-45).
Berlin has rejected the $1.3 trillion claim, pointing to a 1953 declaration by Communist-era Poland renouncing further compensation, a position Warsaw disputes, arguing the decision was imposed upon it by Soviet pressure.
The centre-left Polish Government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, though, has back-pedalled on the reparations claim on Germany. It believes it is legally unenforceable and has been attempting, without much success, to get Germany to make some compensatory gestures towards the victims who are still alive and with regard to honouring Polish victims.
Arkadiusz Mularczyk, a Conservative PiS MEP and former deputy foreign minister who led the lawsuit against Germany in 2022, said his party had “always intended to file a claim against Russia later”. But he accused Tusk of taking action against Moscow now to distract from the “stagnation” in negotiations with Berlin over German reparations.
The issue of possible reparations from Russia can only add further tension to relations between Moscow and Warsaw, already fraught owing to the Ukraine war and Russian hybrid attacks on Poland.
So far Russia’s response to the reports of a coming reparations claim has been mocking. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested Warsaw could receive a link to a recording of the opera Ivan Susanin, which depicts a Russian peasant leading Polish soldiers to their deaths in a swamp.
“This is a ‘smokescreen’ of the dwarfish infantry on the fields of the proxy war against Russia,” said chairman of the foreign relations committee of the Russian State Duma Leonid Slutsky.
Poland may have another motive for its move against Russia on reparations.
According to Stuart Dowell of the Polish Government controlled broadcaster TVP World, Poland is producing the report on its losses to Russia to give itself a stake in the discussions around the €210 billion of that country’s central bank assets, which have been frozen across the European Union.
It may also be a domestic motive to show that the Tusk coalition is as “patriotic” as its PiS predecessor and the opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki.
Since there is no international instrument that could compel Russia to pay Poland any reparations, the domestic political considerations and manoeuvring to be at the table during the discussions on what to do about frozen Russian assets after the Ukraine war is over would appear to be the main objectives of producing the reparations claim.
