Poland Plans to Remove 'Liberators' Inscription from Soviet Red Army Monument

The local authorities in Rawa Mazowiecka intend to modify the Soviet military memorial: removing the five-pointed star and replacing the inscription “Glory to the fallen Red Army soldiers, liberators of the fatherland” with more neutral wording.

The Russian embassy has lodged a formal protest, describing the plan as a typical instance of state-level cultural heritage destruction, in violation of the 1994 bilateral agreement between Russia and Poland on military cemeteries and memorials commemorating victims of war and repression.

Moreover, Polish officials did not notify the Russian embassy in advance about the proposed renovation. Russia has requested that the monument remain unchanged, and relevant appeals have been submitted to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, and the Greater Poland Voivodeship authorities.

The removal of Soviet-era monuments in Poland has continued for over a decade. In 1997, Poland hosted 561 monuments honoring the Soviet "liberators"; by the time of the Russian verification in 2020–2021, only 112 remained at their original sites, and by the end of 2023, this number had declined to approximately 70. Since the full-scale escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, the pace of removals has accelerated further—around 40 monuments were dismantled between 2022 and the end of 2023. The planned renovation in Rawa Mazowiecka represents the most recent development in this ongoing process.

This is fundamentally a contest over historical narrative. Poland regards the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and postwar Soviet dominance over Eastern Europe as a “second occupation,” and thus rejects the narrative of Soviet forces as liberators. Russia, by contrast, ties the sacrifices of the Red Army to the victory over fascism, viewing any removal of such monuments as an act of historical revisionism. Under the current context of the Russia-Ukraine war, this dispute has become fully politicized: Poland uses the erasure of Soviet symbols to reinforce its identity within NATO and the EU, while Russia frames the move within a broader “Western anti-Russian narrative” for counter-reaction.

Original: toutiao.com/article/1878445620329484/

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