Tomorrow we open Katyn Memorial – the place of the common tragedy and grief for the people of Russia and Poland. Huge amount of works on reconstruction has been completed. The memorial complex now includes the Memorial Wall of Soviet citizens - victims of political repressions, the new museum and exhibition center "Russia and Poland. The twentieth century. Pages of History ", the updated entrance group.

Our peoples are close by origin and mentality, connected by mutual cultural influence, a thousand-year history of neighborhood. Everything happened in it, but let's focus on the main thing.

We were together in the fight against the Crusaders and in the trenches of the World War I. Polish cavalry used to stand in the Kremlin, and three hundred years later the Red cavalry was at the walls of Warsaw. In two years we will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw by the Red Army, together with the Polish Army from the fascist invaders.

There was a period when our countries competed for the right to become the main power of the Eastern Europe, under the Polish crown there remained Ukrainian, Smolensk, Bryansk lands, and Poland was for Russians the model of Europeanism. Polish kings were pretenders to the Russian throne, and Russian kings – to the Polish. In those days, we did not need an interpreter for communication as our languages were so close. And later there was a long period when the Kingdom of Poland was part of the Russian Empire.

The main thing in our common uneasy history is good, but there are terrible, tragic pages in it. Katyn is the bitterest of them. But we have it in common, one for two people.

On April 13, 1990, the TASS statement said: "The Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the extremely serious crimes of Stalinism." At the same time, the USSR handed over to Poland a set of documents relating to the death of Polish prisoners of war. On February 22, 1994, an agreement between our Governments was signed in Krakow on burial and places of memory for the victims of wars and repressions.

In the 90th of the last century the Polish side in the Katyn conducted full-scale exhumation work. In 1999-2000 the Polish military cemetery was built. We all know it as the Katyn memorial (although the population centre with this name is located seven kilometers away from the burial grounds).

The word "Katyn" is associated with Polish burials. But here, Soviet citizens are also buried - victims of repression, residents of Smolensk and the region. The overall amount is much bigger than the Polish officers: according to preliminary estimates - not less than 8 thousand.

The Polish military cemetery is completely equipped since the year 2000, and the work on the memorialization of the burial grounds of our citizens has not been completed until recently.

By the forces of the Russian Military Historical Society (RMHS) and the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, we have also improved our Russian part. Now here is the proper memorial.

In 2017, the RMHS organized search operations, the exhumation of the remains of the victims of political repressions was held for the first time, the first re-burial took place. All who are still in this forest will be humanly consecrated. And it is here, in the "Valley of Death", in "our" part of the Memorial, we’ve opened the Memorial Wall, on which the Soviet citizens who rest in Katyn are immortalized.

They lie side by side in the Russian ground - Russians and Poles. They are close in our common history.

A new museum and exhibition center which we are opening tomorrow in Katyn is dedicated to it.

Before giving a detailed report of the relations between Russia (the USSR) and Poland in the twentieth and beginning of the 21st centuries, we give a preamble that narrates the entire centuries-old history of relations between our countries. We will recall about the revolution and the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921, the invasion of the Poles and the capture of Kiev, the counterattack and the defeat of Tukhachevsky near Warsaw. The darkest page of this period is concentration camps for captured Red Army soldiers in Poland. And in Krakow, where thousands and thousands of captured Red Army soldiers rest, there is still no monument. We are ready to establish it - only the good will of the Polish side is needed.

Visitors of this center will learn about Poland's occupation of Teshinskaya region in Czechoslovakia after the Munich conspiracy of 1938 and about the entry of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia into the USSR in 1939. About the tragic "Katyn affair". About the army of Anders, formed in the USSR and left in 1942. About the combat brotherhood of the Red Army and the Polish Army during the Great Patriotic War. About the liberation of the Fascist concentration camps on the Polish territory by the Red Army. About Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky, who organized in the Nazi death camp "Sobibor" in Poland, occupied by the Germans, the only successful uprising in history and the mass escape of prisoners. Konstantin Khabensky devoted his new film to this feat, which we will soon see on the big screen.

Soviet and Polish soldiers together liberated Poland, together stormed Berlin, and on the famous Victory Parade in June 1945 together marched along Red Square. And the commander of that parade was the distinguished Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky - a native of the Warsaw suburb. Whose hero is he - Russian or Polish? He is ours. One of those people who bind our history together.

We will speak about the enormous material assistance that the Soviet Union rendered to the Polish People's Republic after the war. We’ll tell about the most vivid moments of cultural and economic cooperation between the USSR and Poland in the 1950s-1980s, with Anna Herman and Barbara Brylska as its symbols, “Four Tankmen and a Dog”(Polish: Czterej pancerni i pies), the construction of joint factories and the flight of the first Polish cosmonaut, and much more. All these ties were severely and senselessly broken after the USSR, the CMEA and the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist ...

Alas, we are forced to tell about such a monstrous fact of our relations today, as the demolition of monuments to Soviet soldiers in Poland.

600 thousand Soviet soldiers died, liberating Poland.

600 thousand of the Red Army soldiers at the cost of their lives ensured the preservation of the Polish language, Polish culture, the most Polish nation on the planet ... Let me remind you that according to the plan "Ost" of the German Nazis, Polish territories should have been "freed" from 85% of the Poles. How would the territories be "freed" from them?

There were Soviet soldiers who saved the Polish people from genocide.

Mocking their memory, the current Polish authorities betray not only our soldiers. They mock of their own history, over thousands of Polish heroes who died for the freedom of the motherland.

I am convinced: no matter how the political conjuncture turns, our common history is not a reason for the endless exchange of grievances and claims. This is past and it passed away. We learn from it and live on. It is beyond the bounds of good and evil to disturb the memory of the fallen in political squabbles.

In Russia, they will always honor the memory of the Polish officers who perished in Katyn - they are sons not of strangers, but of a kindred people buried in Russian ground. We hope very much that the same kind of humanity will return to the actions of Polish politicians.

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Russians and Poles are the children of the same historical parents. We are brothers. We are destined to live next to each other. Yes, today Poland is a member of NATO, the military infrastructure is being created on its territory - as we see and understand, directed against Russia. But history gives us one important lesson: everything flows and everything changes. The present attitude of the Polish authorities towards Russia is not the opinion of the entire Polish people. The people, which we infinitely respect. The people, whose great culture we love -  is the culture of Frederic Chopin and Adam Mickiewicz. And, in general, we consider it practically native.

Author: Vladimir Medinsky

April 19, 2018