Poland opens Pandora’s box
UNITED NATIONS — Risking the rage of neighboring Russia and threatening to stir the ghosts of its own recent past, Poland opened the Pandora’s box of history by releasing a treasure trove of Cold War era military files. Opening the super secret and highly sensitive archives of the Warsaw Pact military organization, has revealed the painfully obvious presumptions that the former Soviet Union had planned a massive nuclear attack on Western Europe.
Radek Sikorski, Poland’s new Defense Minister took the courageous if not politically correct step by forcing Poland to plainly confront its own past as well as convincingly reveal what many people already long suspected—that the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies were preparing a military blitzkrieg into Western Europe.
“We need to know our own history” Minister Sikorski told a Warsaw press conference adding “It’s important for a democracy to know who was the hero and who was the villain. A morality tale has to be told.”
Release of a particularly frightening 1979 war game exercise—Seven Days to the River Rhine--showed Warsaw Pact forces using nuclear weapons to devastate cities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Soviet planners conceded that NATO would retaliate by targeting Poland along the line of the Vistula River to block Russian reinforcements.
Sikorski stated, “The Polish army was being asked to take part in an invasion which could have resulted in a nuclear violation of our country…Poland is a country which would have been bombed out of existence.” At least two million Poles would have been killed in such a counterstrike. Such revelations are particularly sobering considering that during this same period Western Europe’s own raucous “peace movements” were decrying American defense efforts as the threat to peace!
Soviet strategists believed war with the West remained inevitable and had a plan to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
Such stunning information underscores the Kremlin’s perception that the USA, then led by President Jimmy Carter, would be helpless to respond to a massive military strike.
While such fears were clearly evident in NATO circles during those days, the actual documentation of what many long assumed was part of Moscow’s game plan, as well as details of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s own 1981 martial law crackdown attempting to crush the Solidarity trade union, vindicates many of those sneeringly dubbed as cold warriors.
Release of 1,700 top secret never to be opened Warsaw Pact files indeed serves history.
The Pact was formally dissolved in 1990 after all, in a Budapest hotel in which I took a particular pleasure in staying. But naturally dealing with the past has always been a touchy if not taboo point for many of Eastern Europe’s post-communist governments. The reasons are manifold but rest in the unease that the shadows of the communist era and those who supported it, still very much haunt the present. That’s sad but true.
So when the magic wand of freedom suddenly transformed former if not always willing Soviet satellites into democratic societies, and then yet again morphed the old Marxists themselves into businessmen and democrats, and then magically transformed those same militaries and politicians into members of NATO and the European Union, it would take more than a leap of faith to presume many of the past players didn’t have—a past.
Poland’s new conservative government has thus had to courage to confront the recent past—and no doubt there will be many unpleasant details to go around. The declassified files, from the Central Military Archive will be open to researchers at Warsaw’s Institute of National Remembrance, the organization dealing with the political history of Poland’s post 1945 communist era. How many of these files showing Soviet intent were purged or weeded out over the past 15 years remains a mystery. How Russia’s current government will react to revisiting such issues remains another.
These Warsaw Pact plans, ultimately spoiled by the assertive American leadership of President Ronald Reagan, serve as a reminder of the happily past Cold War. It’s wonderful that a free Poland can honestly discuss its painful past.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com. |
