Old Rivalry Persists as Russian-Polish Relations Take Turn for Worse

WARSAW, Poland -- The Poles say, not without a certain pride, that they are the only ones ever to have taken the Kremlin. That was in the early 17th century, almost 200 years before Napoleon and 300 before Hitler failed in their attempts to do so.

In Moscow not long ago, the national day celebration was switched from Nov. 7, commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution, to Nov. 4, when the Russians rid the Kremlin of the hated Poles.

Clearly, the present bad state of relations between Russia and Poland has plenty of historical precedents. Still, relations between the nations are as bad as they ever have been since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989.

An exchange during a recent visit to Warsaw by Gleb Pawlowski, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, reported by the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, indicated the nastiness of the mood in both countries.

"Poles talk about Russians the way anti-Semites talk about Jews," Pawlowski said.

Poland's foreign minister, Adam Daniel Rotfeld, replied, "You are looking for an enemy and you find it in Poland."

The good news is that neither side is threatening the other with invasion or occupation, so the history of war and partition seems unlikely to repeat itself. But every day it seems something nasty or angry is said by politicians or commentators on one side or the other of the Polish-Russian divide, and the nastiness echoes the remaining insecurities and suspicions of Eastern Europe after the Cold War.

"It's not a result of Polish policy but of the internal processes of Russia," Jacek Cichocki, director of the Polish Center for Eastern Studies, a research group attached to the Polish Foreign Ministry, said while explaining, very much from the Polish perspective, the poor state of relations.

Analysts seem to agree that the immediate cause of tension was the lead role played by Poland in the Ukrainian crisis of late last year, when the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, clearly sided against the Russian-supported presidential candidate and with the Orange Revolution of Viktor Yushchenko.

As the Poles see it - and the Poles contend that, for obvious reasons, they have a special understanding of Russia - Ukraine's reorientation toward the European Union is a major, even historic additional increment in Russia's steady loss of influence in its own region, a loss of influence that began with the success of Solidarity in Poland in 1989.

But Polish-Russian relations, which were good through most of the 1990s, soured well before the Orange Revolution. "The problem started much earlier," Cichocki said. "The first reason was the very nervous reaction of Moscow to the EU enlargement."

In late June, the friction was freshened when Putin invited Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and President Jacques Chirac of France to celebrate the 750th anniversary Sunday of the founding of Kaliningrad, but not the leaders of the two nations the tiny Russian enclave is sandwiched between, Poland and Lithuania.

Polish analysts attribute what they regard as Russia's bad behavior, especially over Ukraine, to its failure to carve out a post-Cold War identity for itself. At the same time, while the Russians are tempted to recognize the EU and its expansion east as an economic opportunity, they see it as a danger, especially to Russian prestige.

"The emotion connected with the EU's enlargement is bigger than their pragmatic thinking," Cichocki said, predicting that it would be a long time before Russia stopped seeing a vibrant and democratic Poland as a threat.

Source: International Herald Tribune