"In 1939, not only Hitler, but also Stalinist totalitarianism attacked Poland," the president said at a ceremony to award Russian veterans medals.
The president called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact an "agreement between two totalitarian regimes" against the peoples of eastern and central Europe.
"Hitler and Stalin maintained close cooperation for almost two years," he said. "A cruel blow was the deaths of 21,000 polish officers whose ashes remain on the territory of the former USSR, in Katyn, Medny and in Kharkov."
"In remembering the courage of Russian and Polish soldiers who fought against Hitler's Nazism, we want to overcome the painful experience in our past relations," Kwasniewski said.
He said the truth should be a foundation of this process. "We should not ignore the historical truth and it should be feared; we need it as a pure source," the president said. "We respect the sensitivity of the Russian people and know that the country incurred many victims during Stalin's totalitarianism."
Therefore, the president said he was counting on Russia to recognize "historical facts" so that the past would no longer stand between the two nations.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact returned western Ukrainian and western Belarussian territory, which Poland had seized in 1920, to the Soviet Union. Moreover, when Western democracies - Britain and France - were doing everything to appease Hitler (it would be enough to mention the Munich agreement that gave Hitler Czechoslovakia), the heads of their delegations were conducting negotiations with Moscow, but did not have the authority to conclude a legally binding agreement with Moscow. So Moscow was forced to sign the Pact of Non-Aggression with Germany and a secret protocol to avoid being left one-on-one with the aggressor.
The Russian military prosecutor's office recently announced that an investigation had established that about 1,800 Poles had been killed at Katyn and no genocide had taken place. However, the former president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, once admitted that the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, had shot Polish officers and he handed over the relevant documents to his Polish counterpart.
