MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Dmitry Babich) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been invited to attend this month's events marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz (Polish: Oswiecim) by the Red Army.
Up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished at the camp in southern Poland during World War II before Soviet Red Army troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.
Invitations for the function set for January 27, 2010, have been sent to many world leaders, first of all the Allied countries. Polish President Lech Kaczynski has also sent an invitation to his Russian colleague but has so far not received a response.
There are two subjective reasons why Medvedev may decline it. First, the invitation has come from Lech Kaczynski, a noted critic of the Kremlin. Second, the deployment of the Soviet Army in Poland in 1939-1989 has been used in Poland for fierce anti-Russian propaganda.
At the same time, neither argument is sufficiently serious to reject the invitation.
Lech Kaczynski does not always act in accordance with interstate protocol or even common courtesy. Even Polish analysts criticized his address to a meeting in Tbilisi, Georgia, with President Mikheil Saakashvili standing nearby, shortly after Georgia attacked South Ossetia.
A year later, Kaczynski compared Nazi occupiers to Russian troops during his speech in memory of WWII victims delivered on September 1, 2009 in the presence of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This did not help thaw Russian-Polish relations either.
On the other hand, diplomatic protocol dictates that the invitation to Medvedev had to come from Lech Kaczynski as the person representing Poland in its official relations with other countries and leaders.
However, it is the Polish parliament and the government formed by the parliament's largest parties that make political decisions. Since Lech Kaczynski has very strained relations with Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who represents the rival party, Civic Platform, the Poles are watching especially closely that the president and the premier do not infringe on each other's powers.
Russia should consider the situation calmly: Since the Polish president is the only official who could invite the Russian president to Auschwitz, there are no objective reasons for rejecting the invitation.
Donald Tusk, who does not use Kaczynski's anti-Kremlin rhetoric during his meetings with visitors from Moscow, is nevertheless not a friend of Russia, contrary to what his enemies in Poland and some not very clever friends in the Russian media say.
The split between Tusk and Kaczynski is personal more than ideological. Civic Platform is a rightwing party but not as radical as Kaczynski's party Law and Justice (PiS). In 2005, the two parties joined forces to snatch power from the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), a centre-left social democratic party. PiS won 27% of the vote and Tusk's Platform 24%, and they were expected to govern Poland as a coalition.
But the Kaczynski brothers cheated Tusk by forming a coalition with the agrarian political party and trade union Self-Defense (an analogue of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky) and the League of Polish Families, a rightwing orthodox Catholic party. Tusk's indignation was only natural.
In 2005-2007, when PiS and its allies had a majority in the Polish parliament, Russian-Polish relations were at their worst since the end of WWII. Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin, Jaroslaw, the leader and the main ideologue of PiS, used historical problems to further worsen them.
But when Tusk and his Civic Platform won the 2007 elections, Tusk changed his rhetoric toward Russia, if only to be more easily distinguished from the Kaczynski brothers.
President Medvedev's visit to Auschwitz, which was librated by the Red Army, will not be a humiliation for Russia. Nobody in Poland questions the fact that it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz and many other Polish territories, even though Poles would have welcomed liberation more wholeheartedly had it come from their own troops.
Operation Tempest, a series of uprisings conducted during World War II by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) in 1944, was aimed at taking power before the arrival of the Soviets and at creating a government that would be independent of both Germany and Soviet Russia.
The plan failed, claiming tens of thousands lives and leading to a nearly total destruction of Warsaw.
Was Operation Tempest a realistic plan? If so, did it fail because Germans were better armed, or because Stalin had no sympathy for the uprising's organizers, or because the uprisings started too early? Anyway, the 600,000 Soviet soldiers who died liberating Poland are not to blame, which nearly all Poles (with very few exceptions) admit.
So, the ongoing Polish-Russian historical disputes have no connection to the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, and so should not prevent Medvedev's visit.
After PiS lost power in 2007, Russian-Polish relations started improving, even if a bit slowly. The trend could be boosted by a nice gesture or phrase, which Poles love dearly.
"I don't know why our leaders are shouting themselves hoarse over what Mr. Putin could or could not say," smiles Stanislaw Ciosek, a former member of the Politburo of the Polish United Workers Party and Ambassador to Moscow (1989-1996), who now holds the post of chairman of the Eastern Club, an association promoting economic cooperation with Russia. "But this is what we Poles are - we are interested in symbols more than in essence."
Medvedev's visit could become the symbolic gesture Poles need, and its practical results could be better than many think.
In 2004-2008, Russian-Polish trade grew from $8 billion to $27.2 billion, although Russia mostly supplies Poland with gas, oil and refined oil products. Polish businessmen and regional leaders would like Russia to invest more in Poland and vice versa.
Indeed, it seems strange that there are thousands of German companies, hundreds of Dutch and French businesses and dozens of South Korean firms investing in Poland, Eastern Europe's leader in terms of foreign direct investment, and not a single Russian investor.
"The difficult relations at the interstate level should not scare Russian businessmen," said Krzysztof Krzysztofiak, president of the Malopolska Agency of Regional Development. "There is no dislike for Russians at the personal level, and Russian businessmen who wish to invest in the Malopolska Province and its capital, the ancient city of Krakow, will enjoy the protection offered by the EU rules and regulations because Poland is an EU member. On the other hand, better interstate relations would help. Nine percent of Polish children study Russian at school, but Russian investment is less than 1%."
Unfortunately, Poland is largely to blame for this situation. Scandals over Gazprom's pipelines and attempts by Russian companies to buy Polish refineries, which started in the late 1990s, have not made Russia's foreign economic policy regarding Poland more popular. On the other hand, the trailblazers in this sphere could get very big dividends.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
