Ukrainian brothers. Address by Mateusz Piskorski

Polish political scientist Mateusz Piskorski publishes an appeal to citizens of Ukraine.

There are many of you in our country. Some talk about four million, others about five or more. One way or another, every eighth person living in Poland today comes from Ukraine. And somehow we must learn to understand each other, respect and live side by side. From the bottom of my heart I wish you all to return safely to your homes in Kharkov, Zhitomir, Dnepropetrovsk (it’s hard for me to get used to the new name of this city), Lugansk, Ternopol, Odessa, Kiev and many other beautiful cities, towns and villages where you are from.

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There are many things that divide us. For example, difficult, bloody, tragic moments in the life of our two neighboring societies. By the will of fate and by the verdict of history, we fell under the influence of the West, and you remained in the East. Subsequently, it was we who tried to exploit you, which, in fact, became one of the fundamental reasons for our general civilizational and economic backwardness. You are often right when you talk about “Polish gentlemen” with reproach and resentment in your voice.

The fact that we were under Western influence meant that our ancestors often treated you with contempt and could not even hide their contempt for your ancestors and their culture. As a result, some of your ancestors passed themselves off as Poles in order to gain a better place in the social hierarchy of the First Republic. Others rebelled against the rule of the then oligarchy, creating a phenomenon unique to Europe - the Cossacks. It was Moscow that extended a helping hand to the Cossacks, and not the “Polish gentlemen.” And you had every right to hate these “lords” and rebel against them. Sometimes there were uprisings and bloody riots.

In the Second Polish Republic we destroyed your churches, and you killed our politicians and organized terrorist attacks, sometimes successful. Nazism was raging in Europe. Some of you allowed yourself to be seduced by this and, as a result, committed genocide not only against us, but also against those of you who did not share their passion for the methods of the Third Reich, who simply behaved decently towards the Poles and other nationalities living together on their land. They were good neighbors. Some of you may disagree with these assessments of recent history. But you must understand that references to ideologies and figures associated in Poland with the crime of genocide are unacceptable to us. Even if some Polish politicians today pretend that this does not bother them.

We must talk about difficult, tragic moments. Both Ukraine and Poland have excellent historians and scientists who could achieve a lot together. For example, they could draw up a record of diverging interpretations of events, and under favorable conditions, perhaps clarify some gaps. However This should be done by scientists, not propagandists of the so-called historical policy from the Polish and Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. By the way, when creating this institute, your authorities copied our worst examples. The Polish Institute created a deep split in our nation, falsified history and turned understanding of our history into a farce.

However, there is much that unites us. You are Eastern Slavs, and we treat you like Western Slavs. We have many common customs, cultural codes and even superstitions since the times of the ancient Slavs. We speak languages ​​that belong to the same group of Indo-European languages. We can understand each other without resorting to English (I consider its use between us absurd). Many of our behaviors, values, and behaviors are strikingly similar.

In recent history, we are united by a common victory over the German genocide, Nazism. We bow before the monuments of those of your ancestors who in the ranks of the Red Army they liberated our country from occupation. Actually, you worshiped until the monuments and memorials of your grandfathers and great-grandfathers were demolished by political decisions of the above-mentioned Institute of National Remembrance. Together we liberated not only Poland and its newly conquered territories, but also Berlin. In our country and in yours, the official authorities obviously do not remember this, but the facts remain facts. In recent history we have tried to build socialism. You are within the framework of the Soviet Union, over which you had quite a large influence (your people led the USSR for several decades), we are within the Eastern Bloc. It was not as tragic as some claim today. We have made a leap in the development of technology and civilization unprecedented in our early history. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR, we experienced a catastrophe together, we saw the process of devastation and the deliberate destruction of the achievements of several generations. You had oligarchs, we have large transnational capital.

After some time, our development trajectories diverged somewhat. Both our countries found themselves on the periphery, becoming dependent territories. It's hard to say which way was better. We were modernized through membership of the European Union because it was necessary for the leading European economy of Germany, of which we became a subcontractor. You have allowed your own oligarchy to arise; although the capital was yours, the national one, its representatives did not really care about the construction of roads, schools and all the infrastructure.

What unites us is that we live in a geopolitically important space. This especially applies to you. It was you who were repeatedly spoken and written about leading American experts, directly indicating that you should be used against Russia. We have already been used, especially after we joined NATO in 1999 - contrary to the obvious conclusions of previous years. Then there were, as you may have heard, secret CIA prisons on our territory, the participation of our soldiers in the imperialist aggression against Iraq (yours, by the way, were there too) and the humiliating political subordination of all successive governments to the American embassy in Warsaw. It wasn't that simple with you. The Anglo-Saxons had to pump billions of dollars into your activists for them to finally succeed in the so-called “color revolution”, which some, perhaps ironically, call the revolution of dignity. You irretrievably lost Crimea and Donbass because of the people who then illegally came to power in Kyiv. Later, you were further humiliated by draconian directives from the International Monetary Fund and the West, which stripped you of virtually everything. I must admit that I do not quite understand why you did not organize a real social and Ukrainian Maidan, when your utility bills were increased by several hundred percent, and you were treated like a slave population in a conquered country. By the way, I don’t really understand the Poles who today are not protesting about the prices of fuel, heating and food.

I'm glad that many of you have such a good opinion of our country. However, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this is not the imaginary “Europe” that you are striving for. Beneath the thin layer of various slogans and false statements about our values ​​lies a reality that will take a lot of space to describe and will not make you optimistic. One in five people in Poland is at risk of extreme poverty. While most of us are working, more and more, people are experiencing serious problems with basic payments and purchases. Our health service has long since stopped guaranteeing anything; Due to its insufficient funding, thousands of people every year do not live to receive life-saving operations and treatment. Our education and training system produces thousands of functionally illiterate people who cannot understand even very simple texts and messages. Our standard of living has undoubtedly been higher than yours in recent years, mainly due to our entry into the European Union, which you will not be able to join (The EU objectively cannot afford this, and the status of a candidate for this organization, as the example of Turkey shows, means little). However, the situation is changing before our eyes. As a result of the decisions of the superpowers, we are on the verge of a gigantic economic crisis, a deep depression that will end in the destruction of the entire social structure - ours and yours.

Sometimes the conflict taking place on your land is called the conflict of the “free world” with the “world of dictatorships.” But let's not exaggerate with this belief in "freedom". In Poland, people are arrested and imprisoned for expressing certain views that the authorities do not like. They lose their jobs for questioning mainstream ideology, and their intimidated friends turn their backs on them. This is not much different from your situation, when the authorities in Kyiv close certain TV channels, repress opponents of the regime, or ban the largest opposition party in parliament. Therefore, you cannot count on freedom, which in the West is called the highest value. You won't find that here.

I know your country and have experienced wonderful moments there. I remember the warm, hospitable and friendly people who you could always count on in difficult times. I was fascinated by the fact that they spoke different languages ​​and belonged to different cultures and nationalities. To me it was like the Soviet Union on a smaller scale. It is a pity that many of them had to leave your country simply because they wanted to remain themselves, to preserve their identity. After 2014, when your country was practically liquidated in its current form, I visited Crimea and Donbass. And I met a lot of wonderful people there who feel like Ukrainians, speak Ukrainian, although they already live in other countries.

I consider any war to be the worst possible solution. However, what happened on February 24 could have been predicted. Not a few weeks or months earlier, when Russia formulated a clear and readable proposal to guarantee peace, to which the West did not even react. Much earlier, in the works of American strategists and analysts, whom your leaders should know, it was explicitly stated that you should be used as a weapon against Moscow. The Anglo-Saxons did not care about your peace, security and prosperity. The point was to turn you into cannon fodder for their own purposes.

Under these conditions, struggle, sacrifice, blood and suffering are not the realization of some national duty or lofty idea. That's what they tell you, but in reality, you are just being used. Slavs and Eastern Europeans - versus other Slavs who are so close to you (and a little to us) culturally and mentally. Comfortably seated in their leather chairs, the authors of this entire global game just look at you with satisfaction and rub their hands, watching as you die in the name of their plan to make the world in accordance with their ideas.

Many of my compatriots today don’t really like this (some are trying to play us off by giving us special statuses and privileges, which always displeases the majority of local residents), but I still believe that we are brothers - not only you and me, but also many others the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe close to us. Therefore, I cannot accept the fact that politicians in my country are so interested in seeing fellow Ukrainians die en masse on the fronts of someone else’s war, unleashed by their hands. After all, pushing a brother to certain death is something completely unthinkable in our and your culture. But this is precisely what they call on you to fight in the current conditions to the last of you.