Russians want Jaruzelski in Moscow

2nd April 2010

© Andrzej Barabasz Jaruzelski has been officially invited to Moscow Share:

The attendance of President Lech Kaczynski at ceremonies in Moscow to mark the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe was cast into doubt after the Kremlin extended an invitation to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader.

The president, a former activist for Solidarity, has always had little time for the general, who crushed the union in 1981 through the introduction of martial law, and the prospect of sitting down next to him on Red Square will no doubt lack appeal.

“President Lech Kaczynski has doubts about travelling to Moscow to attend the festivities after General Wojciech Jaruzelski received an invitation from Russia,” Aleksander Szczyglo, the head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, said in an interview with the Radio ZET radio station.

Putting the controversy aside the 86-year-old general, who fought against the Nazis on the Eastern Front during the war, said that he would be happy to attend.

“I am very grateful to President Dmitry Medvedev for the invitation. I accept it with great satisfaction,” he said in a statement.

But just how he would get there also provided another source of controversy after President Kaczynski said he would offer the frail and elderly general a seat on the presidential plane, if he requested it.  

“We should remember that General Jaruzelski, in addition to his participation in World War II, was also the first democratically elected Polish president. Therefore, the respect based on his age, but also his presidential mandate, appears to be obvious,” said presidential aid Wladyslaw Stasiak said.

But the offer appeared to unsettle the former president, saying that such an invitation was more commonly used for “suitcases, not people.”

The Kremlin’s invitation to General Jaruzelski has also raised concerns in Poland that Moscow might use the VE Day celebrations to re-enforce its perspective on wartime history.

Poland and Russia have had frequent clashes over their separate interpretations of how the war started, was conducted and was won, and arguments over history still divide the two nations.

“The organisation of the commemorations will replicate Russia’s interpretation of World War II,” warned presidential spokesman Pawel Wypych.