TVP WEEKLY: When we talk about the idea of a bulwark of Eastern European countries protecting Europe from Russia, are you more a follower of Józef Piłsudski [the Polish statesman, viewed as a father of the Second Polish Republic founded in 1918], or are you closer to the vision created in Maisons-Laffitte [the suburban Paris centre of post-WWII emigrant Polish intellectual life, that was headed by the charismatic Polish intellectual Jerzy Giedroyć]?

  Prof. Antoni Dudek: I am closer to the narrative of the "Kultura Paryska" [the leading Polish-émigré literary-political magazine "Culture", sometimes referred to as ‘Paris-based Culture’, published in Paris between 1947 and 2000 by Giedroyć]. We should note that back in the 1950s, Jerzy Giedroyć, regardless of how much criticism he was exposing himself to from the Polish emigrant community, was already saying that we had to come to terms with the loss of Vilnius and Lviv [both part of the territory of Poland before WWII]. Thanks to his pioneering work, demands reclaiming these territories were never to feature in any political program after 1989, not even those of the most extreme parties. I think that the ideas created in Maisons-Laffitte will guide the Witryna Domu Wschodniego [the Show-Window of the Eastern House]. We would like the Witryna to follow this course.

  Surely this will raise some questions? For example how would such a discouse address the issue of Volhynia [the historic region located between south-eastern Poland, south-western Belarus, and western Ukraine, where massacres of Poles carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army between 1943 and 1945 resulted in 50,000 to 100,000 deaths]?

  Of course, erasing the Volhynia massacres in the name of Ukrainian-Polish reconciliation is out of the question. Nor can we expect Ukrainians to suddenly focus primarily on condemnation of the Volhynian crime. We need to understand what the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was in the history of this country. For contemporary Ukrainians, it represents pro-independence, anti-Soviet partisans in the main. Therefore, it is impossible today to build the entire narrative of the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations based on the events in Volhynia. Of course, they cannot be underestimated, but neither can they be taken out of context, forgetting about the realities of World War II, the national situation in the Second Polish Republic, the Polish-Ukrainian war in 1919 and the entire history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  If someone talks only about Volhynia, it suggests that they do not understand much about Polish history. It's as if we suddenly started talking about the history of Polish-American relations, focusing only on Theodore Roosevelt's betrayal of our interests in Yalta [the Yalta Conference held in 1945, the meeting of the heads of government of the US, the UK and the USSR to discuss the postwar reorganization of Europe that agreed to the recognition of the communist provisional government installed in Poland by Moscow], and constantly demanding an apology from the Americans for this decision. Personally, instead of such an apology, I would prefer to see even more American soldiers in Poland, guaranteeing our safety. However, the example you cited is important for another reason. It shows how historical emotions dominate our thinking about history and the present. We use too much heart and not enough brain. This has been our problem since time immemorial.

  Your initiative to create the Witryna and the related fundraising activities are known as Professor Dudek's "intellectual Bayraktar". What will be the range of its operations?  

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    Let's be clear from the very outset: I am not the one who came up with the original idea of the Witryna. The credit for that belongs to Zbigniew Gluza and Ośrodek Karta [The Karta Center Foundation Glaza founded], which is one of the most credible and meritorious non-governmental organizations in Poland dealing with historical memory. Located in Warsaw at 6 Konstytucja Square, the Witryna is to be an educational and analytical center dealing with the broadly understood eastern policy. It is there to assist all these people from the East who are trying to find their place in Poland, from the Caucasus, Ukraine and Belarus, but also Russians who disagree with Putin's actions.  

But isn't this another case of multiple entities? Don’t we have enough of these various institutes? Refugees can be helped by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, crimes are investigated by Amnesty International, and archives are gathered in the National Library. And then there is the Pilecki Institute [the Polish government institution charged with preserving the memory, documenting and researching the historical experiences of Polish citizens and increasing awareness regarding totalitarianism in the 20th century]…

  Personally, I think there are far too few of these entities and institutions focused on our eastern policy. The Karta Center has been cooperating with dissidents and non-governmental organizations from the east for years, collecting documentation related to the activities of the Soviet regime. The National Library alone will not be able to collect such documentation. In the Witryna, we want to create an archive, and one of our fundraising goals is to collect money to equip it. Of course, we have the well-functioning Centre for Eastern Studies [the Warsaw-based think tank focusing on independent research in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia], a de facto governmental institution of ‘official intelligence’, preparing analyses related to the geopolitical situation in the region. It is a valuable and praiseworthy institution, but it operates on behalf of the Polish authorities. We cannot demand, for example, that it take responsibility for organizing meetings in support of Belarusian or Ukrainian cultural events, for exhibitions or debates on the history of Soviet imperialism. Since Poland’s accession to the EU, we have received a lot from the West, but our real chance for the future lies in the East.

  But at the moment, our guests from the East are looking for a chance in the West, i.e. with us…

  This year, over a million people from Ukraine arrived in Poland. According to research, more than half are people with higher education. We should support these people and help them adapt not only in the purely existential dimension, because it will be beneficial for us. Currently, completely new structures are emerging in our part of Europe. I believe Ukraine will successfully defend herself against Russia and the Lukashenko regime in Belarus will soon collapse. However, alongside new opportunities, even such a favorable course of events will create new challenges for our country. I believe that a new Commonwealth of Many Nations is being reborn before our eyes. What we have read about in school textbooks -- the Golden Age and the multinational Second Polish Republic -- is being created here and now. For demographic reasons, one way or another, Poland will have to accept immigrants. The influx of culturally aligned Ukrainian refugees can be described as a godsend, but this gift must be managed somehow. The scale of related problems Poland, as one of the most important countries in this part of Europe, faces in this regard is bound to increase.

What are Witryna's other functions?

  Unfortunately, the current political elites, focused on an increasingly brutal power struggle, throw more and more idiotic accusations at each other. No sane person should take this spectacle seriously. That is why we need every institution that motivates people to think, participate in a dialogue, discuss and understand their neighbours.

  Will the Witryna be actually a think tank?

  This was my initial idea, but it is only possible if some financial conditions are met. I am happy that the Witryna fundraising has been supported by people from various circles, that it has united both Agnieszka Holland [the progressive film director] and Prof. Andrzej Nowak [the conservative historian], or journalists as ideologically different as Tomasz Terlikowski and Sławomir Sierakowski. However, a think tank needs more funds than can be obtained using a crowdfunding portal. Of course, the idea of this fundraiser was based on another very successful initiative  -- the money-raising drive to buy a Polish drone for Ukraine that was supported by 200,000 people. Hence the name "intellectual Bayraktar" you mentioned. However, it turned out that in this case it is much more difficult to obtain funds. Conventional weapons appeal much more to the imagination than intellectual ones. However, the crowdfunding at: https://zrzutka.pl/witryna is still going on and I am constantly appealing for support.

  The point is we should arm ourselves not only militarily, but also intellectually. After all, expenditures on activities such as ours are just a small fraction of what is being spent on armaments. Unfortunately, I see a lack of broader interest in supporting our cause. This is another proof that we are too little interested in civic matters, in creating a space for reflection free from the current party struggle. In Poland, we have created politicians who are telling people that if they come to power, they will solve their problems. Meanwhile, sometimes it would be enough for them not to interfere. As a society, we have enormous potential. This was confirmed in recent times, when the grassroots organized on an unprecedented scale in Europe in assisting the incoming war refugees.

  Unfortunately, for some of our compatriots this help is no longer a matter of pride, but a problem. On November 11 [Poland’s Independence Day], in some Polish cities, there were demonstrations with the slogans "In Poland, the Pole is a Master".

  I have to admit that I have a big problem with how we celebrate November 11 nowadays. This day should be a holiday for all Poles, but it has been destroyed by current disputes. The root of the problem was the disregard of this holiday by the previous state authorities, especially the former presidents, who thought that a parade and a few salvoes at noon at Warsaw’s Piłsudski Square would do the trick. In this way an empty space was created, used nowadays by radical circles. However, I am of the opinion that the issue of the allegedly growing negative attitude of Poles towards Ukrainians is artificially created. If there were such sentiments in Poland, there would certainly be specific incidents, and there are none. I realize that in recent months we have had difficulties with coal or inflation, but the economic problems of Poland and other European countries are not the fault of refugees from Ukraine, but the actions of Vladimir Putin.

  Doesn’t the slogan "Stop the Ukrainization of Poland" worry you? Doesn't it outrage you?

  What nationalists shout at their rallies or radicals write online is marginal. However, their slogans are then shown in the media, both in Poland and, unfortunately, abroad. But they are not the real problem. The real problem is the silent majority that lets itself be shouted down by radicals. This applies to the same extent to the radical right as to the radical left -- of course, in the context of different postulates. With regard to the alleged "Ukrainization", I find it incomprehensible that some don't understand how it is that Ukrainians fight and die also in our interest. If Russia had managed to take Kyiv quickly in the spring, who would have given us any guarantees that her next demand would not have been to create an extraterritorial highway from Minsk to Kaliningrad? How would Europe have reacted to such a demand?

It is now time to leave the past behind and move on to the future. What is your forecast for Russia for the next 20 years.

  I believe that Russia is facing a very serious crisis. The history of the country points to such a conclusion. Over the last 200 years, problems kept arising when the state was not winning its sequential wars. It started with the Crimean War, followed by the so-called "Post-Sevastopol Thaw" and great political changes implemented by Tsar Alexander II. Later, there was the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, after which Tsar Nicholas II introduced further reforms, which, alas, proved to be too weak to save Tsarism.  

  Eventually, he plunged the country into World War I, leading to the biggest upheaval, the Bolshevik Revolution. In turn, the end of the USSR came after the defeat in Afghanistan, when the country was no longer able to solve its economic and national problems. Russia will not win this war either and it will have to undergo changes. The question is what their scale will be and whether it will mean just replacing Putin with a second Putin or something bigger?  

  Can we believe in a new Perestroika in Russia?  

  In the early 1990s, like many others, I believed that the free market and democracy were the only path for the entire post-Soviet bloc and that our region, from the Baltic states to Bulgaria, would follow it. When Russia was ruled by Boris Yeltsin, I thought that this country would follow, more slowly but the same way. However, when former KGB agents led by Putin seized power, it became more and more clear with each passing year that Russia would follow a different path. However, even then, I did not think that Russia would become strong enough economically to unleash a war on such a large scale. Yet Russia turned out to be able to do it, because Putin was earning unimaginable money from oil and gas.  

  In 2022, however, he made a mistake. Eight years after the successful operation in the Crimea and the effective hybrid war, he decided to take over all of Ukraine in a similar manner. However, he can no longer count on such a spectacular victory in this war as in 2014. Therefore, I think it is inevitable that he will be replaced by another slightly "softer" leader who will try to withdraw Russia from the war before the governing system established by Putin collapses completely. If this does not happen next year, in the next two or three years Russia may experience a repeat of 1917. That is, a great social rebellion against the current oligarchy that has stolen the wealth of the country, led the nation into a lost war and discredited it in the world.  

Will the Russian Federation collapse like the USSR 30 years ago?

  I believe that Russia may not survive in its present form. In this more radical scenario, I do not rule out that the European and Asian parts will diverge, each taking a different path. Besides, beyond the Urals, the Chinese are waiting for the Russians to bleed out. For now, they do not condemn the Russians, but they do not support them militarily either. They are their diplomatic ally, but they secretly hope to weaken Russia and envelop its Asian part within their sphere of influence. And that, I think, would be good. The disintegration of this huge country and limiting Russia only to European territory would give it a chance to get rid of the imperial state syndrome. After all, that's what happened at some point with Great Britain and France. When Russia is cured of the imperial syndrome, maybe one day it will join the group of European democracies. All this, of course, will not happen if the West, and especially America, stop supporting the Ukrainians on such a large scale as they have since February 24.

  The current US president is consistent in this, but how might his predecessor have behaved?

  Ukraine, despite all the misfortune that befell it, was very lucky to have found a favorable moment in the context of US international policy. Just a few months earlier, the Americans had withdrawn from Afghanistan in disgrace, Now, and thanks to Kiev's support, they can again show the world that they remain a global power. I don't know how Donald Trump would have reacted to Putin's actions today. He was a completely unpredictable politician. He could have acted firmly and consistently like Joe Biden, but he could have also put on some mediating spectacle, which would have been far too early. We had examples of this when he met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Maybe in the current situation, Trump would have gone to Moscow, met with Putin, and then tried to convince Zelensky to make peace, threatening to stop aid if he had refused? We don't know that. For me, however, there is no doubt that support for Ukraine is in the well-understood interest of the Americans themselves.

  – Interviewed by Cezary Korycki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

– Translated by Agnieszka Rakoczy
  Antoni Dudek is a political scientist, historian and publicist, professor of humanities, full professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Between 2010 and 2016, he was a member of the Council of the Institute of National Remembrance. He deals with the recent political history of Poland and its contemporary political system.