Rebuilding the Past, Preparing for War

For Poland, Putin's Russia is not a distant and abstract threat

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of taking a run along the west bank of the Vistula, the river that runs through the heart of Warsaw.

With a western promenade stretching for miles, and an east bank left wild and beautiful — strewn with sandy beaches, reeds, and willows — it’s a lovely run past cafes and beer gardens, gawking tourists, and moony lovers holding hands. All this gorgeousness lies alongside Warsaw’s Old Town, a charming maze of narrow streets, squares, cobblestones, restaurants, and churches. Old Town is what every North American who has never been to Europe imagines Europe to be.

Warsaw’s Old Town. Credit: Gerard Stanczak.

What Old Town is not, however, is old.

The whole thing is a meticulous reproduction of what was once there, before history taught Poles certain brutal lessons. And the reconstruction is not over yet. A little further out from Old Town is what was, and will be again, the imposing Saxon Palace. For now, it’s a construction site surrounded by fences on which the passion that drives Warsaw’s renaissance is spelled out explicitly, in giant letters, in Polish and English: “Together we are rebuilding what should not have been destroyed.”

In Warsaw, history is now, a point driven home during my run along the Vistula River.

Next to the highway paralleling the river, metal barricades, police, and soldiers kept traffic and pedestrians back. As I ran, I saw why. A long convoy of armoured personnel carriers on the backs of transport trucks rushed by. A few minutes later, another convoy rolled past, this one carrying German-made Leopard 2 main battle tanks. The Poles around me scarcely took a glance. Nothing unusual for them, I suppose. Poland is now spending more than 4% of its GDP on its military, with a planned increase to 5% in 2025. That’s the highest in NATO by a wide margin, far above even the United States.

Poland is a nation rebuilding its past and preparing for war.

To understand why, you need to know the history all Poles know.

In the Middle Ages, Poland was a major power, controlling territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But it waned as others waxed, until, in the late 18th century, Poland was carved up and passed around the table like a Christmas goose. The Austrians and Prussians helped themselves to lands in the south and west. The Russians took the lion’s share in the east, including Warsaw.

In the 19th century, nationalism inspired multiple rebellions in the Russian-occupied lands but these were invariably crushed with characteristic brutality.

In 1914, a Serbian terrorist assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne and Germany set in motion its long-planned strategy for dealing with a general European war on two fronts: The Schlieffen plan called for a swift and massive assault into France, quick victory, and a swing back to the east to deal with the lumbering Russian giant. But Russia mobilized faster than the Germans expected. In the fall of 1914, at the Battle of the Vistula River, also known as the Battle of Warsaw, the Russians beat Germany badly. The Russians failed to turn the victory into a strategic turning point and the war in the east, as in the west, descended into a long, grinding hell of trenches and pounding artillery. It was mostly Polish soil scarred by the trenches and artillery, however, not German or Russian.

When internal unrest finally brought Russia to its knees in 1917, the new “Soviet” government of Vladimir Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. The Russian Empire – now known as the Soviet Union -- gave up Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, much of Belarus, and Ukraine, lands which had been conquered by Russia in the previous decades and centuries. The German military occupied much of that territory, intent on creating a series of independent states dominated by Berlin. Poland, however, would not be one. Germany refused to recognize a Polish delegation as it intended to absorb some of what had been Poland, keep the remainder under indirect German control, and everywhere ensure local German minorities dominated.

In November, 1918, as German forces on the western front disintegrated in the face of a rapid Allied advance, Germany was forced to sue for peace. The Great War ended in the west. In the east, it merely entered a new phase.

The Soviet Union repudiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Bolsheviks moved to restore the lost lands of the Russian Empire. They invaded and conquered Ukraine despite strong resistance. But in a series of conflicts between 1918 and 1921, the Soviets were beaten by the Poles. With the support of Britain, France, and the United States, Poland became an independent country for the first time in more than a century, with Warsaw as its capital.

For North Americans, this is ancient and obscure history. For Poles, nothing could be more relevant today.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany, burning with hatred of Communism and an explicit goal of seizing ‘lebensraum’ (living room) in the east. In 1939, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union, signed a deal with his supposed fascist enemy, permitting the Germans to take the western half of Poland, and Warsaw, the Soviets the east.  

On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht attacked Poland. Britain and France were forced, finally, to declare war. Warsaw was pummelled from the air and soon fell to the Nazis. With the Polish military largely destroyed by the Germans in the west, the Soviets walked into what remained of Poland, where they soon began the mass murder of military officers and intellectuals and the deportation of Poles by the thousands to work as slave labourers in Siberian camps.

In Nazi ideology, Polish Slavs were untermenschen, subhuman, and would eventually be reduced to slavery or exterminated. Some Polish lands were immediately annexed to Germany and their Polish populations expelled. The remainder of German-occupied Poland, including Warsaw, became, in effect, an immense factory churning out food for the Reich, armaments for the German military, and death for Jews.

In June, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Nazi exploitation of Poland extended into the formerly Soviet-controlled lands of Poland.

In April, 1943, Jews confined to a ghetto in Warsaw rose up. The Germans crushed the resistance, sent survivors to the death camps, and razed the district.

By the summer of 1944, the Germans were clearly losing the war in the east as the immense Red Army rolled rapidly toward Warsaw. Responding in part to calls from Moscow, Poles launched the Warsaw Uprising. It was the biggest armed resistance action of the Second World War. With only light weaponry, the Poles hammered German units and seized control of much of Warsaw.

Stalin ordered the Red Army to halt.

Stalin did not want Polish leaders liberating Poles as this would create a political class capable of interfering with his plan to create a post-war Communist puppet government in Poland. So the Red Army stopped east of the Vistula and watched – literally watched -- as the Germans mobilized their forces. The British and Americans pleaded with Stalin to let them airdrop weapons to the Polish defenders and land their planes at Soviet airfields. Stalin refused. Churchill was enraged. British and American planes had to fly from bases in Italy, drop supplies above raging battles, and return. They were mauled. The Poles got only modest amounts of light weapons and food.

The resistance held on for two desperate months but inevitably the Germans rallied, crushed the Poles, and carried out massacres. Soldiers, nurses, and civilians alike were shot. An estimated 20,000 Polish soldiers died along with 150,000 civilians. And Warsaw’s agony was still not over.

Himmler told Hitler that Poles had stymied the German “drang noch Osten” – drive to the east – since the 1410 battle in which a Polish king destroyed the Teutonic Order and now was the time to finally erase them. Starting with Warsaw. For three months, the Germans sent the civilian population into slavery while systematically tearing Warsaw down to its foundations. Churches, theatres, galleries, museums, castles. Even parks. Anything of any significance was destroyed. “No stone can remain standing” Himmler ordered. It was probably the most complete destruction of a modern city in history.

Finally, in January, 1945, the Red Army “liberated” Warsaw. Or rather, the rubble and dust that had been Warsaw.

Warsaw after the war.

When the war ended, Stalin kept the Polish lands he had stolen in the east. He compensated Poland with German lands in the west. And he installed his puppet government.

It is indisputably true that the defeat of Hitler was accomplished with immense sacrifice by Russians and the other nationalities of the Soviet Union. But from a Polish perspective, it is surely also true that Germans and Russians were partners in one of history’s most monstrous crimes.

Poles remember. That is why they are so determined to rebuild “what should not have been destroyed.”

That is also why they are spending so heavily on their military.

Poland now faces another dictator whose head is filled with nationalist fantasies masquerading as history. Another dictator who dreams of territorial expansion, or as Putin would put it, the restoration of Russian land. Another dictator who has repeatedly pressed his neighbours and tested the will of the leading powers to resist.

But there is an important difference between Putin and Hitler.

In 1938, Britain and France, without consulting Czechslovakia, agreed to the surrender of the German-speaking Czech territory of Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for peace. When Hitler later sent his forces to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia, the Czechs decided not to fight. They could have resisted. The Czech military and munitions industry were substantial. But in permitting Czech territory to be carved up, Britain and France gave away Czechoslovakia’s strongest line of defence. So the Czechs held their fire when the Germans rolled into Prague.

But in 2022, when Russian sent its forces to Kyiv, the Ukrainians fought back. And NATO came together in surprising unity to support Ukraine with weapons and financial aid.

After swallowing Czechoslovakia, Hitler turned to Poland. If Ukraine had swiftly surrendered to Putin and NATO had shrugged — as Putin apparently expected — would Poland have been next?

In his own long speeches, stuffed with historical references going back all the way to the Vikings that settled Kievan Rus in the 9th century, Vladimir Putin clearly sees himself as a Russian czar, a worthy successor to Peter the Great, restoring Russian lands. And what is Poland, to such a Russian, but Russia’s lost western oblast?

Happily, we’ll never know what would have happened if Ukraine had surrendered. But we may still learn what will happen if Ukraine is defeated.

In either case, it seems clear that Poles believe they are indeed next. Given Poland’s history, it would be mad not to. For Poles, Russia and its dictator are not some abstract threat far away. They are a visceral and immediate danger.

And so Poland is preparing for invasion, as it has so many times before.

On my run, I saw something that made me stop and stare in awe. It wasn’t a castle or a monument or any of the usual things that grab tourists. It was a tree.

There are few trees in Warsaw’s Old Town but even if there were this one would have stood out. Its trunk is easily five feet across. It must be hundreds of years old.

I stopped. There was something off about it.

Then I realized the trunk and crown are out of proportion. The trunk is immense. The crown is a decent size, but much more modest. I looked more carefully and realized why.

When the tree was younger, but still intimidatingly large, it had been blasted apart. The current crown grew out of what survived the maelstrom.

I stared in awe. There was no plaque but it couldn’t be clearer that this tree had witnessed much, if not all, of what I described above.

Somehow, incredibly, it had survived. And grown.

Like Poland itself.

Post-script

As I’ve mentioned now and then, I am Canadian. If the reader will indulge me, I’d like to add a note for the Canadians among us. And perhaps for citizens of those European countries which are making the same terrible mistake as my country.

Canada joined the Second World War at the beginning. Canadians fought on land, at sea, and in the air. My own great-uncle was a bomber pilot and the first Nova Scotian killed in the war. He was 22. He left behind a wife, along with a daughter he never held.

Canada is also a founding member of NATO. Generations that knew war intimately were willing to fight again, and prepared themselves accordingly.

I am immensely proud of that record. All Canadians should be. We could have stayed home, far from danger, and pretended we are not cowards and fools. But we did not. We did what was right.

I am much less proud of what Canada has done these last few decades.

Our national security has always been collective, always maintained by working with our friends and allies. As it should be. It is morally right to do so. And it is, if I may speak like an economist for only a moment, cost-effective. A strong collective defence is by far the best way to ensure war never happens.

The problem with collective security, however, is that it invites freeloading. If others shoulder more, why not shoulder less? The same load is carried. And it’s so much easier.

Canada has been freeloading for at least thirty years. When I say that I am “somewhat less proud” of what Canada has done in this years, I mean I am positively ashamed.

I’ve written about this many times, and often argued about it with my fellow Canadians. And always, when I drill down, the response is the same: “The Americans would never let anyone attack Canada so why spend more on our military when there are so many other important things we can spend that money on?”

The fact that this effectively amounts to ceding some portion of our sovereignty to our Americans friends and allies never seems to occur to the otherwise decent and reasonable people who say this. Nor does the fact that we are members of an alliance that requires all members to go to war if any member – including Poland -- is attacked. War, for these Canadians, is a distant historical memory. A fairy tale. Science fiction. It’s not really possible. Not really.

And so, since the end of the Cold War, we have solved budget crises and paid for new social programs by cutting military spending.

Many years ago, NATO members all committed to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence. Canada spends around 1.3%. That’s actually up from less than 1% in 2015, but most of that alleged increase is due to an accounting change. Do I need to say that enemies cannot be defeated with accounting changes?

Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to get spending to 2% by the early 2030s. But he did so at a NATO summit, under duress, as allies and the press pounded Canada for being the only country in the alliance with no plan to even get to 2%. And Trudeau clearly announced his plan through gritted teeth. It’s an arbitrary target, he said. What matters more is how military power is used and Canada volunteers more to NATO than others who spend more. But anyway, he said, we’ll get to 2%. Eventually.

I think he’s lying. I think he has no intention of doing what Canada long ago agreed to do.

Earlier reports suggested Trudeau had told allies privately that Canada would never get to 2%. And Trudeau’s “plan” looks less like a plan than a plan to make a plan. In politics, a plan to make a plan is as worthless as a three-dollar bill.

Given that Trudeau has been prime minister since 2015, given that he has shown not the slightest interest in the military, and given that he did not change course even after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine — when Poland and other NATO allies started preparing for war — I think his promise to get to 2%, eventually, one day, isn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell, to use a favourite expression of my dear, departed dad.

Please don’t think I’ve descended into partisanship. The low-water mark of Canadian military funding came in 2015, as I’ve said, and 2015 was nine years into a Conservative government that loved all things military except spending money on the military. The freeloading of the past 30 years has been a bi-partisan shame. (I won’t mention the NDP. If the NDP ever formed a national government, our soldiers would be equipped with megaphones and highly trained in the use of inclusive language.)

The simple truth is that both Liberal and Conservative governments have so badly underfunded the Canadian military that we are now utterly unprepared to do our part in a war, which is and always has been the primary mission of the Canadian Armed Forces. The CAF has atrophied to such an extent that it can’t even spend money. I mean that literally. Even its procurement bureaucracy has so withered that if the CAF were suddenly given a huge injection of cash, it would be hard-pressed to turn that money into battlefield capabilities.

We have outstanding men and women in the CAF, people so dedicated to standing guard that they remain in the military despite never being properly funded and constantly being asked to do more than their funding permits so that prime ministers like Justin Trudeau can claim that Canada contributes its share to collective security while freeloading and spending the money saved at home. They are the only reason the Canadian Armed Forces hasn’t entirely crumbled, the only reason why there’s still hope it can be turned around. They deserve so much better than the callow, short-sighted, parochial prime ministers who give them orders.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Russia will turn on Poland any time soon — thanks mostly to the heroism and sacrifice of the people of Ukraine. But then, in 2022, I did not think that Vladimir Putin would dare launch a major land war in Europe.

That’s the thing about the future: “Man plans and God laughs.”

People who say war is impossible are fools. So are people who do not prepare for war sufficiently to ensure it never happens. Worst of all, however, are people who do not deny that war is possible but let others prepare so they may spend their time and money on domestic priorities. They are contemptible freeloaders.

I will let the reader decide to which of those three categories recent Canadian prime ministers should be assigned.