"In Russia they looked at me as a curiosity: a young Pole who speaks Russian."
I gave an extensive interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, where I described how Russian elites shaped in the late Brezhnev era view history today, and why their memory of World War II is irreconcilable with the European one.
I explain that the average age of Russia's elites is approaching seventy, and their worldview was shaped by the popular culture of the Brezhnev era: films like "Officers" and "The Shield and the Sword," in which war was not a tragedy but a great adventure and a source of great-power pride. Hence the difference between the European "never again" and the Russian "we can do it again." I show how Russia appropriated the memory of World War II, even though in proportional terms it was Belarus, Ukraine, and Latvia, not Russia, that suffered the greatest losses, and why new textbooks question NKVD responsibility for Katyn. I also discuss the myth of Crimea as a "Russian Jerusalem," built since the times of Catherine II, and the belief that an "imperial gene" still lingers in Poles, prompting Russians to propose partitioning Ukraine. Finally, I share my own experiences in Russian archives, where after years of declassifying files came the time to seal them again with white tape, and explain why Russia is not nearly as alien and decaying a country as we would like to believe. The full conversation is available on the Wyborcza website.