Hot Type: Poland Fights Back Against 'The End of the World'

Heidi Siegmund Cuda reports on Poland's renewed determination to defend itself from Russian aggression on both the virtual and actual battlefield

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a press conference where topics included military support through arms deliveries, new sanctions against Russia and efforts to weaken Russian energy dominance. Warsaw, 15 January 2025. Photo: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy

Early in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, he explained how Ukrainians who were being starved in 1930 by Stalin under ‘collectivization’ voted with their feet by walking to Poland.

“Whole villages followed their example, taking up church banners, or crosses, or sometimes just black flags tied to sticks, and marching westward toward the border. Thousands of them reached Poland, where knowledge of famine conditions in the Soviet Union spread,” wrote Snyder, a Yale professor who also authored On Tyranny and On Freedom.

He explained how “Polish border guards patiently interviewed the refugees, gaining knowledge of the course and the failure of collectivization.”

In return, Poland dispatched spies in the other direction and began engaging in anti-Soviet propaganda.

“Their propaganda posters called Stalin a ‘Hunger Tsar’ who exported grain while starving his own people. In March 1930, politburo members feared that ‘the Polish government might intervene.’”

Snyder documented how a Polish father living in Ukraine explained to his son why the family would not join the collective farm:

“I do not want to sell my soul to the devil.”

A century later, Poland still doesn’t want to sell its soul to the devil.

As Russia attacks dozens of countries through funding fake populist movements and planting puppets to destroy democracies worldwide, Poland’s leaders are fighting back.