Poland Releases Warsaw Pact Files

Many of the details of over seven decades of communist Soviet Union rule remain hidden. Sooner or later, they will become known and added to the murderous and oppressive legacy of socialism. Communists, 'ex-communists' and their sympathizers would prefer the information not be made available to historians. Too bad.

Yesterday (11/25), the Polish government made public a cache of secret Warsaw Pact military files containing war plans for attacking Western Europe and details of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The "highly-sensitive" files were given to the Institute of National Remembrance in an effort by the new conservative government to deal more openly with Poland's communist past and to "confront those Poles who worked closely with the Soviet Union."

From MOSNews.com:

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland's defense minister, claimed the country had been "an unwilling ally of the Soviet Union in the cold war" and that being in the Warsaw Pact had put the country in mortal danger.

Sikorski published a map showing Soviet bloc forces planning a "counter-attack" against NATO forces, in which the Soviets would have dropped nuclear bombs along a line from the Dutch coast to Strasbourg, wiping out cities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

But the 1979 exercise also showed that Warsaw Pact planners believed such a conflict would have seen NATO target its nuclear bombs along the line of the Vistula river in Poland, to prevent Russian reinforcements reaching the front.

As described, the scenario would have made Poland the battlefield with no regard for the fact that people live there. In the words of Sikorski, "Poland is a country which would have been bombed out of existence."

Obviously, the release of the files has painfully puckered the glutei of communist-era politicians and soldiers in both Poland and other Warsaw Pact nations. Interesting revelations are sure to surface once the documents are reviewed. My take? I pray for all communists and socialists to have painful and puckered glutei.

Debbie has more on the story at In The Bullpen.