MOSCOW. Nov 20 (Interfax) - The Russian Defense Ministry has released historical documents from its central archive, telling of the Soviet material aid for Poland in 1944-1945, and published as part of the "Memory against oblivion" multimedia project.
"Of much interest to the users will be an agreement between the Soviet command the provisional government of the Polish republic, which is published for the first time, regarding the use of German enterprises' equipment and other property located in Poland. It notes in particular that all Polish plants and equipment, without exception, were handed over to the Poles, their dismantling and removal strictly forbidden," the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
The released documents contain data on Soviet aid for the Polish cities freed by the Red Army that included food, medications, automotive transport, fuel and raw material for industrial enterprises.
Free Poland was receiving aid from Red Army stocks and Soviet government resources, according to the documents.
"Between March and November 1945 alone, the Soviet Union provided food and forage, worth over 1.5 billion rubles in 1945 prices, for the population and the sowing campaign," the ministry said.
Under a labor agreement, during the second and third quarters of 1945 the Polish provision government received over 130,000 tonnes of food, 20,000 tonnes of cotton and over 2,000 trucks.
Over 8,000 tonnes of meat came from the 1st and 2nd Belarusian Fronts and the 1st Ukrainian Front as a one-off food aid for Polish railway workers.
The declassified documents tell of the Red Army restoring Polish railways and bridges destroyed by Nazi invaders. Thus, railway troops from the 1st Belarusian Front rebuilt more than 5,000 kilometers of railway, 12,500 cable kilometers of railroad communications, and built and repaired over 30,000 linear meters of bridges in Poland.
A separate set of documents tells of the aid during the 1945 spring sowing campaign with seeds of wheat, barley, millet, maize, bean, cabbage, cucumbers, onion, etc., as well as agricultural machinery and equipment.
The declassified documents also reflect unprecedented levels of financial aid for Poland and numbers of Soviet troops and civilian specialists involved in restoring the country's economy.
The historical documents were previously available only to a limited circle of specialists.
On October 21 this year Poland introduced a decommunization law threatening removal of Red Army monuments, the ministry said.
"One of the first 'victims' of the barbaric law was the moment of gratitude to the Red Army in the Polish city of Szczecin," the ministry said.