Talk:Northern Group of Forces

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[edit] legal status

Note on legal status: LOC article states that the legal status of Soviet troops in C/EE satellites was regulated by 1949, however all the other sources I could find state that there was no legal framework for stationment of those troops in Poland until 1956. As LOC study is rather old, I'd tend to think that modern (2004) research by Polish historians (like [1]) is more reliable (see also [2]).-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  22:02, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

To address the legal status, let me stress that we have lot of references that state that legal status (the specific term for that is Status of Forces Agreement - agreement regulating foreign nation stationing military forces in other country) of the NGF was regulated only in 1956. Jamgotch, for example, explicitly writes: "The Polish-Soviet Treaty of December 17, 1956 formalized for the first time a situation which had existed in fact since World War II". Of course, Polish communist government was helped to power by those forces and it relied on them - although as Golon notes, there were also tensions, as the Soviet forces often did what they wanted and 'bullied' the local government. While there are lot of details to expand upon, there can be little doubt that the DYK hook - that the legal status of the NGF - was finally recongized only in 1956 - is well referenced.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  14:52, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] revert warring

I see that Piotrus persistently reverts me here. I am not to continue this game and if I see my edits reverted again to the POV-pushing version, I will POV-tag the article and explain its deficiencies at talk instead. I have better things to do than spend time editing to be reverted on the spot. --Irpen 08:17, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

By all means, DO explain your reasons on talk, this is what it is for. Also, please cite sources to back up your point: as I indicated before, your personal POV is not enough to make the article POVed. I address the legal situation above. If it is the looting part that you find objectionable, it is well referenced - and you fail to provide any refs of your own for any of your edits. Please note that the facts that you add - like that the looting was seen by Soviets as part of their war repatriotons - are kept. PS. Some quotes to further expand the article if you insist (for example, the issues of Soviet crimes on their 'allies'): 1) 'As even the PPR leadership was forced to admit, Polish-Soviet relations were beginning to look like that of an "occupied country". (...) Soldiers of the Red Army (...) became synonymous with looting and robbery. (...) archives are filled with reports of mugging, bulgraries, rape and murders attributed to Soviet soldiers [against Poles]."Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 2) "Unqualified Soviet support (to the Polish communists) equalled unqualifed Soviet control. In 1945 Gomulka (Władysław Gomułka) complained that 'the massess don't regard us as Polish communists at all but as the most despicable agents of the NKVD. Zawadzki (Aleksander Zawadzki) feared that raping and looting of the Soviet army would provoke a civil war. Ochab (Edward Ochab) declared that the main problems facing the Party were those of withdrawal of the Soviet army and lack of "sovereignity". Davies, God's... 3) "majority of (Polish) population was rapidly coming to dested Red Army because of its thelf, looting and undisciplined brutality." and more on the conflict between Poles (AK) and red Army. [3] -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  17:26, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

All right Piotrus, I have better things to do than to deal with your persistent reverts aimed at keeping this article heavily POVed. I tried to fix it but I am constantly seeing myself reverted. I won't play these games. In your zeal to revert me you even undo some spelling corrections that I correct. This is outrageous and I give up in trying to do something here.

The article is POV-tagged and here is the partial list of reasons.

  • However it was only on 17 December that 1956 Polish government officialy recognized the Northern Group by signing a Status of Forces Agreement with the Soviet Union regulating the Soviet military presence in Poland (Agreement on Legal Status of Soviet Troops Temporarily Stationed in Poland).
    • I attempted to replace this with: "On 17 December, 1956 Polish government signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the Soviet Union regulating the Soviet military presence in Poland (Agreement on Legal Status of Soviet Troops Temporarily Stationed in Poland)".All the info that the agreement regulating the issue was signed was there. I simply removed the POV tilt of the original phrasing that implies that prior to that the Polish government considered the Soviet presence illegitimate. This is such nonsense to say, especially in view of how the hell Soviets got there in the first place (otherwise Poland would have continued to thrived under the benevolent Nazi rule) and that the very government of Poland than was created by Soviets and no way those guys could have possibly have any objections to the Soviet presense. Nevertheless, my edit was undone. Good luck with that.
      • There is no 'POV tilt'. It is important to note that the presense of Soviet troops was not regulated by Polish law until 1956. Whether that means they were considred by Polish governement illegitimate or not is your interpretation, the text makes no such claim. There are and there were controversies on that issue on many levels, and I was even suprised to find that even in deep late 1940s prominent Polish communists expressed reservations about the extent of Soviet control (see citations above, referenced to Davies). I repeat: it is a well-referenced fact that before 17 Dec 1956 there was no treaty between Poland and USSR addressing the issue of Soviet troops on Polish soil. That's all there is to it - reader can and will make their own interpretation.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  19:25, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Next:

  • Third, in the first post-war years, one of the major - and also unofficial - tasks of the Northen Group was to loot the territories it was stationed on, and organize transport of all valuable items to the Soviet Union.
    • This is an incredible bizarre way to put it aside from the spelling error that Piotrus keeps restoring because of this urge to revert me no matter what. My version was: "In the first post-war years, one of the major tasks of the Northen Group was also to organize and transport to the Soviet Union the items of the war reparations from the former territories of Nazi Germany attached to Poland. Some Polish sources assert that Soviet troops looted the traditional Polish territories, in the areas Northern Group forces were stationed at." My version did not deny the looting, it merely properly attributed the assertion. Moreover, the Piotrus' version by saying that "looting was the major task" implies that the army received the order from Moscow "to loot" Poland, note that looting and evacuation of facilities are not one and the same. I do agree that the latter was the official order. I accept that real looting also took place as it is not unusual that such incidents take place when the standing army is imposed on the ambivalent population, but that the looting was a mission so ordered by the leadership just does not fly.
      • I agree this sentence is somewhat clumsly, I will attempt to improve it. More on it below, but first: My primary problem with your version is that you insist on the strange qualification that 'Some Polish sources assert'. We don't use such qualifications on Wikipedia, unless we can clearly show that there are 'Some other notable sources' that assert something different. Going back to the original sentence, it is as I said clumsly as it tries to address lots of issues: living aside looting and criminal behaviour of individual soldiers, which were certainly not ordered (and often indeed against orders), the 'evacuation of the facilities' is often describing as looting, as not only industrial but various civilian installations were stripped down, and also that looting/evacuation took place on territories that were supposed to be given to Poland and aid it in its reconstruction (both 'regained territories' and territories of the Second Polish Republic'). I will try to expand it, and remove possible confusion.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  19:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
  • There is further nonsense in there that the first Soviet mission was to confront NATO forces. NATO was established in 1949, while Soviets were stationed in Poland since 1944.
    • Indeed, that's another clumsy sentence: the first Soviet mission was to confront Western Allies, and later, NATO. Cold War started immediatly after the end of IIWW - and indeed it should be mentioned. I will correct that.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  19:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Now, what's the deal with "1965 Polish-Soviet friendship treaty which had legitimized Soviet domination of Polish military policy". This is plainly sloppy phrasing. Soviets did dominate the Polish military policy true enough.But what does this have to do with "legitimization" by the treaty. How the term "legitimacy" even enters this sentence?

Anyway, I can't work on the article in the mode that I spend an hour to do a careful edit and someone just comes in and reverts me time and again. Since Piotrus does not allow me to edit the article, I am tagging it. The tag should remain until either these objections are addressed by Piotrus (or others) or I am allowed to edit it without Piotrus' reverting me on the spot. --Irpen 18:21, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

  • Nobody is forbidding you from editing this article, however your edits are no more perfect then those of others and just as you have reverted parts of my edits, don't cry if I or others revert yours. Also, thank you for finally commenting here on the issues you want me to address; now that I know in more detail what they are I will try to address them.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  19:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

"Others reverted yours"? This "other" is someone who I never met and who did not do a single edit and simply removed the well-explained tag without even commenting on my objections to your applause (as usually you prefer others to do the dirty work for you, when possible). I asked you very politely to reason with the problematic editor yourself and, as always, you preferred instead to use him to your advantage. More at your talk. But there is now more to it.

You pasted a whole paragraph about Legnica event to the article that is supposed to cover 50 years. Usual Russian Enlightenment style of your with the overdue weight problem. All there had to me there is a mention and a link to the article where the issue is already covered. But of course, the barbarous looting of the Zaluski library has to be in every Russian article on the 19th century and the Legnica incident needs now to be pasted in the overwhelming detail into every article about with Soviet-Polish issues in the post war. WP:TE at its worse.

The article did not improve one iota only got more tendentious. Additionally, it fails WP:RS test since out of 44 inline references, 16 are to the Polityka, a newsmagazine of publicist nature, 8 more to the Web-site of unknown reliability called "Portal Historyczny" and 6 more to the web-site of the portal of the town of Borne Sulinowo, thus making over two thirds of the inline references to the dubious sources. As per this, the article fails not only NPOV but also WP:V and WP:RS. I am tagging it as such.

If you change your mind and want to work on this together, please leave a note to that matter but in this case I request you deal with the users who disrupt the articles with unexplained reverts curtly even if they revert to your POV. --Irpen 06:46, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Setting aside good half of your post which is nothing but a personal attack (particulary comments like that), let me address your specific concerns - finally posted after a series of reverts. First, Legnica is a relevant example of how Soviet official policies antagonized Polish population and governement - I see nothing wrong with having an example here (please cite relevant policy if you disagree). Please cite relevant part of WP:RS which would argue that Polityka - a respected mainstream publication - is unreliable; also, I can't fail to note that you have no problems with using Zerkalo Nedeli (for example) as a source yourself. 'Portal historyczny' is an initative of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, which make it a reliable academic venue (not to mention that the cited article by an academic was also published in printed academic journal, see further reading). Homepage of Borne Sulinowo is indeed the least reliable, but as part of an official town website (and thus, by an extension, a Polish governmenal publication), is still reliable.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  16:59, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Your baseless accusation of personal attacks are to be ignored, Piotrus. I won't let you deflect the discussion off topic by this common trick. I suggest you concentrate on issues rather than try to pull some policies to attack your opponent.

I expected to hear your analogy with Zerkalo Nedeli from the onset. The answer to you is that ZN refs that you have on your mind, and I have told you that many times, is in fact a reference to a book written by a professor from the Kiev University. Zerkalo Nedeli simply chose to publish selected chapters from that book in her several weekly issues thus making the reference an online one. It is a reference to the book, not to a newspaper, and written by an established scholar, which makes it an acceptable source. If you can show that the authors of your newsweekly (Marek Henzler and Miroslaw Golon) are both otherwise well-established as scholars, referring to them would be acceptable, but only if the authors reputation can be established in the scholarly work. Until then, the source is unscholarly but rather of the publicist and polemical nature. Same applies to the reference to an anonymous article at the city portal.

As for the Legnica incident, I do not question that it took place. What I do question is devoting the whole paragraph to it in article that covers a 50 year period. It is covered in the city article. I won't object to having it mentioned here with the link to an article with detail. Pasting in in detail to every article were it is only marginally relevant is WP:TE as it gives the issue an undue weight. I will now try to give an article another go. If I see myself reverted again without any explanations, as the last time, I will tag it. But for now, I would simply prefer a suitable version to be displayed at the main page, that's all. --Irpen 21:35, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Sigh. Since you cannot quote a policy to discard Polityka, it stays as a reliable source, EOT. Same for offical town page. As for Legnica, controversy in estabilishing the formation main headquaters seems perfectly reasonable to be described in that formation article. What would be unreasonable would be to describe details of hundreds of criems committed by soldiers, or particular grievances of local towns and governments - although the refs have various examples of that. Feel free to improve the article, but censorship of anything that may show Soviets were not perfect will not be accepted.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  21:40, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
This particular two Polityka articles, the town web-site and the entry at "Historic portla" will be acceptable if you find any proof of their author's credentials being otherwise established. This requirement does not apply to the publications in the scholarly journals, university press or other book publishers. But the fact that something appears in Polityka (or Zerkalo Nedeli) does not make it a reliable source because these publications are of a polemic nature by definition. This should be decided case by case based on who authored it. --Irpen 21:51, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
It would be a very interesting change of our policies, Irpen, if we were to follow this. Unfortunatly until this is policy, let's just follow WP:RS and WP:V. Quoting from here: "Mainstream newspapers and magazines published by notable media outlets (are generally regarded as reliable)." I see no need to look at the specific authors unless the sources are used to reference a particulary controversial/bizzarre claim.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  23:12, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nice work, Piotrus

This sort of factual information is what I would put in Soviet occupation of Romania, but I have no idea where to get it. The Warsaw pact is probably what allowed the Russians to remain in Romania after 1955, and this info should be put in that article or another. But I don't know where to get that info. I saw that you mainly have Polish sources. I am aware of no Romanian source on the matter. Dpotop 21:27, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, the recent (2004) article by Polish historian, Mirosław Golon, was very helpful (even if the online version is strangly truncated...). He notes that until now there have been no publication on the entire NGF, only on local parts. I found also few others Polish articles, although they are less academic (IPN can be considered reliable and academic, but Polityka is just a newspaper). And I managed to find some useful tidbids via Google Print, to verify some controversial issues with reliable and neural western sources. But yes, it was not easy and there is still much scope for expansion. I am afraid I cannot give you much tips for expansion on the Southern Group, but have you tried searching for Hungarian (and Bulgarian) articles?-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  22:33, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
I second Dpotop's kudos. Excellent job. To Dpotop's comment, my understanding (from a military journal I came across) was that the Warsaw Pact did change the legal status of Soviet troops on non-Soviet Warsaw Pact territory. There should be a copy around somewhere in English. It always helps to have the actual text (not someone's rants about what, in fact, is never said...). —  Pēters J. Vecrumba 03:04, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm particularly impressed that the newspaper, Polityka, is not going to be considered to be reliable and academic anymore; perhaps the rest of the junk coming out of these tabloids and tygodniks will cease to be used as "sources" to back absurd claims too. One can only hope. Then we can next focus on eliminating the "Google hits" phenomenon that is used to adjudicate matters of history and philosophy. Dr. Dan 03:48, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
And perhaps one day you will actually contribute something significant to this project in the article space. We can always hope for improvement, now, can't we?-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  04:05, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
And that they will be more significant than Operation Wilno and Zydokomuna are. In the meantime I will try to continue with my copy editing, and corrections of POV presented as fact. Per your advice below, ...-but any further copyedit is, of course, welcomed, and I'll do my best. Dr. Dan 14:13, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POV

As the thread was expanding on DYK, I thought I'd take a look. It doesn't look too slanted from a quick read through (assuming there aren't sources to the contrary), but it wouldn't hurt to tone down the use of "further", "however", "eventually" etc. in almost every sentence of the section about the treaty. Just the facts will make the case quite convincingly. Cheers, Yomanganitalk 17:51, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I got read of one further, the other qualifiers I think improve the flow and logic of the article - but any further copyedit is, of course, welcomed.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk  18:13, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
I won't edit it as the tag is on, but Personnel has two "n"s. Yomanganitalk 23:25, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
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