In September 2013, the Polish city of Legnica was preparing to host a reunion of former Soviet officers who had served in the city and left after the Soviet Union fell. The centrepiece of the celebrations would be a monument in the main square showing two soldiers, a Pole and a Russian, locked in a handshake; on their shoulders sat a small girl, her gaze fixed on the Russian. When it was unveiled in 1951, the monument had been described in the local press as an expression of the Polish people’s “limitless gratitude to their liberators”, of “inseparability and eternal friendship with the Soviet Union”.

In the middle of the night before the reunion event, Piotr Borodacz, a 25-year-old Polish nationalist, gathered with several friends on the square and doused the “monument of gratitude” in red paint. On its base, they scrawled the symbol of the National Radical Camp, a Polish prewar fascist movement that was resurrected after the fall of communism. Red was the colour of the communism Borodacz despised, and of the blood of Poles persecuted by the communist regime.

Hours later, Borodacz stood beside the defaced monument to address a nationalist rally. “They told us that the Soviets are a brother nation,” he said to about 100 supporters. “And today, in the name of unity, they tell us to play with the butchers at a feast, to call our occupiers friends.” Waving Polish flags and banners of the far-right All-Polish Youth, the protestors marched through town, congregating before a stage on which a folk band was performing songs for the reunion event. “From trees, instead of leaves, communists will be hanging,” they chanted, drowning out the music.

At 6am the following day, police officers stormed into Borodacz’s apartment. He was handcuffed and driven to the police station, held for 48 hours and ordered to pay for the monument to be cleaned. His laptop, camera and mobile phone were confiscated. For the next four days, as festivities continued and Russian pop bands were welcomed into town, police stood watch beside the vandalised statue.

That was a different time in Poland. Two years later, in 2015, Law and Justice (PiS) was elected with the first outright parliamentary majority in the country’s post-communist history. Since then, the nationalist party has seized control of state media and portrayed Poland as a country assailed by malign outside forces. It has announced a political revolution aimed at wiping out the corrosive influence of the venal communist collaborators it accuses of seizing power when Poland regained independence in 1989. And it has mounted a campaign to erase the communist legacy entirely, ridding Poland’s streets of the names of former communists, and its squares and roundabouts of the hundreds of “monuments of gratitude” put up for the 600,000 Soviet soldiers estimated to have died fighting the Nazis on Polish territory. In communist times, these soldiers were seen as liberators. Today, the totalitarian regime whose uniforms they wore is being equated with Nazi occupation.

That narrative has helped revive a story of Polish defiance and heroism at a time when many see their national identity threatened by the forces of globalisation. But it also taps into a well of historical pain and animosity, reigniting conflicts that have lain dormant for years. The Soviet Union liberated Poland from the Nazis, opening the gates of concentration camps and freeing thousands of Jews. But it brought with it a communist system that crushed all domestic opposition, executed leaders of the wartime resistance and imposed a totalitarian order aimed at indoctrinating successive generations with unquestioning gratitude towards the USSR. For millions of Poles, 1945 brought a new occupation under a different name; for others, it brought salvation and social advancement.

The ‘monument to gratitude’ to Soviet forces in Legnica, fenced off prior to its removal. Photograph: Matthew Luxmoore

Legnica, a small city near the German border, is a microcosm of that rift. After the Red Army swept across the region in 1945, driving German troops back towards Berlin, the city became known as Little Moscow, the largest of several dozen Soviet bases constructed along Poland’s western border. Some residents recall acts of kindness by Soviet officers or enduring friendships with their wives; others, like Borodacz, want all traces of that period destroyed. The last Soviet soldier departed Legnica in 1993; but the monument of gratitude remained, inflaming divisions in a community riven by its postwar past.

This November, Poland will celebrate the centenary of its rebirth as a state in 1918, which followed more than a century of partition by imperial powers. Law and Justice has heralded the inception of a new Polish state shorn of all relics of communist rule, and a new set of anti-Soviet heroes is now being placed on pedestals.

Russia is incensed. It accuses Poland of violating mutual cooperation treaties signed in the 1990s that guarantee the protection and upkeep of historical sites. But while the Kremlin warns of retaliation, Law and Justice is forging ahead.

In March this year, Legnica’s most divisive landmark was dismantled. Borodacz, who had been arrested for defacing it just five years earlier, stood on the main square to celebrate what he sees as a resurgent Poland exorcising the ghosts of its past. But the toppling of monuments is only the most visible part of the battle that Poland is waging over its identity as a nation, amid a resurgent nationalism that is pitting its government against the European Union and endangering the country’s EU membership. Increasingly, this battle is setting Pole against Pole.

One evening in August 2014, Kinga Zazulak, a Polish amateur historian, was browsing the web in her Wrocław apartment when an article caught her attention. A Red Army monument in the nearby town of Mikolin had fallen into disrepair, she read, and authorities were debating its demolition. In the days that followed, she wondered what she could do to help save the monument – a towering obelisk topped with a Soviet red star. She happened upon the Facebook page of Kursk, a Polish non-profit organisation that renovates Soviet monuments and cemeteries, and sent a message to Jerzy Tyc, Kursk’s director, asking if there was anything he could do. Tyc promptly replied, promising he would look into it.

As a former soldier in the communist Polish People’s Army and an avowed socialist, Tyc laments the erosion of Poland’s Soviet-era heritage. A mild-mannered man with a receding hairline, he retains, at 50, a profound loyalty to the Red Army, who saved his mother and her family from the Nazis. Army service has left its imprint on this working-class Pole: he speaks in military jargon, calls himself Kursk’s “commander” and dons his old army uniform to unveil each new cemetery and monument he has repaired. He is driven by a nostalgia for the past, for the sense of security he felt as part of a powerful, Soviet-led military bloc.

The pace of his life is frantic. He is constantly on the road, traversing the length and breadth of Poland in his small grey Citroën, visiting dilapidated monuments and cemeteries and meeting local officials to request permission to restore them. But every so often, Tyc retreats for days on end to the tranquility of Surmówka, the village in northern Poland where he grew up, and where he and his younger brother Adam, one of his five siblings, run a 20-hectare farm and keep bees. It is here that, as children, Tyc and his friends would build wooden guns, dress up as Red Army soldiers and play war. At 18, he was able to fulfil his dream and join the army, a place where he developed the deep distrust towards the west that he still feels today.

Tyc launched Kursk in 2008, in a bid to repair several abandoned communist-era bunkers near Katowice. He named the organisation after the Russian city where the largest tank battle of the second world war took place. Over the past decade, he has renovated more than 40 Red Army monuments with approval from local authorities, to whom he files a request prior to purchasing the necessary materials and drawing up plans. He has secured the backing of powerful figures in the Russian government and a regular stream of donations, including from charities close to the Kremlin. He has also become a regular on Russian state media, which portrays him as an ordinary Pole fighting historical revisionism in the face of an uncompromising government.

Tyc regularly travels to Moscow, driving through Lithuania and Latvia. It is a long journey – 18 hours, with stops to nap in the back seat – but it saves money and allows him to meet sponsors and veterans’ associations, and call on the many Russians who contact him via social media for information about relatives lost in the war. In 2016, a Russian TV journalist, Anna Zakharian, reached out to to Tyc for help locating the grave of her grandfather who went missing in Poland. The two connected over a common respect for the Red Army. They became a couple, and Zakharian is now the official representative of Kursk in Russia.

When he heard about the Mikolin monument, Tyc contacted local authorities and secured permission to begin work. But this renovation posed a particular challenge. Trees had sprouted through the cement base, allowing rainwater to seep through the cracks, freezing in winter months and breaking through its foundation. The stairs leading to the 20-metre obelisk, exposed for years to the elements, were disintegrating.

The project took two years and cost 20,000 złoty (£4,000). Helped by volunteers from across Poland, Tyc ripped out the weeds, repaved the stairs, laid new insulation, repaired the road leading to the monument and repainted the red star that crowns it. He unveiled the renovated monument at a ceremony on 22 June 2017, the 76th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Soviet war songs played as a light breeze swayed two flags – Polish and Russian – mounted high. Members of the Russian diplomatic mission watched on. “You know, dear Russian friends, that we will never forget what your people did for our nation,” Tyc said in heavily accented Russian. “That your people, at the cost of their blood, returned our country, Poland, to the map and returned to Polish territory the lands we stand on today.”

But even as he spoke, Tyc knew his work had likely been in vain. Law and Justice had been in power almost two years. Railing against the communist collaborators the party accuses of stalling Poland’s transition from communism, it had announced the abolition of the Third Republic, the independent Polish state inaugurated in 1989. The decommunisation Poland never completed would pave the way for a new Fourth Republic cleansed of all vestiges of Soviet power. This meant all reminders of that hated system had to disappear.

That same morning, as Tyc prepared to address the crowd in his People’s Army uniform, the Polish parliament passed legislation banning “the propagation of communism or any other totalitarian system”. It ordered the removal of all monuments of gratitude to the Soviets, except those on cemetery grounds. The newly restored statue in Mikolin was one of those slated to go.

The monuments of gratitude are the most conspicuous reminders of communism. Over more than four decades, hundreds were erected in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states, part of a campaign to entrench the narrative of friendship with the USSR and popularise the liberation myth. In Poland, the vast majority emerged in the first five years after the war, but their construction continued until the final years of communist rule. Some depict the brotherhood of Polish and Soviet soldiers, shown surging forward to battle side by side. Others feature a lone soldier, sometimes a celebrated Red Army hero, with clenched fists and a steely gaze. The inscription, usually in both Russian and Polish, praises the sacrifice of the Red Army, with no mention of the rape and looting that sometimes accompanied its westward advance or the postwar subjugation of the countries it liberated.

The monuments have served as something on to which Poles could project their thoughts and feelings about the turbulent changes of the past decades. They have provided a backdrop for dates and wedding celebrations, concerts and flashmobs, nationalist demonstrations and anti-Soviet rallies. In 1956, as Red Army troops entered communist Hungary to suppress an anti-Soviet uprising, they became the setting for mass protests against Soviet domination. By the late 1980s, when communist rule began unravelling, details behind some of the 20th century’s darkest episodes were coming to light. For Poles, none was starker than the 1940 massacre of more than 20,000 members of the Polish elite in Katyn and surrounding regions, including almost half the country’s officer corps. In 1990, after decades of denial, Moscow finally admitted responsibility for the atrocity, which befell a Polish state dismembered by a double invasion from two totalitarian powers in accordance with a secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.

At that time, a wave of iconoclasm was sweeping Poland. Streets and squares were renamed and monuments were defaced or toppled. Across the country, empty plinths became metaphors for a vanquished regime. However, that process was stalled by local opposition and reluctance to spark conflict. According to historian Dominika Czarnecka, who has documented Poland’s decommunisation, fewer than a third of the monuments of gratitude had been dismantled by 2012. Many were shorn of their red stars and their hammer and sickle, or moved to cemeteries. Others were repurposed or rededicated to alternative heroes, but most remained intact. In February 1994, Poland and Russia signed an agreement to protect and maintain graves and “places of memory” on each other’s territory. A joint commission drew up a list of objects in Poland dedicated to fallen Soviet soldiers – it included 415 monuments and 77 obelisks, but excluded the hundreds standing on cemetery grounds.

By the late 1990s, public attention had shifted to the political and economic transformation required for membership of the EU, which Poland joined in 2004. Following its narrow victory in the 2005 election, Law and Justice proposed legislation to remove the monuments, but the bill didn’t pass. After the party’s re-election three years ago, a pliant parliament overwhelmingly backed the law. Taken together with other controversial moves – a purge of Poland’s supreme court, a campaign against abortion, rejection of the EU’s migrant quotas and deepening state ties with Poland’s powerful Catholic church – it amounts to what critics decry as a nationalist volte-face in a country long celebrated as a success story of the post-communist transition.

The decommunisation law is being enforced by the Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, a government-run commission launched in 1998 to document crimes committed against Poles during the periods of Nazi occupation and Soviet domination. Since Law and Justice assumed power, IPN’s budget has risen every year, dwarfing that of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From a nondescript business centre in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, it presides over a nationwide network of regional branches that organise conferences, screenings, exhibitions, concerts and social media campaigns, all directed, since 2015, towards the promotion of a positive version of Polish history.

A mural in Dąbrowa Górnicza commemorating one of the ‘cursed soldiers’ who fought against Poland’s post-war communist government. Photograph: Matthew Luxmoore

IPN is the spearhead of Law and Justice’s counter-offensive against perceived historical myths peddled about Poland from abroad, from references to Nazi concentration camps as “Polish death camps” to claims about instances of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, aggressively disputed by the current government. The institute is tasked with injecting into Poles a sense of pride about their history and a willingness to stand up and defend it against any effort to undermine the country’s heroic past. In the Law and Justice lexicon, this is called “historical politics”. IPN’s director, Jarosław Szarek, describes its aim as “showing the historical heritage that our predecessors have created, showing it in a modern form, transmitting it to the young generation, shaping views on history”. Many Poles believes their country would be at the level of the world’s most developed economies if it had escaped Nazi and Soviet subjugation. Critics say highlighting past crimes against Poland helps justify mistakes in the present.

After the fall of communism in eastern Europe, the newly independent states sought legitimacy in a break with the postwar past, turning to the second world war for tales of heroism and defiance that could provide a basis for patriotism. Wartime nationalist movements such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Latvian Legion or the Polish National Armed Forces were revived. In Poland, Law and Justice is championing a set of heroes that were suppressed and silenced under communist rule. In the place of communist monuments, new state-approved murals and memorials are appearing across the country: to those Polish generals who died at the hands of the Nazi and Soviet occupiers, and, increasingly, to the “cursed soldiers”, a motley crew of resistance fighters from the Home Army and other underground movements, who waged a protracted struggle against communist authorities until the early 1960s. A decade ago, these men and women were rarely discussed; today their names form a key part of the foundation myth Law and Justice is forging for Poland.

I arrived in Legnica in late March, three days before the monument of the two soldiers and the little girl was dismantled. The area around it had been fenced off, and workers in fluorescent overalls unloaded equipment from a van. Passersby slowed their step and exchanged comments or took pictures. In the basement office of a small accounting firm – a few steps from the former Soviet Officers’ House, which is now a Catholic seminary – I met Piotr Borodacz, the young nationalist, his 17-year-old sister, Julia, and his father, Artur. In the driveway stood Artur’s gleaming black Chrysler. Embossed on the bumper were the words “we remember” and the logo of the Polish Home Army. On the steering wheel was a white eagle on a red background, the emblem of the far-right National Movement, whose local chapter Artur runs. The political party unites under one umbrella the National Radical Camp, the All-Polish Youth and other far-right movements with roots in prewar Poland.

This family is energised by a sense of vindication. The election of Law and Justice has validated its years-long grassroots campaign to instill Polish pride and nationalism locally. For years, Artur has arranged rallies in Legnica and lectures by historians sympathetic to the nationalist cause. His own family had been exiled to Siberia in cattle trains during the war, along with hundreds of thousands of Poles. Today, they and other heroes Artur and Piotr revere are being revived with new monuments and education campaigns. The past for which they hanker is a past mythologised, a past of Polish traditions, of Polish pride, of Polish heroism. And their desire to defend those myths comes at a time when European unity is strained by an influx of migrants that the Borodacz family considers a threat to Polish identity on a par with collective amnesia about the past.

Piotr Borodacz (left), with his sister, Julia, and father, Artur. Photograph: Matthew Luxmoore

Last November, Borodacz stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Warsaw with 60,000 fellow Poles – from moderate Law and Justice supporters to football hooligans and neo-Nazis – in the largest Independence Day march since its inception in 2010. The march commemorates the day in 1918 when Poland regained statehood after 123 years of partition between the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Polish state media, reorganised under Law and Justice into a platform for official propaganda, has promoted the event as a rally of patriots. It used to be a fringe gathering of Poland’s extreme-right, but this year, on the 100th anniversary of Poland’s independence, the event is expected to go mainstream.

I asked Piotr if he would get arrested today for the kind of vandalism that got him jailed in 2013. In response, he offered an example. On 11 November each year since 2010, he and his father have organised a bus trip for National Movement supporters to the Independence Day march in Warsaw. For the first few years, the bus would be stopped en route and searched by police officers, he said. At the march, masked men would appear seemingly out of nowhere and begin hurling rocks at the police, who would respond with teargas to scatter the marchers. “Then Law and Justice came to power,” he says. “And all of that suddenly stopped.”

In April, I met Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, in an annex of its hulking gothic skyscraper in Moscow. Zakharova has emerged as the most prominent defender of Russia’s second world war legacy. Nearly a month had passed since the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, and she had just delivered a blistering public tirade against Britain’s charges of Russian complicity.

The way she saw it, the Skripal case fitted into the west’s centuries-long campaign to weaken Russia, which includes a drive to undermine its role in the victory over fascism. The Soviet Union lost more than 26 million people in that war; no family was left unaffected. Today, the “Great Patriotic War”, as Russians call it, is the pillar of the national narrative, even as its core premise – Europe’s liberation by the Soviet Union – is being assailed across the former communist bloc. “It’s not for Poland to tell us what damage communism caused. Our people went through civil war, through destitution, through dispossession, through the executions of the 1920s. Our literature describes far better than any Polish propaganda all the fear and horror of that time,” Zakharova told me. “We understand all that. And we have no doubt that there are people who want no further communist experiments till the end of time.”

As a child, Zakharova spent weekends at her grandmother’s dacha outside Moscow. The highway there is flanked by dozens of monuments to those who fell defending the capital in 1941, when Nazi forces came within 18 miles of the Kremlin: stone faces etched into granite blocs, towering limestone obelisks shaped like bayonets, mothers bent over dying sons, and many, many eternal flames.

Zakharova would watch newlyweds lay flowers beneath the monuments and marvel at the bouquets protruding from the westward-facing guns of decorative T-34 tanks sitting high atop plinths, wondering how those bouquets had got there. Decades later, the symbolism still awes her: young people celebrating new beginnings with the memory of those who had made it possible. As she grew older, the highway was widened. New shops, cafes and petrol stations sprouted up. But, as time passed and other things changed, the monuments were left untouched. Zakharova came to see them as a sacred part of the landscape.

Today, she advances this perspective during her weekly press briefings at the ministry. In October 2016, after another monument in Poland was taken down, Zakharova denounced “Warsaw’s complete disdain for norms of behaviour accepted in civilised society”. Then she broke into a smile. Moscow would receive a visit from Tyc, she announced, and Zakharova would personally greet him. That Sunday, she drove Tyc and his Kursk colleagues along that same highway to the family dacha she would frequent as a child. She treated them to homemade apple pie while her uncle laid out the second world war-era helmets, bullets and shrapnel he had unearthed in the crater-strewn garden. Tyc gave Zakharova a star-shaped Russian tricolor sewn by his mother, who, he told her, has been grateful her whole life to the Red Army soldiers who saved her from the Nazis.

There’s little the Russian side can do to thwart’s Poland’s efforts to dismantle the monuments of gratitude, Zakharova says, other than send letters of protest and mount legal campaigns, citing agreements such as the 1994 treaty on graves and places of memory. Russia has accused Poland of repeatedly violating that agreement, most notably last September, when IPN ordered the demolition of a commemorative mausoleum in the town of Trzcianka, where the remains of 56 soldiers had been buried. Poland says the remains were exhumed and interred at a local cemetery decades ago. Moscow contests that claim, and a legal dispute continues.

Russia is also using the full force of its formidable media machine, which broadcasts in several languages across the former socialist bloc. On 17 July 2017, the same day Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, signed the decommunisation project into law, Russia’s defence ministry launched an online project titled The Liberation of Poland: the Price of Victory, which features scans of wartime reports from Soviet officers and Polish communists citing widespread gratitude among Poles towards the Red Army. A preamble introduces the documents as evidence of the Polish nation’s “promises to immortalise the feats of Red Army soldiers with monuments and memorials, and pass on a call to care for them to future generations”.

Zakharova sees decommunisation as betrayal. She acknowledges the crimes of the Soviet regime – the brutal expropriations that followed the 1917 revolution, the Stalinist repressions, the wartime massacre of the Polish elite – but believes eastern Europe’s liberation from fascism stands apart. “Those soldiers did indeed have red stars, they lived in a country that was building communism. But they were fighting fascism. And when I hear from Polish colleagues, ‘your soldiers didn’t bring us freedom’, I say, ‘perhaps’, and I’m even prepared to agree with that. But our soldiers brought them life.”

In April 2007, the former Soviet republic of Estonia decided to relocate a monument of gratitude out of the centre of its capital city, Tallinn. The bronze statue depicts a pensive soldier with his head bowed, one hand holding a helmet and the other curled into a fist. For Estonia’s sizeable Russian minority, it was a symbol of the country’s liberation from fascism by the Red Army. For many Estonians, it was a reminder of the country’s occupation by the Soviet Union. On 26 April, as authorities cordoned off the monument in preparation for its removal, hundreds of ethnic Russians descended on the area. They began charging a line of police officers, who responded with teargas. Over the next three days, riots swept across Estonia in the worst case of unrest the tiny Baltic state had seen since the second world war. Shops were looted, bus stops vandalised and roads dug up. One man died from stab wounds and 100 others were injured. A massive wave of cyber-attacks coincided with the riots, crippling government institutions.

There is unlikely to be a repeat of such violence in Poland. The country’s small Russian community has little influence, and can still pay homage to its own heroes undisturbed. On 9 May, its members gathered at the Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw, where an estimated 22,000 Red Army soldiers lie buried. Holding photos of relatives killed in the war, as millions of their compatriots do on this day, they walked forward to lay flowers at the foot of an obelisk topped with a red star. Sergei Andreev, Russia’s ambassador to Poland, looked on.

A few days later, I sat down with Andreev below the palatial ceilings and crystal chandeliers of the Russian embassy, which commands a four-hectare site close to the city centre. As I ascended the steps to the vast wooden doors of the embassy, the curtains were drawn. Black cars lined the drives. Inside the splendid, cavernous halls, an eerie silence prevailed. Four staff members had recently left, expelled by Poland in solidarity with the UK over the Skripal affair.

Andreev was defiant. “Poland and the Polish nation exist today on this land thanks to the Red Army’s victory in that war, at the cost of the lives of those 600,000 soldiers and officers who died here,” he told me. “Those monuments are to them.” On the wall of his office hung photos of a grandfather who died in the war and two grandparents who survived it. “This is a foreign country, and we cannot lay down the law here. But one thing is clear,” he said. “We will not forget this, and we will not forgive.”

In the meantime, Law and Justice is pressing on with its decommunisation campaign. Almost weekly, crowds gather in Poland’s towns and cities to watch a local communist landmark dismantled. In rare instances, grassroots opposition has forced the authorities to compromise. In Mikolin, the imposing obelisk that Tyc renovated still stands. It may lose its red star and commemorative inscriptions to appease Law and Justice, which would help save it, for now.

In late May, I joined Tyc in Dąbrowa Górnicza, an industrial town of 120,000 and home to Poland’s emasculated communist party. Tyc had rented a crane truck and had come to haul away several of the Red Army monuments erected across this region during the communist era, all of which were slated for removal. Fresh from an appearance as part of a Russian delegation at the UN headquarters in Geneva, he was stepping up his campaign. In Surmówka, his home village, he was realising a long-held ambition: an open-air display of the monuments he had saved from destruction, in the form of an “educational park” for local kids. He has salvaged about a dozen so far, from across Poland – they are now strewn across a small field outside Tyc’s farm, waiting to be raised up again.

When I met him that morning, Tyc was trying to fix on to his nose a pair of spectacles with one arm snapped off. He was unshaven and had barely slept. Two weeks previously, police had interrupted a conference at Szczecin University timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. Officers had been tipped off that the scholarly gathering may be “propagating fascism or another totalitarian system” – a violation of the new law on decommunisation punishable by a maximum two-year jail sentence. Tyc’s main sponsor had subsequently pulled out, citing the hostile climate. Tyc had scraped together enough money to haul away two more monuments, but he could feel the screws tightening.

In this toxic atmosphere, Kursk was being scrutinised and its Russian affiliates targeted. On 17 May, Polish border security officers had detained Tyc’s girlfriend, Zakharian, near the Czech border, where she and Tyc were visiting a mutual friend. After seven days in police custody, she was deported to Russia. In a statement, the spokesman for ABW, Poland’s internal security service, said Zakharian and three other Russians were trying to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in a bid to promote Russia’s version of history and “obstruct the historical politics advanced by the Polish state”. Another Kursk associate and longtime resident of Poland was also deported. “This is a woman I connect my future with,” Tyc told me. He had hoped Zakharian would move to Poland to help him create his “educational park” in Surmówka. Now, she was on a blacklist and banned from returning.

None of this had gone unnoticed in Dąbrowa Górnicza. Photoshopped images of Tyc had surfaced on local forums. One featured his face on a “most wanted” poster from the video game franchise Grand Theft Auto, citing “assault with a deadly weapon”; another showed what looked like a Soviet navy ID carrying his photograph. A widely shared post carried the exact date and time of his visit and the words: “See a Russian spy with your own eyes!”

When we pulled up beside the first monument, a small obelisk beside a residential block, a small crowd was already waiting. Several men with Polish flags on their lapels stood next to another man operating a camera on a tripod. From the balconies above, curious residents looked out. The men began heckling Tyc as soon as he stepped out of his car. “Where do you get your money?!” they shouted. “You’re spitting on your nation!” “Stalin created Hitler!”

Jerzy Tyc in Dąbrowa Górnicza, debating with anti-communist locas. Photograph: Matthew Luxmoore

Tyc paid little attention as he wrapped a rope around the obelisk and attached it to the arm of the crane truck, while a young man with a baseball cap on backwards, who operated the remote control, looked confused by the whole spectacle.

Once the work was done, Tyc turned to face his opponents. One of the men thrust a handheld camera in his face and asked him how he dare honour Poland’s bloody occupiers. “My uncle was a soldier in the Home Army. In 1943, he was imprisoned in Dachau and survived. In 1945, he returned to his family and two sons. In 1946, he was murdered by the communist secret police. So what monuments?” he demanded. Tyc responded calmly: “In 1945, my entire village, including my mother, who was then 13, was rescued from Nazi occupation by Soviet soldiers. She told me: ‘You must respect this army, it saved us.’”

The heated exchange lasted some 20 minutes. Tyc weathered each accusation and insult, patiently defending his stance. As we drove off towards the second monument, he told me of his determination to engage even his most hostile opponents. “We have to talk. If we don’t, we’ll start killing each other.” He hoped the men would visit Surmówka, the site of his monument park, and share their views there. (Instead, the men shared a video of that exchange with Polish state TV, which included it in a 25-minute exposé on “Russian agents of influence” broadcast 10 days later on Channel 1. A large part of the programme was devoted to Tyc’s work in Poland, and Zakharian’s deportation on charges of waging hybrid warfare on Moscow’s behalf.)

It was noon by the time Tyc was done. He had one final errand to run before setting off on the long drive to see Zakharian in Moscow. On the way back to town, we stopped beside a small parish church in the district of Łosień. The grounds were enclosed by a green fence, above which flew the Vatican flag. Just beyond the fence, on the side adjacent to the road, stood a spectacular steel monument. Two gargantuan, cloaked Soviet soldiers stood mid-step, guns slung over their shoulders. Unveiled in 1984, this is one of Poland’s later monuments of gratitude. But, since it stands on parish ground, IPN, the government body that oversees decommunisation, needed the priest’s permission to remove it. Tyc was hoping the priest might instead agree to relinquish the monument to Kursk. When we reached the rectory, the priest was in the middle of his lunch on the veranda. He stepped out in a flannel shirt and shorts. “I’ve handed the monument over to IPN,” he said. Tyc nodded and left without a word.

Very soon, that magnificent steel sculpture will stand alongside other monuments deep in the forests of northern Poland. It is here, outside the village of Podborsko, that a compound codenamed Object 3001 lies. It is one of three nuclear bunkers built in Poland at the end of the 1960s, with the capacity to store 160 atomic warheads. Camouflaged and hidden from prying eyes, it was known to only a dozen officials in communist Poland – the population at large was convinced that the country was free of such weapons. It remained a state secret until the collapse of communism, when it was handed first to the Polish army, then to the prison service and, finally, to local authorities. It is here that IPN is gathering Poland’s monuments of gratitude for a museum aimed at exposing the mendacity of the communist system. Within this maze of yellow corridors and reinforced steel doors, an exhibition on totalitarianism will soon open its doors.

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• This article was amended on 13 July 2018, to correct an editing error which inadvertently removed a reference to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.