WARSAW, January 28. /TASS/. Russia and Poland should seek common denominators in their past history, Russia Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky told Polish television on Wednesday.

"It’s important for us to use cultural exchanges for studying history, not for searching the motives that divide our people’s so that we could build a common future and understand each other better," he said.

He said he had come to Poland on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day and had laid wreathes at the site of a former Nazi concentration camp in Sobibor "in order to pay respect to our common history."

"I hope relations between our Ministries of Culture will be as good as they are between our moviemakers," Medinsky said.

As he answered a question on the situation in Poland around the monuments of gratitude to the Red Army, which often turned into vandals’ targets, Medinsky said that had the 600,000 soldiers of the Red Army lost their lives on the Polish territory there would have been no Poland or Poles today.

"The German concept didn’t envision existence of either the Polish state or the Polish people in the same way as it didn’t envision existence of the Russian people," he said.

Medinsky turned down the commonplace Polish conviction that Nazi Germany had attacked this country in the wake of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

"That’s untrue," he said adding that a decision on attacking Poland and the date of the attack had been endorsed much, much earlier.