Tuesday, September 29, 2009

THIS REWRITING OF HISTORY IS SPREADING EUROPE'S POISON by Seamus Milne


Blaming the USSR for the second world war is not only absurd – it boosts the heirs of the Nazis' wartime collaborators

Through decades of British commemorations and coverage of the second world war – from Dunkirk to D-day – there has never been any doubt about who started it. However dishonestly the story of 1939 has been abused to justify new wars against quite different kinds of enemies, the responsibility for the greatest conflagration in human history has always been laid at the door of Hitler and his genocidal Nazi regime.

That is until now. Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was "Hitler's accomplice", the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s.

In his introduction to this week's Guardian history of the war, the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson declared that Stalin was "as much an aggressor as Hitler". Last month, the ostensibly more liberal Orlando Figes went further, insisting the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was "the licence for the Holocaust".

Given that the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat at the cost of 25 million dead, it's scarcely surprising that Russians are outraged by such accusations. When the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week denounced attempts to draw parallels between the role of the Nazis and the Soviet Union as a "cynical lie", he wasn't just speaking for his government, but the whole country – and a good deal of the rest of the world besides.

There's no doubt that the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war. You can argue about how Stalin used it to buy time, his delusions about delaying the Nazi onslaught, or whether the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland was, as Churchill maintained at the time, "necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace".

But to claim that without the pact there would have been no war is simply absurd – and, in the words of the historian Mark Mazower, "too tainted by present day political concerns to be taken seriously". Hitler had given the order to attack and occupy Poland much earlier. As fellow historian Geoff Roberts puts it, the pact was an "instrument of defence, not aggression".

That was a good deal less true of the previous year's Munich agreement, in which British and French politicians dismembered Czechoslovakia at the Nazi dictator's pleasure. The one pact that could conceivably have prevented war, a collective security alliance with the Soviet Union, was in effect blocked by the appeaser Chamberlain and an authoritarian Polish government that refused to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil.

Poland had signed its own non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and seized Czech territory, which puts last week's description by the Polish president Lech Kaczynski of a Soviet "stab in the back" in perspective. The case against the Anglo-French appeasers and the Polish colonels' regime over the failure to prevent war is a good deal stronger than against the Soviet Union, which perhaps helps to explain the enthusiasm for the new revisionism in both parts of the continent.

But across eastern Europe, the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, the drive to rewrite history is being used to relativise Nazi crimes and rehabilitate collaborators. At the official level, it has focused on a campaign to turn August 23 – the anniversary of the non-aggression pact – into a day of commemoration for the victims of communism and nazism.

In July that was backed by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, following a similar vote in the European parliament and a declaration signed by Vaclav Havel and others branding "communism and nazism as a common legacy" of Europe that should be jointly commemorated because of "substantial similarities".

That east Europeans should want to remember the deportations and killings of "class enemies" by the Soviet Union during and after the war is entirely understandable. So is their pressure on Russia to account, say, for the killing of Polish officers at Katyn – even if Soviet and Russian acknowledgment of Stalin's crimes already goes far beyond, for example, any such apologies by Britain or France for the crimes of colonialism.

But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius's Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as "fighters for independence".

Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania – a member of the EU and Nato – last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: "People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries' participation in mass murder."

As the political heirs of the Nazis' collaborators in eastern Europe gain strength on the back of growing unemployment and poverty, and antisemitism and racist violence against Roma grow across the region, the current indulgence of historical falsehoods about the second world war can only spread this poison.

13 comments:

Simon said...

Good post. I knew Troubling things are happening in the east but SS-veteran parades in Riga. . . wow. What ever happened to Israel kidnapping those bastards and putting them on trial?

Anonymous said...

What the foot soldiers how can you put them on trial, the officers class was placed on trial not the foot soldiers although many spent the longest in POW camps to have de Nazi training, like watching the films of the Jews people in camps, many left still having strong allegiance to Hitler. The only soldiers placed on trial were those who could be directly placed at crimes and even then it was the officer who was sought.

Anonymous said...

what about Jersey

The only place in Europe

where

They had the same Government before, during and after the War

The only place where the resistance movement (Norman Le Brocq and co) were attacked for daring to question the sending of Jews to the concentration camps when Jersey was under Nazi occupation

Long Live the memory of Le Brouq and the Jersey Resistance Movement

Anonymous said...

le brocq
correct spelling

Johnny said...

Don't forget the demonisation of the Serbian people in the 1990s was another piece in the jigsaw of saying the Nazis were right and the Soviets / Partizans were wrong.

Unknown said...

A very good article, if I may say.

The continuous propaganda against the Soviet Union and Stalin was also carried out by the BBC, with their infamous documentaries "Behind Closed Doors" and "War in the East".

In the beginning, I was very much disappointed by this movement from the very old and rusty capitalist machine. Then, I understood how valuable certain written documents are, like "The Underground Committee Carries On" by A. Fyodorov or "Another View of Stalin" by Ludo Martens.

Many other documents can be consulted in the internet. It seems that the anti-communist propaganda started before the war, with the help of William Randolph Hearst who, as it seems, helped Hitler and Goebbels creating the myth of millions being killed by hunger in Ukrain.

Robert Conquest, who received some help from a Ucranian National Organization helped even more to create this myth. He also spread other false information about the Soviet Union. So did Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was very committed to fraud.

All the other historians who compare Hitler to Stalin are repeating what Hearst, Conquest and Solzhenitsyn said. In fact, without knowing some of their information was also declared by the nazi propaganda machine.

While they write nonsense and create more infamous frauds, the best choice we have, I suppose, is to read more and defend the truth with honour and dignity.

GeniusJunky said...

Well-written article; on the other hand, if you're suggesting that Stalin was somehow a magnanimous ruler-- with a death toll rumored in the tens of millions, with known orders to kill other founders so that he could solidify power, etc.-- then you're really going to have to refer me to some solid evidence of it. We are all of us sometimes prey to propaganda.

Unknown said...

I don't want to sound like the robot machine in Stanley Kubrick's "2001 Odissey" but I am affraid, David, that the reference of a "death toll rumored in the tens of millions" was also defended by Robert Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

dave said...

Bravo - a fine piece. Far from being "a shocking act of realpolitik", though, I consider the agreement a masterstroke of Soviet diplomacy and a gain to Europe's peoples. War was coming, the USSR had exhausted efforts to conclude a coalition with Britain and France, and the Polish government was ready to see its whole country overrun by Germany rather than accept Soviet support with the likelihood of a rectification of its own 1920 land grab from a war-torn Soviet state. Pushing that Soviet border westward saved unknown millions of lives after June 1941, crucially postponing the Nazi-Soviet conflict that western reactionary circles would have been happy to see in 1939. Any blame for Poland's fate rests not with Moscow but with those in London and Paris who wrecked efforts to forge a strong anti-Nazi alliance.

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