Jonathan Steele: WW II Nostalgia--And Myths

Jonathan Steele, in the Guardian (5-6-05):

Like other recent "60ths" - D-day last June, and the liberation of Auschwitz in January - this year's remembrance in Moscow has the poignancy of being the last in which significant numbers of survivors will be able to join. But will it make the breakthrough in western minds that previous postwar historiography has failed to do? Will the Soviet Union's overwhelming role in defeating Hitler finally be accepted, or is Monday's event just another empty ritual of being polite to the memory of a foreign country's dead soldiers and civilians without understanding how much we owe them?

The "role denial" of what the Soviet Union and the Red Army achieved is not as perverse as "Holocaust denial" but it is considerably more widespread in the western world. During the cold war, western leaders routinely laid wreaths at the tomb of the unknown soldier below the Kremlin walls or visited the immense cemetery for the 1 million civilians who died in the siege of Leningrad. But their gestures often masked an inner view that Nazism and communism were somehow two sides of the same evil coin.

Few paid public tribute to the relief that swept through all of Europe with the victory of Stalingrad in 1943, bringing for the first time a sense that the fascist tide had turned. How many European or American politicians, let alone school textbooks, admit the Red Army inflicted 80% of the Nazi war machine's casualties, or that at the D-day landings the allied troops faced 58 German divisions in the west while Soviet forces had to overcome 228 divisions in their march to Berlin - and did?

With the end of the cold war the equation of Nazism and communism became more prevalent. It was given a superficial new legitimacy by Russians who could not say such things before.

But as Moshe Lewin and Ian Kershaw argued in their book, Stalinism and Nazism, the concept of totalitarianism distorts reality. "Looking for common ground is more fruitful than the search for sameness," they wrote, while also outlining crucial differences. "The Nazi regime, unlike Stalin's, cannot be regarded as a modernising dictatorship. Its concern was with national rebirth and supremacy built on racial purification and regeneration."

Under Stalin there was nothing comparable to the Nazis' compulsory sterilisa tion of the "unfit", euthanasia of people considered to be a burden on society, the concept of certain nations as "subhuman", and the extermination camps for Jews. Mass terror and purges were not intrinsic to Soviet rule, as was clear after Stalin's death. Millions of Russians look back to the long Brezhnev period as a time of personal security and economic stability.

The lifting of censorship in Russia has ended many historical taboos. Stalin's incarceration of returning Soviet PoWs was known to most families, but publicly suppressed for too long. Many Russians acknowledge his wartime blunders and the cruelty of his indiscriminate use of peasants as cannon fodder - not unlike the crassness of British generals in the first world war. As Alexander Yakovlev, the now fierce anti-Marxist and anti-communist who used to be Gorbachev's ideology chief, argues, "victory was achieved despite Stalin's leadership, not because of it".

But there are other black holes that ought to be explored in Russia. Around 1 million Soviet PoWs, or almost 30% of those in German hands, did fight for the Nazis, albeit usually under duress or to avoid starvation. The Nazi-Soviet non-aggres sion pact which gave Stalin the chance to build better defences is well-known, but Russians still underplay the secret annexes that allowed him to send troops into eastern Poland, adding its lands to Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, and to occupy the Baltic states a year later. Or it is spuriously stated that the people in these places voted freely to join the Soviet Union.

To claim, as Vladimir Putin did recently, that the Nazi-Soviet pact was no worse than Britain's and France's earlier agreement with Hitler at Munich is misleading. By appeasing Hitler, London and Paris were certainly hoping he would move against the Soviet Union, but their immediate goal, however foolish, was to buy peace in the west rather than territory. But it is equally wrong of today's Baltic leaders to pretend the prewar Baltic regimes of the 1930s were not authoritarian and chauvinist, or to claim Soviet occupation was as bad as that of the Nazis or worse.

You only have to read the memoirs of the few Lithuanian Jewish survivors or the reports of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen when they invaded the Baltics to get a more accurate version. In his book, Messages of Murder, the historian Ronald Headland says of the anti-semitic massacres: "In the Baltic countries the collaboration in the killing operations was immediate and extensive."...