Posted on 05/10/2005 1:53:59 PM PDT by neverdem
Moscow
MY parents named me Victor in honor of the Soviet Union's victory over Hitler, and I am proud of my name. I see no reason to cast doubt on the historical significance of that victory; for years the Russian people, who lost millions of soldiers in the war, have united around the celebration of Victory Day. Yet, as we mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, we are seeing not so much a celebration as a major disagreement between millions of people, and even between nations.
This city, having summoned distinguished foreign guests for the occasion, chose to celebrate victory in genuine military-camp style, full of gun-carrying army and police patrols more fearful of terrorist attacks than ever before. And who exactly is to blame for these painful paradoxes? President Vladimir Putin himself effectively answered that question in his recent declaration that the collapse of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."
Today's Kremlin has neatly split the history of the Soviet Union into two, like splitting a block of birch wood with an axe. It has cast aside the country's communist experiment as an unworkable utopia and begun glorifying Soviet Russia's imperial pretensions. In other words, what has happened is pretty much the opposite of what Khruschev did in the 1950's when he sacrificed Stalin's dictatorship in the name of Lenin. Now the Kremlin is sacrificing Lenin in the name of Generalissimus Stalin.
Schism is a terrible word in Russia, where Christians were once divided into the "old believers" and the followers of the reformed Othodox Church. Now a battle over the interpretation of Russian history is provoking a schism throughout society.
Half of the population - elderly people, the poor, those not very well educated and resentful of perestroika - see the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin as a return to true values. They are ready to erect monuments to Stalin the Victor around the country. They are not disconcerted by his political crimes, for which they sometimes produce justifications that are beyond all comprehension. There is no more logic in all this than there would be in Jews suddenly deciding to erect a monument to Hitler.
However, the other half of today's Russia, made richer by the experiment of perestroika, knows more about Stalin's crimes than it did even 15 years ago. Enlightened Russia affirms that we won the victory despite Stalin. It hates him for his terror, his failure to prepare for war, his use of soldiers as cannon fodder, and for much more besides. Enlightened Russia sees Stalinist totalitarianism and Hitler's regime as two sides of the same coin.
But the Kremlin is pandering rashly and none too intelligently to the unenlightened, socially backward half of Russia, refusing to understand that this bloc has no future. In short, the schism has led Russia into an ideological civil war.
By adopting the ideas of the Soviet Union as its heritage, Mr. Putin's Russia is entering into intellectual conflict with her western neighbors. The Kremlin is once again emphasizing its historical justification for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - which gave Germany permission to invade Poland in exchange for Soviet dominion over Finland and much of the Baltics - and denying that Baltic states were occupied; it is also again trying to gloss over the massacre of Polish troops at the Katyn Forest in 1940 (after a period of public confessions from Yeltsin) and the rapes of hundreds of thousands of women by soldiers in the territory liberated by the Red Army.
The Kremlin does not seem to understand that it no longer has any Warsaw Pact satellites that will applaud its every move. Rather, Russia's neighbors now resent the way the Soviet Union treated them, and are new members of NATO who like not feeling afraid of the Kremlin any more. They are justifiably furious at being offered old versions of history in the Kremlin's new packaging.
Political quarrels lead to scandalous rows. I regret that some Polish politicians want to name a square in Warsaw after the slain Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. My position is closer to that of the Poles who believe that while the Soviet Union reduced Poland to subjection, it also saved it from the national extinction that Hitler intended.
But if Russia stubbornly persists in taking everything that was once politically useful to the Stalinist superpower as its own priorities, I am afraid that she will lose the ability to distinguish her victories from her defeats. Russia has never been as ideologically isolated in Europe as she was on this Victory Day.
Victor Erofeyev is the author of "Russian Beauty." This article was translated by Andrew Bromfield from the Russian.
Reads like it was translated by a computer.
I knew an enlightened, anti-communist, Hungarian Jew who survived WWII in a cave in a forest in Hungary who used to say EXACTLY the same thing.
He passed away recently. We were very good friends. I can tell you that he was absolutely delighted that the USSR fell and he was very hopeful that they would again be a good and free country.
He said he just knew that there were many good people in Russia, who were just as much prisoners of the commies, as were those in the Eastern block nations.
He said he hoped that SOMEDAY those good people would finally win out.
Had the USSR not turned against the US immediately after WWII, they might have had some benefit.
By losing WWII Japan and Germany became the 2nd and 3rd largest economies in the world. Thanks in large part to the US.;
USSR could have similarly benefited, quite ossibly, had they followed a smarter path.
my 2c
Russia has never won a war from the time the Mongols swept over Asia and most of Europe until the Afghans kicked them out.
Russia's greatest loss was when it partnered up with Adolph Hitler and invaded Poland in September 1939. Stalin, Hitler's rival in socialism, was happy with his alliance until Hitler turned on him and invaded Russia.
The Nazis would have beaten Russia if it had not been for the U. S. supplying them with the materials of war. Even then it was a close run thing. The Germans lost in Russia mostly because of Hitler's military ignorance.
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