The May 9th military highlight of Russia’s official calendar is phony. Not just because the “victory cult” is of quite recent invention (until the 1960s, the celebrations of the 1917 revolution were the highlight of the year). But also because the Soviet version of history is a flimsy propaganda edifice. It asserts that:
n Pre-1941 Soviet-German relations are irrelevant
n The Soviet Union was a blameless victim of Nazi aggression,
n Allied help is not worth mentioning,
n Soviet forces liberated half of Europe,
n Russia and Russians suffered disproportionately during the war,
n Russia has therefore inherited the moral weight of the Soviet victory.
n Therefore anyone who resists Russia now is a Nazi; and
n Anyone who questions any of the above points is a Nazi sympathiser
Among the topics that Vladimir Putin will have to leave out of his speech are the following. The Soviet Union was a co-conspirator with Hitler before the war. Stalin sabotaged his own armed forces with frenzied pre-war purges, hugely compounding the success of the Nazi invasion. Western aid was crucial to Soviet survival. Most of the fighting was outside what is now the territory of Russia. The “liberation” of eastern Europe quickly turned into occupation.
The toxic legacy of World War Two is still stifling and dangerous. History, and particularly the history of the second world war, is at the heart of the argument about security and freedom in modern Europe.
When did it really start, and why? Certainly not with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Or with Pearl Harbour. Or really with the attack on Poland in September 1939. The roots go far further back than that. And it wasn’t just that Germany went mad and put Hitler in charge, and he was mad and started a war. That may be good enough for Hollywood. But not for us. We are still living in the shadow of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and its secret protocols.
Until we understand the origins of the war, we won’t know how to avoid it happening again. How do small states survive when big countries do deals? From Rapallo to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to Barbarossa, Ostpolitik and Nord Stream Schroederisation we witness attraction and repulsion between Germany and Russia, often with catastrophic consequences for the countries in between. We thought we had answered that question with Nato and the European Union. With the splintering of the transatlantic alliance, the departure of the UK with Brexit, the growth of populist parties, the questions of how to run Europe have never been more pressing.
The historical argument continues in relation to what really happened after 1945. For whom, and in what sense, was the Soviet conquest of eastern Europe a liberation, and in what sense an occupation? And what really happened in 1991 and afterwards? Did the West win the Cold War, with Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars and economic superiority? Did the Soviet Union lose it, with gerontocracy and economic collapse? Was it the Russians who overthrew Communism in search of something better? Or was it the captive nations inspired by Pope John Paul II, and the memories of their past sovereignty and freedom, who overthrew the evil empire?
Those answers too have a pressing importance for today. Russians who celebrated their freedom in the 1990s now look back bitterly on that decade as chaotic, humiliating and traumatic years, a Western-imposed punishment, a disappointment and betrayal that must be avenged. One can also argue that 1991 stoked a dangerous Western triumphalism, in which the inherent weaknesses and unfairness of the economic and political model were overlooked. They have come back to bite us now.
When did the Second World War finish in Europe? Not really in May 1945. Armed resistance in Western Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, and – less well remembered, in Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia — continued for years afterwards. The Second World War did not really end in the Baltics until 1994, with the withdrawal of the final occupation forces from Estonia and Latvia. But what did that end mean?
Certainly not a tidy end to the era of great-power conflict in Europe. Was that the end of the Kremlin’s empire, or just the political and economic system that sustained it? What if anything did the West promise to Gorbachev about Nato? Is Nato expansion a response to Russian imperialism, or the irritant that causes it.
These arguments are raging right now. Their outcome determines our safety, our freedom and our prosperity. None of this should be any surprise. History never went away, for those who were paying attention. As early as 1993 the Kremlin adviser Sergei Karaganov proclaimed a new political category of “Russian speakers” deserving of Kremlin protection. This so-called Karaganov doctrine was the basis for Russia’s ethnonationalist interference in neighbouring countries, a direct echo of Hitler’s claim to protect the interests of the Volksdeutsche in Czechoslovakia.
The toxic legacy of World War Two came up again a year later when the then Estonian president Lennart Meri issued a withering condemnation of Russia’s amnesia towards the crimes of the Soviet past, in a speech in Hamburg on February 25th, 1994.
Why does the new, post-communist Russia, which claims to have broken with the evil traditions of the USSR, stubbornly refuse to admit that the Baltic nations - Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians - were occupied and annexed against their will and contrary to international law, in 1940, and once again in 1944, and subsequently brought to the limit of their national existence through five decades of sovietization and russification? [1]
Meri went on to highlight that a deputy foreign minister, Sergei Krylov, had just stated publicly that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had joined the Soviet Union "voluntarily". This, he said, “is little short of the statement that tens of thousands of Estonians, including my family and myself, had “voluntarily” let themselves be deported to Siberia by the Soviets.”
It is worth noting that this mild admonition provoked the head of the Russian delegation to lead his colleagues in a walkout, slamming the door demonstratively behind him, before they had a chance to eat their dinner. That official, at the time the head of the St Petersburg committee for foreign economic relations, was to become better known in later years. His name was Vladimir Putin.
Putin’s approach then was to leave history to the historians, to treat the past as some kind of geological process, with no moral component, and of no relevance to the present day. In 2005, he described thehistory of the Baltic states in the interwar period like this.
“Russia and Germany did a deal under which Russia handed over territories to German control. This marked the beginning of Estonian statehood. In 1939, Russia and Germany did another deal, and Germany handed these territories back to Russia [and] they were absorbed into the Soviet Union. Let us not talk now whether this was good or bad. This is part of history. This was a deal, and small countries were the bargaining chips in this deal. Regrettably this was the reality of those times…[2]
Here he is in 2020, in his 9,000 word article for the National Interest.
In autumn 1939, the Soviet Union, pursuing its strategic military and defensive goals, started the process of the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Their accession to the USSR was implemented on a contractual basis, with the consent of the elected authorities. [3]
By saying that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact are legal, Russia is mounting a profound political attack on the Baltic states.
Their policies on language and citizenship are justified, and justifiable, if you accept that these three countries have historical continuity dating from the interwar era, and were occupied territories during the Soviet era. Settlers who moved there during the Soviet era did so against international law, and it is reasonable for the Baltic states on regaining independence set rules for those wishing to naturalise.
If, by contrast, the Baltic states were legally part of the Soviet Union from 1940, then they were indeed “liberated” and not “occupied” by the advancing Soviet forces in 1944. When they became independent in 1991 it was in the same way as Belarus or Ukraine, as Soviet Socialist Republics. If so, Russia can and does argue, then any attempt to divide the population into Übermenschen and Untermenschen based on ethnicity or language is discriminatory and unfair. It is grounds for political, economic, and military pressure. In short, war.
In short, a politicised interpretation of the past, particularly fetishizing the Soviet victory in 1945, is the battering ram of Putinist ideology. The manifesto for his full-scale invasion of in Ukraine was his bizarre 5,000 word essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Ukraine is depicted not just as an artificial creation, but a place run by neo-Nazis on behalf of their foreign backers.
That at least is contested. The idea that Putin’s ethnonationalist policies echo those of Adolf Hitler towards the Volksdeutsche of the Sudetenland 80 years ago used to be shocking. Now it is commonplace. In 2008, the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism put Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity into the same category of 20th-century disasters that had blighted the European continent, though it also said that each system of terror should be judged separately.
But epistemic privilege remains. We may have got Western countries to rethink the past, but not yet to rethink its relevance to the present. Ignorance, arrogance, naïveté, complacency, stubbornness, cowardice, and greed still serve to distort our understanding of history.
Perhaps the most striking example of this collection of sins is Germany, which has elevated greed, sanctimony, sentimentality, and dithering to an art form. I remember the mystifying infatuation of “Gorbymania” in the late 1980s. What followed was worse. Germany pursued lucrative bilateral deals with Moscow, notably the two Nord Stream natural gas pipelines across the Baltic Sea. German decision-makers repeatedly ignored warnings from me and others about the dangers of Russian hybrid warfare tactics — the cocktail of disinformation, economic coercion, subversion, espionage, and threats of force that Russia uses against its neighbours. The authorities allowed Russian spies, crooks, and thugs to run wild, stealing secrets, assassinating critics, and building bastions of influence in Germany and beyond
The historical, geographical, and geopolitical blind spots overlap. Allergic to nationalism because of its abuse by Hitler’s Nazi regime, Germans flinched at the role that patriotic sentiment played in overthrow of communism. East Europeans were “nationalist,” Germans muttered disapprovingly (though Russian nationalism, a far greater and more toxic force, was conveniently ignored.) Credit for ending the Cold War, Germans told themselves, was really due to their own Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) of the 1970s and 1980s, which focused on rapprochement and confidence-building with the Soviet bloc. Moreover, the Soviet Union had accepted German unification and pulled its military out of the former East Germany: Gratitude, not scepticism, was the appropriate response.
In the modern world, German public figures piously intoned, problems should be solved by dialogue, not arcane confrontation. The way to avoid conflict was to boost trade and investment. Russia would never attack its customers. We see now how that worked out.
Germans wallow in guilt about their country’s Nazi-era crimes, while maintaining a self-satisfied ignorance about how those lessons might apply to other crimes and dangers. Stuck in the uniqueness of their own history, they refuse to apply the lessons they say they have learned, while lecturing everyone else about the need to learn from the past. This is what might be called “Doppelgedächtnis” or double memory. My history is my business, but your history is my political football.
A useful principle is to start from the view that it is unlikely that any country or people are solely victims and never perpetrators. Poles, for example, are Olympic champions in recalling their own suffering, particularly because those recollections had to do constant battle with the communist lie machine. But it can sometimes be difficult for Poles to appreciate that their eastern neighbours, such as Ukrainians and Lithuanians, do not view history in quite the same way.
Estonians and Latvians readily recall their own traumatic suffering under foreign rule but the expropriation of Baltic Germans in the early 1920s attracts rather less attention. Life in interwar central Europe and the Baltic states may have been a paradise compared to what came afterwards, but it was better for some than for others: Jews and Communists may remember that era less fondly than those with roots in other parts of the political or social spectrum.
But playing a game of historical “tit for tat” is pointless. History does not provide convenient starting points, like the start of a football game, where the score is nil-nil and it is possible to see who scored first and who committed the most fouls. It would be equally mistaken to adopt a position of total moral equivalence, where everybody is equally guilty for everything, and all crimes cancel out.
From a western point of view this means taking a bleak view of the sentimental and self-righteous way in which the Second World War is remembered. I am not arguing that we were wholly wrong in the decisions we made, or even that attractive alternatives always existed that were not taken. But without a thorough and knowledgeable exploration of the darker corners of the West’s wartime history, any attempt to challenge the current interpretations of the 20th century in countries such as Russia risks looking hypocritical and one-sided.
Failure to understand the mistakes made before the war also raises the risk that we make them again. Chief among these mistakes is complacency. None of the countries that were to end up fighting for their lives invested in the statecraft that could have avoided war. The big countries imposed pointlessly punitive terms on Germany and Austria-Hungary after 1918, and alienated Japan. All of them failed to deal with the inevitable results. Again and again they showed the regimes in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo that aggression went unpunished. They dithered, procrastinated and—worse—cut their own deals. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was undoubtedly the summit of cynicism, but it was preceded by years in which other countries sought to buy time—and then wasted it. The Anglo-German Naval agreement of 1935, which handed the Baltic Sea region to Hitler and Stalin, deserves mention here.
To the brink of war and beyond, decision-making was shockingly short-sighted. It was not until the spring of 1938 that Poland and Lithuania normalized relations. Neither Poland nor Hungary helped Czechoslovakia resist Nazi aggression; instead, they saw it as a chance to seize territory. Sweden stayed neutral when the Soviet Union attacked Finland. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, nobody saw the bigger picture.
Most importantly, nobody spent enough on defence. The Spanish Civil War had given a foretaste of the new kind of warfare, with German Stukas used to dive-bomb defenceless cities. But Hitler’s “Blitzkrieg” (combined-arms offensive) still caught its victims by surprise. The newly poured concrete on Polish fortifications was still setting when the Germans attacked.
All that looks horribly familiar now. Far from punishing aggression, we have shown Putin that nuclear blackmail works. We have seen a new kind of warfare unfold in Ukraine, but most countries have barely started to devote the time and money needed to get ready to fight the new way. Our decision-making is slow, barnacled with bureaucracy and duplication, and plagued by ancient grievances (can anyone explain why Ireland is not in Nato?). We do what we feel we can, not what we know we must.
As with so many other features of what, back in 2008, I described in my book as the New Cold War, when it comes to dealing with Putin, the biggest and hardest tasks are at home.
[1] https://president.ee/en/official-duties/speeches/51828-address-he-lennart-meri-president-republic-estonia-matthiae-supper-hamburg-february-25-1994
[2] Answering a question from the Estonian journalist Astrid Kannel, about the Molotov Ribbentrop pact
[3] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982