The Guardian tells me that my job here is to "disturb a cosy worldview." But I appreciate the invitation to post here, so maybe instead of disturbing, I'll settle for expanding.
May 9, the launch date of the Huffington Post, is also the day that President Bush joins Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s Red Square to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II on the eastern front.
As anniversaries go, May 9 is a strange one. Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their bunker on April 30. On May 7, the German High Command traveled to Rheims in France to sign an unconditional surrender before representatives of all the allied governments, including the Soviet Union. The surrender went into effect the next day, VE Day, May 8, 1945. That’s the day the war ended.
For political purposes of their own, however, the Soviets refused to accept the validity of the May 7 surrender. They insisted on having their own separate instrument of surrender, which they then celebrated on their own day, May 9.
The Soviets’ refusal to share a day of celebration with the Western allies was another in a gathering series of warnings of their dangerous postwar ambitions for eastern and central Europe. These ambitions would fasten a new totalitarian oppression on half a continent for almost half a century. So it might accurately be said that the historical event commemorated on May 9 is not the end of the last world war; it is rather the beginning of the Cold War.
That’s why the Russian plans for this anniversary event have alarmed so many people: a giant military parade through Red Square – just like the old communist days; special invitations to Belarussian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (Kim declined; Lukashenko accepted); continued kid-gloving of Josef Stalin by senior leaders as lower echelon bosses erect statues to the old killer; an ever more monstrous failure to acknowlege, commemorate, mourn, and punish the crimes of communism.
On this 60th anniversary, the hard fact is that united democratic Germany has completed and more than completed the work of remorse and repentance for the crimes committed decades ago in Germany’s name. Russia, though, is rapidly reverting to the authoritarian and expansionist past.
This very weekend, an article under Vladimir Putin’s name appeared in the French newspaper Le Figaro contemptuously rejecting any apology to the Baltic states for Soviet-era deportations of Baltic populations and attempted extirpation of Baltic language and culture:
"Our Baltic neighbors ... continue to demand some kind of repentance from Russia. … I think they are trying to attract attention to themselves, to justify a discriminatory and reprehensible policy of their governments toward a large Russian-speaking part of their own population, to mask the shame of past collaboration.”
Imagine if a German chancellor were to describe the fall of the Third Reich as a “catastrophe”! Yet that’s just what Putin termed the collapse of the Soviet Union in his address to the Russian nation last week: “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”
The crimes of Nazi Germany are remembered and memorialized. Indeed if anything there is a danger of over-remembrance: as if the Germany that was vanquished six decades ago this week were more alive in our mind than the democratic Germany that exists today. But who is memorializing the crimes that were planned in the building that overlooks that Red Square where today’s ceremonies take place? There are some excellent books on the subject in the languages of the West – Anne Applebaum’s superb Gulag won a much deserved Pulitzer Prize last year – and the independent states of central Europe have their own individual memorials.
But where is the Russian equivalent to the memorial to the murdered Jews built in Berlin? Americans spent hundreds of billions of dollars to contain and defeat Soviet communism - yet where is the American equivalent to the Holocaust museum to recall to mind the Soviet crimes that explained and justified America's sacrifices? And where – a special question to the audience for this blog – are the movies that tell new generations the story that Vladimir Putin wishes to consign to silence and forgetfulness?
Maybe this May 9, 2005, is a time to begin – not just a new blog – but a new work of memory.