The first annual European-wide commemoration of the "the victims of
Stalinism and Nazism" took place on August 23. The resolution to
hold this event was passed recently by the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a
fifty-six-nation body, which includes the United States and describes
itself as the world's largest regional security organization. The
date, August 23, 2009, was chosen not by chance: it happens to be the
seventieth anniversary of the Non-Aggression Treaty signed between the
Soviet Union and the Third Reich. Stalin and Hitler agreed to divide
Poland and to carve Europe into spheres of influence. The Second World War
began only days later.
The Assembly's resolution, which celebrates the "reunification" of
Europe encourages members to promote human rights and civil liberties
and to fight all forms of extremism. Special mention is made of the
uniqueness of the Holocaust and the need to combat anti-Semitism. The
320 lawmakers in the Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor with only
eight opposed and four abstentions.
The Russian representatives, however, were incensed. Alexander
Kozlovsky, head of their delegation called the resolution "a public
insult against all Russians." His ire was raised by what he regarded
as the insensitivity of "those who place Nazism and Stalinism on the
same level" and forget "that it is the Stalin-era Soviet Union that
made the biggest sacrifices and the biggest contribution to liberating
Europe from fascism." Konstantin Kosachyov, who leads the Russian
Duma's international affairs committee in Moscow, said the motion was
"nothing but an attempt to rewrite the history of World War II by
placing responsibility for its causes, course and results equally on
Hitler's Germany and the former Soviet Union." Many ordinary Russians
were also upset. A national poll on July 25-26 by the All-Russian
Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM), found that most
respondents (59 percent) generally agree with Kozlovsky and Kosachyov, while a
minority (21 percent) think the aim is to pay tribute to the victims of all
totalitarian regimes.
What we have here is a battle over memory, complicated by politics and
imprecise language. It is misleading for the Assembly to use the term
Stalinism, which is a personalization of the Soviet regime during one
era, and then to compare it with Nazism, which was the ideology of
Hitler and the Third Reich. It would have been more accurate to
compare Nazism and Communism, as those terms signify the two ideologies and
systems of rule.
One Moscow newspaper maintains that the OSCE dared not mention
Communists and Nazis in the same sentence, much less equate them, for
fear of upsetting socialists across Europe. So there is not a whisper
about Communism, and nothing said of its many victims inside the
Soviet Union. Instead all sins are attributed to Stalin. Is there not
a need to face up to the cruel truth about Communist rule in Russia?
Nor should we forget that after 1945 Communist satellite regimes in
Eastern Europe routinely trampled civil and human rights under foot.
The Russians were quick to object to the Parliamentary Assembly's
resolution. Alas they are not yet ready to mention the Kremlin's
crimes committed over generations against their own people.
How many Soviet victims were there of the "Stalinist terror"? Between
1930 and 1941 around 20 million Soviets were "convicted," that is,
they suffered arrest, execution, or detention. The USSR census for
1939 counted 37,500,000 families, and four million single adults. Thus
in the 1930s alone the terror affected one or more members of every
second family. It killed more than two million in that decade, above
and beyond the millions who died in the man-made famine in Ukraine. I
would tentatively suggest that somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of
all Stalin's victims lived in the former Soviet Union.
There is no official Russian commemoration of these people, and not a
single trial of any of the perpetrators has been held. Perm-31 is the
only significant museum of the vast Gulag concentration camp system,
and it's located in the distant Urals. The Russian government still
looks intent on playing down Stalin's crimes and accentuating his
"positive accomplishments." However, while Russia is far from
recognizing the victims of official state policy between 1917 and
1991, it will not be so easy to bury the past.
The stark inward-looking quality of Stalin's terror comes across if we
compare it to Hitler's. Germans, including German Jews, murdered
through Hitler's terror represented less than 10 percent of all the
victims of Nazism. Approximately 150,000 of the six million murdered
Jews had been Germans. Their deaths took place in the East. At war's
end, an estimated 5 percent of all prisoners in the concentration
camps were German. Hitler focused largely on non-citizens, while the
Soviet Communists terrorized mainly (but not exclusively) their own
people. These horrendous statistics do not minimize Nazi terror or the
Holocaust one iota. Instead they suggest that Soviet and Nazi terror
had different goals and modus operandi. As cruel and evil as Stalin
was, he never created anything like Auschwitz or Treblinka.
Today the Russians are right to object that the OSCE's resolution
makes no mention of the crucial role the Soviet Union played in
stopping Hitler. We need to recall that 25.5 million Soviet citizens,
well over ten percent of the population in 1939, died in the Second
World War. More than half of these were civilians. It is true that
Stalin conspired to start the conflict with the Pact signed on August
23, 1939. His people had no part in that, but were informed through
filtered reports and propaganda. What they discovered to their dismay
in June 1941 was that Hitler's forces had launched a murderous
crusade. The Soviet peoples in all their diversity and multiplicity
rallied to the colors, often in spite of, not because of Communism and
Stalin. As President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were the
first to admit, without the Soviet peoples' will to carry on, Hitler would
have won.
We can well imagine what it would have meant if Hitler had emerged as
the conqueror of everything between the Urals and the English Channel.
He was preparing the next stage and in his mind already heading for
the United States. It is startling to recall that he counted in his
ranks some of the world's best rocket and atomic scientists.
Suffice it to say that it behooves us and all of Europe to remember
that the Red Army and the Soviet peoples saved us from such a fate.
The Russians today should be proud of what they did in the Second
World War and we should praise them to the heavens for it. But they
are wrong to think they have to defend Stalin and gloss over his
crimes inside the Soviet Union in order to construct a usable history.
They need to face up to the past and not wish it away.
On August 23, 1939 Stalin's agreement with Nazi Germany gave Hitler
the green light. That signal was important at the time and seventy
years later there is no reason for Russians to deny it. After all,
Stalin persecuted them relentlessly, making them pay in torrents of
blood as he pursued his dreams and delusions at home and abroad.
Robert Gellately's latest book is Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of
Social Catastrophe (Knopf and Vintage). He teaches history at Florida
State University.
Nazism and Soviet communism were each horrific and criminal in their own way. The difference amounts to would you rather kill millions of people for racial reasons or class reasons?
Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler are on the same level of philosophical incoherence and anti-humanism.
Their mutual legacy is an Everest of human corpses and mangled societies.
I get it, you don't like communism. But you can't really compare a theorist (who wasn't theorizing about killing millions) to a murderous dictator.
And he wasn't just an 'economic theorist" he was a revolutionary who advocated specific actions. If you read Marx, you'll see that he reveled in the ruthlessness and slaughter of the "bourgeois" revolutions and anticipated similar steps by the working class.
I solute the brave people of what was then Russia. I have the utmost repect for their strength and perserverence. Having said that, I feel Stalin was a monster. He was a paranoid, uneducated thug who terrorized his own people. The collectivization of the Ukraine nearly starved the country.
One further point: "Spheres of Influence" as a term didn't appear until the Pottsdam Conference of 1945.
Article I. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.
Article II. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.
It is not appropriate for peoples whose sole existence is owed to Soviet citizen's heroism to talk about it.
Equating Nazism and Soviet government is a scandal of global proportions.
Many human right and social and economic advances the disadvantaged achieved in the West can be DIRECTLY attributed to the influence of Marx' ideas on economy (surplus value, commodities, theory of labor) and society (class structure, feminism. historical materialism, alienation) and many others ideas, of course
.
The real tragedy was that, rather than try and work together to establish democracy in Europe, the US and USSR instead divided up the continent and used the status quo turn make each other the "enemy".
While it is true to say that the Russians won the war against Germany, it is not quite accurate to say that they won World War 2. There was another side-war going on in the Pacific against Japan, and it was the U.S. that clearly won that war.
Germany could not just fight Russia. It is overly simplistic to say Russia won WWII.
It took two great nations with the help of England and a few more to beat Axis of evil in WWII.
As for what Stalin got, he simply restored the boundaries which had been granted at Versailles. That meant the Curzon line was restored and the ethnic groups who HATED Poles got out from under them. As for the Baltic States, I have NO sympathy for them at all. They were some of the biggest supporters of Hitlers FInal Solution and were fascist to the core. Too bad more of them didn't die. Those regimes themselves had a bloody history that would rival Stalin's in killing off their opponents within their borders. Those Baltic pre-war government should ALSO have been condemned in the resolution.
Now, what would you say if there was a huge statue of Adolf Hitler in Braunau am Inn, his Austrian birthplace?
In 1933, Hitler used his new position as Chancellor to subvert the democratic process. Nazi leaders Goering and Goebbels hatched a plan to burn the Reichstag building. When fire engulfed the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, Hitler blamed the Communists and used the incident as an excuse to begin a brutal crackdown.
Hitler persuaded a befuddled Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree "for the Protection of the People and the State."
Truckloads of Nazi storm troopers rounded up Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, and other political rivals. These "enemies of the state" were put in hastily constructed holding pens, which became the first concentration camps.
In March 1933, Hitler presented a defining piece of legislation to the Reichstag called the Enabling Act. The purpose of the act was to get the Reichstag to dissolve itself and hand over its constitutional powers to Hitler. The act required a two-thirds majority vote to become law. It passed easily with the support of Germany's right-wing and center parties; the only party to vote against was the Social Democrats. Deputies of the Communist Party were unable to vote, having already been arrested by the Nazis.
Stalin was scared $hitless of Hitler, and had essentially NO Army to fight him with.
He signed the pact in 1939 to try to buy some time and to get some buffer area between himself and Nazi Germany, and it didn't work. The bungled invasion of Finland showed how pathetic the Red Army was in 1939 and did more to encourage Hitler than anything else (and the Soviet people paid for it with 20+ million lives in WW2.)
Remember also, Poland had not been an independent country since the late 1500's and when at the end of WW1 it "declared" itself an independent country, the West, caught by surprise, rushed to recognize it as a buffer between the Communist Soviet Union and the West. England entered into a foolish and unenforceable defense pact with Poland that guaranteed WW2 would happen when Germany decided to take back what had been part of "Greater Germany" for 400 years.
Same thing with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc.
"Is there not a need to face up to the cruel truth about Communist rule in Russia? Nor should we forget that after 1945 Communist satellite regimes in Eastern Europe routinely trampled civil and human rights under foot. "
There was no "Communist Rule" nor were there any "Communist Satellite regimes". They were dictatorships and not the dictatorship of the proletariat.