Jun 05 2009
Lavelle’s Defense of Medvedev’s Commission
Peter Lavelle, who works for the English-language Russian television network Russia Today, has weighed in on Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s efforts to defend the honor of the Soviet Union against historical falsification.
Lavelle is generally supportive of Medvedev’s effort. He suggests that this initiative is an understandable reaction
to the way history, particularly events before, during, and after World War II, is being reinterpreted and even rewritten in a number of post-Soviet and Eastern European states. This approach often undermines, or even denies, the role the Soviet Union played in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This claim is puzzling–after all, it’s hard to make the case that German troops triumphantly raised the swastika over the Kremlin, instead of Soviet troops triumphantly raising their flag over the Reichstag. Lavelle later clarifies his meaning. The histories he wants to criticize in the Baltics and Eastern Europe:
claim that not only did the Soviet Union not liberate them from fascism, but that it replaced Nazi Germany as the occupying power.
This, he suggests, is political and pathological, for
Instead of facing up to the sins of the past, it is all too easy to blame contemporary Russia for the real or imagined sins of the Soviet Union.
Lavelle concludes,
Denying the Holocaust is a legal offense in Germany. This is the case in many countries in the world, and is morally right. Consigning to oblivion the murder of millions of people is simply wrong. Russia wants the same to hold true for the 27 million Soviet citizens (at the very least) who gave their lives to defeat Hitler’s murderous regime.
The problems here are quite similar to the ones I identified yesterday in Colonel Kovalyov’s claims about the origins of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and even Medvedev’s original complaints about falsifiers. First, there’s a reluctance common to most of these complaints to name names or quote quotations to identify the historians who have made egregiously false claims. Does anyone actually deny Soviet victory? If so, who is it?
And the reason that people link contemporary Russia to the sins of the Soviet Union is that contemporary Russia is claiming the legacy of the Soviet Union. It’s not clear to me how Medvedev can bask in the glory of Soviet victory in World War II without taking some of the responsibility for the darker side. Certainly I’d love to have American history that was all Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, no slavery or internment camps, but things don’t work that way.
More substantively, no serious Western historian denies the enormous contribution of the Soviet Union to victory. Sure–the American public doesn’t know much about the German-Soviet war, but the American public doesn’t know much about the German-AMERICAN war. Where there’s a debate, and it’s a legitimate one, is the extent of the various allied contributions that qualify and provide nuance to the Soviet Union’s clear predominance in terms of where German soldiers were actually fighting. They relate to things like the importance of Lend-Lease, strategic bombing, diversion of German aircraft and AA, and so on. I don’t question the Soviet Union’s predominance in the victory over Nazi Germany, but the question is certainly worth discussing.
Along the same lines, I understand why some in the Baltics and Eastern Europe would not view 1944 and 1945 as liberation but as new occupation, and why they might have decidedly mixed feelings about monuments to Soviet soldiers. It’s certainly worthy of discussion, but not worthy of state authorities ruling the question settled in advance.
I happen to think, actually, that opening up the sources would not actually hurt the Russian / Soviet case. I’ve recently been reading a fair amount of the literature on the struggle for the borderlands by scholars like Jeff Burds and Alex Statiev. What they show is how complicated the politics were, and how no one had clean hands. Statiev is pretty convincing that German occupation policies were themselves quite draconian in the Baltics, that Soviet policies were harsh but not nearly as harsh as local nationalists have claimed, that resistance movements (particularly in Ukraine) killed far more locals than they killed Soviet officials, and that the Soviets relied heavily on local collaborators to reexert control and pacify their newly-acquired territories. The real story is incompatible with a neat, politically-correct narrative from any side.
By the standard Lavelle ends with–denying Soviet sacrifices for victory– the first and most egregious falsifier of Soviet victory was the victor, Stalin himself, who systematically downplayed the Soviet Union’s loss of life in the Second World War in order to avoid any appearance of weakness.