FINROSFORUM // The Finnish-Russian Civic Forum strives to promote cooperation between the peoples of Finland and Russia by supporting civic initiatives for democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech.
I want to thank the organisers of this event for inviting me to take part. I am delighted to be here in Finland and to speak about a subject, which is important to the Baltic people, which is known in Finland also, but which is less known in the rest of Western Europe. That subject is Soviet Communism and its legacy today.
"Russians should not bury Lenin until they uncover his lies," writes Walter Rodgers, former senior international correspondent for CNN, in Christian Science Monitor. Russians must face up to Lenin’s brutal legacy – as Germans did Hitler’s, he says. "Burying Lenin would be terribly dishonest. It would risk erasing the brutally violent communist legacy he spawned. His strain of socialism bankrupted Russia morally and economically, leaving it in many respects a third-world country – even today," Rodgers opines. "When new nationalist saviors like current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin appear on stage, flaunting the same arrogance Lenin practiced with his messianic vision, Russians ought to be able to look at Lenin’s tomb for a chilling reminder that rigid, intolerant ideologies are usually flawed and destructive beyond imagining," Rodgers writes.
[Today] many countries mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the UN in 2005. Yet at the same time, there is a movement afoot to proclaim another day to commemorate the victims of the Nazis, but in this new movement to commemorate them along with the victims of Stalinism.
There is ground for deep concern about repeated attempts to equate the Nazi regime's genocidal policies [...] with other murderous or oppressive actions, an equation that not only trivializes and relativizes the genocide of the Jews perpetrated by the Nazi regime, but is also a mendacious revision of recent world history.
[There] was brutal and murderous oppression [in the Soviet Union], but not genocide either toward [the Jews] or toward the other ethnic groups. [...] A certain proportion of the persecuted [...] had in fact been Nazi collaborators. However, to compare this with the murder of many millions of Europeans by the Nazi regime is a distortion of history.
The greater threat to humanity was Nazi Germany; [...] the Soviet army liberated [...] and saved Europe from the Nazi nightmare. [...] World War II was started by Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, and the responsibility for the 35 million dead in Europe [...] is that of Nazi Germany, not Stalin. To commemorate their victims equally is a distortion.
If today East Europeans can enjoy membership in the EU, it is due to the fact that they were oppressed and ruled for 45 years by a basically inefficient, corrupt and barbarous dictatorship, but not by the Nazis. They were liberated by the Soviets. The West recognizes that, and so do many East Europeans.
One certainly should remember the victims of the Soviet regime, and there is every justification for designating special memorials and events to do so. But to put the two regimes on the same level and commemorating the different crimes on the same occasion is totally unacceptable. Not only to Jews.
http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=166904
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is enjoying a resurgent popularity in Russia. The Russian government has been sending clear signals in recent years that Stalin's achievements must be revered. What is behind the government's move to rehabilitate his image? Some opposition politicians believe it is tied to the efforts of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party to solidify its power. "The state is hinting that Stalin's tactics are also part of its arsenal for controlling the country," says Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the opposition Yabloko party. The widespread sympathy toward Stalin, he adds, is also a result of the lingering impact of Soviet propaganda, which the Russian government never tried to erase from the public consciousness after communism fell. "All countries emerging from totalitarianism and evolving into a normal form of government carried out a long and difficult program of reforms and re-education, of coming to grips with the past," Mr Mitrokhin says. "Germany is still carrying out de-Nazification, while we never even began this process." The government is succeeding in dispelling the outrage toward Stalin's terror-filled reign.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949500,00.html
1 July 1988: Gorbachev is killed when his plane is attacked by a Stinger surface-to-air missile in East Germany; military heads take control in Moscow, accuse the CIA of responsibility for the assassination, impose a news blackout in the USSR, and send troops to East Germany and Poland to impose martial law. 15 July 1988: West Germans propose intervention in East Germany following reports of violence there; clashes occur along the border between the two Germanys; NATO puts its forces in West Germany on alert.19 July 1988: A massive Soviet invasion of West Germany begins: NATO airfields are attacked by missiles with chemical warheads as tanks pour across the border. US nuclear forces are put on alert: Bergstrom Air Force Base (AFB) near Austin receives 4 B-52 bombers dispersed from their home base.
