OREANDA-NEWS. September 2, 2009. September 1 marks 70 years since the outbreak of World War II – one in a series of twentieth-century tragedies that almost turned into a disaster for Europe and the entire human civilization. As with any tragedy, it gave examples of how low man can sink, but also unsurpassed instances of the greatness of the human spirit, the capacity for self-sacrifice in the name of saving “his friends.”

The outbreak of World War II became a prologue to the Great Patriotic War, the 65th anniversary of the Victory in which we will celebrate next year. The Great Victory was the highest spiritual achievement of all peoples of the former Soviet Union. Not only did our fathers and grandfathers uphold our freedom, but they also contributed decisively to the liberation of Europe from fascist enslavement.

But of course this is not only about a duty of memory. Unfortunately, although the new conditions would seem to give us good reason to forget about the very possibility of another war in Europe, events indicate there is a systemic problem with European security. The chief defect is the absence of an open system of collective security that would extend across the Euro-Atlantic region. Even now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, bloc-based, essentially confrontational approaches to security have not been overcome.

The August 2008 crisis in the Caucasus has shown that the situation leaves no room for complacency. It has become clear that irresponsible regimes are prone to gamble on war, making all of Europe a hostage of their selfish calculations and ambitions. In so doing they exploit objective opportunities associated with the fragmentedness of the European security architecture. To reduce it to a common denominator, which could not be done either before or after World War I, and to close loopholes being used to destabilize the situation in our continent, is the exact aim of the European Security Treaty initiative President Medvedev put forward in June 2008 at Berlin.

Another evidence of the continuing relevance of that war and its lessons is a revitalization in recent years of diverse political forces that engage in falsifying history to suit the political conjuncture and revising the outcome of World War II, enshrined in the UN Charter and other international legal documents, by using a selective or even dishonest approach to the events of that period. Attempts to politicize history after the fall of the Berlin Wall that ended the ideological schism in Europe and the world can only be regarded as a desire to draw new dividing lines on our continent. The spearhead of these attempts is pointed at Russia, whose very existence seems to be a source of “nervousness” for those leaders who have been sidelined from mainstream European politics.

The talk about the war’s origins exhibits too much of outright falsehood, political opportunism and selfish interests, an eagerness to absolve oneself of one’s share of responsibility for one’s own past and to tackle one’s current problems at others’ expense, through exhorting – as was the case during the Cold War – for “civilizational solidarity” and by invoking the imperatives of “ideological struggle.” The history of World War II was being repeatedly rewritten. Elements of this approach, dictated by considerations of ideology and political expediency, were present in the Soviet Union too. Yet even during the Cold War no one ever tried to equate the Nazi regime with Stalin’s dictatorship. It never occurred to anyone to compare the Nazi threat, which implied enslaving and destroying whole peoples, and the policy of the Soviet Union, which proved to be the only force able first to resist the war machine of Hitler Germany and in the final phase to ensure its defeat, speeded by the (albeit belated) opening of a second front in 1944. This difference was well understood by those who had been waiting for liberation from the Nazis, those for whom the pace of the Red Army’s advance was a matter of life and death. Freedom came from the East. Its price was the feat of arms and the willingness to die of those very same “unpretentious lads – Vanki, Vaski, Alyoshki, Grishki” – whom Anna Akhmatova wrote about (‘To the Victors’).

The height of historical revisionism was epitomized by an attempt to put an equal sign between August 23 and September 1, 1939: the conclusion of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact and Germany’s attack on Poland. These two events are completely torn out of the general historical context, leaving outside the brackets the 1938 Munich Agreement that led to the dismemberment and occupation of Czechoslovakia, the concurrently signed Anglo-German declaration, which basically stood for a non-aggression agreement between Britain and Hitler Germany (the so-called “peace for our time”), and the whole sequence of other events that consistently prepared and directed German aggression towards the East.

The war revealed the invalidity of the European politics, regardless of the nature of governance in specific countries, most of which were authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes. That this was not an accidental phenomenon in the then “deglobalization” is demonstrated by right-wing radical tendencies in the modern political life of those countries and by attempts to rehabilitate the fascist regimes and make heroes of the Nazis and SS men.

Fascism – in varying degrees – was the most common response to the contradictions of European society, which World War I failed to resolve, when, in the figurative expression of Anna Akhmatova, "only shreds of old Europe still remain” (from the poem Way of All the Earth). They were only aggravated by interwar deglobalization. The way out of the crisis was found through militarizing the economy and international relations, which constituted a key factor in unleashing World War II. The fallacious Versailles system, to which Soviet Russia bore no relation, by the universal acknowledgement of historians made the next war inevitable.

I could not like to think that, by rewriting history, someone is trying to make up for the assumed loss of ideological ground by the West. How else is one to interpret the recent celebration of the anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, when practically none of the western leaders, except for Barack Obama, mentioned the Soviet contribution to the victory over fascism? It is difficult to see how acknowledging the obvious – the role of the Soviet Union in ensuring the common victory, which served as a powerful rallying point for all nations of the anti-Hitler coalition – can weaken America or “disarm it morally.” But that’s exactly how Liz Cheney tries to present the case in her article in The Wall Street Journal.

All the tragedies of the 19th-20th centuries, including colonialism, the extremist products of European political thought, World Wars 1 and 2, Nazism and Fascism, as well as the Cold War, occurred at a time when the West dominated world politics, economics and finance. At issue more broadly was a crisis of European society, whose traditional foundations had been destroyed by the many revolutions in Europe. Creating a sustainable economic and social development model, socially oriented, with universal suffrage and reliance upon a significant middle class, only became possible in the conditions of the Cold War and on a new technological basis.

History falsifiers tend to forget what they acquired as a result of the liberation campaign of the Red Army, including in territorial terms. The victory over fascism and the events preceding the war, like them or not, gave all the countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe as well as the former Soviet space their contemporary borders, which the vast majority of the Euro-Atlantic family does not object to. If they do not suit somebody, one should say so, rather than appeal to history. Do we want to go back into the past – to Europe burdened by territorial issues?

I do not think everybody will like to publicly rake up the past, where there are quite a few pages which many would rather forget. What about the Phony War, which points to the very unseemly designs of the Western allies against the Soviet Union in connection with Hitler Germany’s attack on Poland? What is to be done with ubiquitous collaborationism? In a number of countries, a roughly equal number of citizens participated in the Resistance and served with the Waffen SS, including on the Eastern Front. Some still defend the right to fight for independence in SS uniform.

Who directed the aggression of Hitler’s Germany towards the East? Who thwarted all attempts to secure peace in Europe through guaranteeing the borders of Germany's eastern neighbors, including the idea of concluding an Eastern Pact? This list could go on. If we talk about the Soviet Union, it acted in line with the usual diplomacy for that time. It was not Stalin who won the war, but the peoples of the USSR, paying the bills for bankrupt prewar European politics in the process. And was it not the Soviet Union – with its expanses, towns and villages – that absorbed the brunt of the Nazi invasion? Three fourths of Germany's armed forces were defeated on the Eastern Front. Those were the most combat-capable, battle-hardened units.

In the end, Russia – for the umpteenth time – fulfilled its historic mission of saving Europe from forced unification and its own folly. Suffice it to recall August 1914, when the self-sacrifice of Russian troops in East Prussia pre-determined the outcome of World War I. Many serious researchers, including Barbara Takman in her celebrated book ‘The Guns of August,’ convincingly demonstrated this. It is cynical and blasphemous to compare with the Nazi occupation the events of the postwar period in Central and Eastern Europe, although they were associated with tragedies.

Was it not the German invasion (as with Napoleon's invasion in 1812) that became an invitation to Russia and its army into Europe? The ways of historical process are inscrutable; for the Western European model of economic development became "socialized" precisely in response to the "challenge of the Soviet Union and socialism." And didn’t the postwar experience, including the GDR’s, help reconciliation in Europe, in particular Russian-German reconciliation and that between Russia and the former allies of Germany?

The politicization of history has become a state affair in a number of countries. So the response must be appropriate. We have set up a commission to counter the falsification of history. Russia is not going to censor the science of history, or rewrite history in its own way. We are in favor of its depoliticization, for its comprehensive study, in the entirety of facts, circumstances and cause-effect relationships. This will be done openly, relying upon scholarly cooperation among different countries to clarify the difficult issues of common history, including in the framework of existing bilateral commissions of historians.

We paid too high a price for this victory to allow it to be taken away from us. For us it is a "red line". If someone wants a new ideological showdown in Europe, then historical revisionism and attempts to turn history into a tool of practical politics is the straight path to it. This will poison the general atmosphere of European politics, and our relationships with the countries involved. It is going to interfere with tackling common tasks and lead nations astray from jointly drawing lessons from the events of the last century and the beginning of this.

Obviously the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the global economic and financial crisis are links of a chain, attesting to the collapse of the old socio-cultural order and the emergence of a new, to use Pitirim Sorokin’s term, “integral” order that sets a new coordinate system for international relations too. A major element of such a picture of the world, of its new landscape probably will also be the best things the West gave to the world – time-tested values, truly and generally valid for all, particularly in terms of the present crisis. This will provide the basis for all states to jointly restore governability for world development. This order will reflect – for the first time in history – the cultural and civilizational diversity of the world. And it would only aid the success of such efforts if we could give a common and honest answer to the question of who is to blame for the tragedy of World War II.