he war but also the beginning of nearly a half-century of Soviet occupation, during which one in 10 Balts were murdered or deported to concentration camps and exile villages. The thought of applauding the same Red Army veterans who helped “pacify” their countries after 1945 was too much for the Estonian and Lithuanian presidents, who have refused to attend. Although the Latvian president will attend the Moscow festivities, she’s had to declare that she will use her trip to talk about the Soviet occupation. The president of Poland also has spent much of the past month justifying his decision to celebrate this particular anniversary in Moscow. By May 1945, after all, the leaders of what had been the Polish anti-Nazi resistance were already imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the KGB’s most notorious Moscow prison.
The Russian president hasn’t made anyone’s trip easier. Recently he told a radio interviewer that the Soviet Union was justified in signing the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, in which the two totalitarian powers agreed to divide Poland and cede the Baltic states to the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union, Putin said, was within its rights to protect the “security of its western borders,” as if annexing other countries were a legitimate form of border patrol. This week Putin went on to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union — which resulted in the liberation of Eastern Europe — as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, presumably ranking it higher than the war itself. His countrymen, in symbolic agreement, have commissioned a host of new Stalin statues around the country to commemorate the end of the war. […]
Bush, too, should show that he understands what really happened in 1945. Every recent U.S. president has visited Auschwitz, and many have visited concentration camps in Germany, too. Perhaps it’s time for American presidents to start a new tradition and pay their respects to the victims of Stalin. This is made difficult by the dearth of monuments in Moscow, but it isn’t impossible. The president could, for example, lay a wreath at the stone that was brought from the Solovetsky Islands, the Soviet Union’s first political prison camp, and placed just across from the Lubyanka itself. Or he could visit one of the mass-execution sites outside of town.
Of course these would be nothing more than purely symbolic gestures. But a war anniversary is a purely symbolic event. Each commemoration helps all of us remember what happened and why it happened, and each commemoration helps us draw relevant lessons for the future. To falsify the record — to commemorate the triumph of totalitarianism rather than its defeat — sends the wrong message to new and would-be democracies in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
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