Warning from the past

Last week the European parliament screened Edvins Snore’s ‘The Soviet Story’, a film which shows shocking details from recently uncovered archive documents revealing how the Soviet Union helped Nazi Germany instigate the Holocaust, including footage of how a delegation of the German Gestapo and SS went to the Soviet Union to learn how to build concentration camps

If mankind has adequately appraised the Nazi regime, then the role of the Soviet regime in the tragic events of the 20th century is a long way from having been properly evaluated. ‘The Soviet Story’ makes a significant contribution to facilitating the establishment of a common approach towards such events of the past, events which form an integral part of the history of the whole of Europe.

 In ‘The Soviet Story’, opinions about this tragic period of history are expressed by a number of MEPs such as Christopher Beazley, Ari Vatanen, Wojciech Roszkowski, Michael Gahler,  André Brie and others. The film crew also interviewed leading western historians Norman Davies, Nicolas Werth and Françoise Thom.

The Soviet Story is not just about an Allied power that helped the Nazis to kill Jews. It’s about the Soviet regime slaughtering its own people on an industrial scale. Deportation, execution and torture were a post-war reality for millions of people. Concentration camps were scattered throughout both Europe and Siberia. In many of them, horrific medical experiments were performed on humans. In Butugychag camp in Magadan, the KGB used thousands of prisoners as guinea-pigs, experimenting with human brains. Many of these prisoners were still alive during these experiments. “People were being killed day and night throughout the biggest country in the world. Stalin even got to the point of killing people by random, by quotas” said Norman Davies, historian and a professor at Cambridge university.

Assisted by the west, the Soviet power triumphed on 9 May 1945, but the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told, as its crimes were made taboo for the west until now. ‘The Soviet Story’ reveals the reality of the Soviet regime, including the great famine in Ukraine (1932/33), the Katyn massacre (1940), the SS-KGB partnership, Soviet mass deportations and medical experiments in the gulags. And these are just a few of the subjects covered by the documentary.

‘The Soviet Story’ also discusses the impact of Soviet legacy on modern day Europe. After the second world war and the second invasion and repeated occupation of the Baltic countries by the Red Army, the Soviet Union transferred millions of Russians into the occupied countries, dramatically changing the ethnic composition of the population. This was a clear violation of the Geneva conventions. The western world has for 60 years lived under the assumption that all such crimes committed were Nazi crimes. In fact, “the agreement which Stalin made with the west affected the whole of Europe for the next 50 years”,  stresses UK MEP Christopher Beazley.

Mass killing is mass killing. The Soviet victims were buried in anonymous mass graves, and so have no memorials. The Soviet Union, along with other countries, was never actually prepared to talk about these killings, and in remaining silent they have erased the memory of millions of innocent victims from European history.

For many in western Europe, 20th century history may have been about the overcoming of Nazism; for eastern Europe it is equally important to overcome the totalitarian communist past. The story remains important because of the major distortions of history and denials of past wrongdoings, which serve as warning signs from the past.

The European parliament must take a principled stand on these matters and take the lead in developing and adopting necessary policies. In our view, it is essential that a formal working group on truth, justice and reconciliation be set up within parliament in order to establish common principles for the evaluation of historical developments. There needs to be a thorough and sincere recognition of facts, and a respect for human rights and international obligations. Even one individual innocent victim is still a victim, and the international community has now developed concepts such as human rights, aggression, war crimes and genocide without prescription, which are useful in clarifying any evaluation of the past. Such concepts are necessary points of reference for contemporary moral assessments.

‘The Soviet Story’ makes a significant contribution to the establishment of a common understanding of history and brings us closer to the truth about the tragic events of the 20th century. A common understanding of history among the member states is crucial for the future of the whole EU.