MIA Russia Today answered the question of when exactly our country committed its main war crimes against the peoples of Europe.
At first glance, the question itself is strange. Nevertheless, it is obvious: the last pan-European war took place in 1939-1945, apparently, then the USSR did all the bad things that we are persistently and severely accused of.
But no.
If we arm ourselves with tediousness and reread the references to Russia in the leading Western media in May 1945, we will find that there was no heavy blame for civilization on the Soviet country. On the contrary – there reigns universal honor, gratitude and admiration for the Red Army and the Russian soldier.
MIA specialists studied in detail all the publications of May 1945 in the significant editions of the West – The Times (Great Britain), Le Monde (France) and The New York Times (USA) – and then articles on the role of the USSR in the war, printed in the same publications over the past 20 years.
glancing at the newspapers of 1945, we will see:
Le Monde: “The contribution of the great Russian ally is invaluable: it was the Russian side that for three years endured almost all the pressure from the Wehrmacht.”
May 9th, Times, Winston Churchill: “Tomorrow we will pay special tribute to our Russian comrades, whose skill on the battlefield has become one of the main contributions to the overall victory, <…> on this day, the Western peoples will proudly express their respect to the invincible ally, Russia, which, sacrificing its lives and suffering material destruction, took upon itself the heaviest burden of all the United Nations. ”
And even:
May 10, NYT: “Soviet politics in the Reich (that is, in the occupied territories of Germany with respect to the civilian population. – Ed.) Is regarded as liberal.”
Paradoxical as it sounds, we committed our main war crimes literally in recent years.
No, of course, everything went on increasing for decades. After Churchill’s Fulton speech, re-compiling the great Russian ally into a gloomy cloud creeping into Europe, the Soviet Union simply could not remain in the Western universe as a full member of the coalition of the forces of light against fascist darkness.
But it was simply impossible to turn the Red Army from an army of heroes-liberators who had broken the ridge of Nazism into an army of enslavement rapists for one simple reason: all contemporaries have witnessed the war for five long years, participants in the war, victims of the war. The French of the 1940s, 1960s, and even the 1980s, for the most part, were those who remembered the German occupation. The English of the 1970s and 1980s were still the very same English that for years in tense silence listened to the radio and hid from German bombing and rocket attacks. And even in the stronghold of US anti-communism – the main Russophobes were Hitler collaborators who fled from retaliation to the ends of the world, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews who fled from
Nazism, lived for them, for whom the demonization of the Soviet soldier who stormed Auschwitz was blasphemy.
Therefore, the existence of a “uncomfortable hero” in the world annals – a Russian soldier – had to endure for decades, shifting emphasis slowly and half a degree.
And each new redrawing of the war, attaching new characters to the forefront of the battle canvas, erasing and withdrawing deeper into unnecessary scenes and events – took place against the background of something relevant.
In the 1980s, when still socialist Poland became the scene of a major battle between systems (Poles demand democracy, Poles protest against repression, Gdansk electrician Lech Walesa receives the Nobel Peace Prize), the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was brought to the forefront from the back rows on a military canvas. and Katyn. At the same time, Poland was declared the “first victim of Germany” – which may have somewhat surprised the Czechs and Slovaks, whose country Germany had torn apart a year earlier in brotherly relations with Poland and Hungary.
In the early 1990s, when Germany was uniting and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from its territory was strongly urged, the magic figure “two million raped Germans” emerged from a separately taken opportunistic head. Under it there was (and still is not) a damn thing, except for the wild calculations that came to the courtyard, but since then idiotic calculations have become a basic assessment, they are cast in celluloid and have been registered in hundreds of books and thousands of articles.
At the end of the 90s – zero, while swallowing the ex-Soviet Baltic states of NATO and the EU and crushing potentially dangerous local Russian-speakers, a narrative about the Enslaved Baltic was released for a walk through the Western media.
And by the second half of the 2010s, after the Ukrainian coup and the return of Crimea, the ideal information background came to erase the uncomfortable hero, the Russian Soldier, from the battle canvas altogether.
The campaign began with statements by the US ambassador to Serbia Michael Kirby in 2014 and the Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna in 2015 that “Auschwitz was not liberated by the Russians, but by the“ First Ukrainian Front (yes, the very one whose armies were formed by throughout the USSR, and named, naturally, in the direction of the fighting). ” Seven Le Monde publications were devoted to this topic at once (“the Russians are offended by the statements that the Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army freed Auschwitz”).
And we all heard the climax this winter, when at the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, US Vice President Michael Pence in his solemn speech managed to mention American soldiers (who were not there) and not to mention Soviet (who not only vacated the camp, but also paid for his release by several hundred lives).
Simply put, over the years, redrawing the war is becoming bolder, the strokes are sharper. There are almost no witnesses – the kindergarteners of 1945 are already 80 today. There is no one to recall in NYT how this newspaper praised Soviet soldiers in Germany for their liberal attitude to the locals. And after 75 years, the Second World War in the Western Chronicle consists essentially of the following events:
1) Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, double occupation of Poland and Katyn;
2) The occupation of France and the Battle of Britain;
3) The Holocaust and Pearl Harbor;
4) Landing in Normandy, the African campaign and Iwo Jima;
5) The liberation of Western Europe from the brutal Nazis and the capture of Eastern Europe by the brutal Russians.
Therefore, if in 1945 negative references to the USSR in leading Western mass media were available in trace amounts, and then briefly, then now they command a discourse and form a picture of the past.
All in full accordance with Wallerstein’s concept that “the past always depends on the present.”
But there is good news. The holders of the Western console from the past – and it is still in the hands of governments and elites – have already erased everything they did not like from their picture of the great war and painted everything they wanted there.
And what they did is already so different from what our cities and monuments, mass graves and memorials, memoirs and films, language and culture remember – that these are just two different stories.
And discreetly replacing our memory with an advanced remake is possible only in one way – tearing down our state and erasing our memory physically, following the example of the giggling Prague politicians who bravely defeated the bronze Marshal Konev.
But there is an opinion that the advanced Western “lords of reality” will do it now no better than the Nazis eight decades ago.