{"id":7394,"date":"2022-07-04T09:18:43","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T15:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/?p=7394"},"modified":"2022-09-20T09:31:32","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T15:31:32","slug":"commentary-how-putins-war-can-bring-soviet-reckoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/commentary-how-putins-war-can-bring-soviet-reckoning\/","title":{"rendered":"COMMENTARY. How Putin\u2019s War Can Bring Soviet Reckoning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandy Baksys.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes the buried war crimes of the past and the brazen crimes of the present vibrate at the same emotional frequency.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was clearly the case at a recent World War II \u201cVictory Day\u201d incident in a Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw. Online videos showed the Russian ambassador to Poland being spattered with red paint by demonstrators holding Ukrainian flags, as they taunted him with shouts of \u201cfascist murderer.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Grave of Sandy Baksys\u2019 Lithuanian aunt who was raped by Soviet invaders at age 30 in 1944.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Watching from a distance of some 8,000 miles and 80 years, I felt a brief but savage thrill of payback \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t only for Russia\u2019s present crimes in Ukraine. <\/span><\/p>\n

What I felt was also for my father\u2019s family, forever scattered and broken by the Soviet invasion of Lithuania in 1944. For my crippled Lithuanian aunt who was gang-raped by Soviet soldiers when she couldn\u2019t flee. For my Lithuanian grandmother, who died in exile without ever seeing half of her children again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout the 1930s and \u201840s, in a mixture of ethnic and ideological \u201ccleansing,\u201d Soviet dictator Josef Stalin starved, tortured, murdered, or deported millions. <\/span><\/p>\n

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic,\u201d Stalin has been quoted as saying, probably because it is so easy to imagine him saying it.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the reverse is also true. And that\u2019s how the symbolic \u201cbloodying\u201d of one Russian official in May 2022 could evoke even a fleeting moment of accountability, of vindication, for countless Soviet victims.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Who\u2019s the Fascist?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMany hesitate to see today\u2019s Russia as fascist because Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist,\u201d Yale historian Dr. Timothy Snyder wrote May 19 in the New York Times under the headline: \u201cWe Should Say it. Russia is Fascist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Snyder asserts that fascist dictators and their irrational ideologies of hate can only be defeated on the battlefield. Ergo, debunking Putin\u2019s myth that Ukraine must be destroyed in order to \u201cde-Nazify\u201d it requires Russia definitively to lose this war.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I believe we must also leverage world opinion against the myth of then-Soviet, now-Russian, antifascism upon which Putin\u2019s threat to all Eastern Europe \u2013 not just Ukraine \u2013 historically pivots.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, Snyder demonstrates how Putin\u2019s attack on Ukraine is fascist. On the other, he details the many ways in which the Soviet Union, despite being Hitler\u2019s enemy (after being his ally), was only expediently, never ideologically, antifascist.<\/span><\/p>\n

The obvious question is, could antifascism have been any more of a justification for violently suppressing Baltic nationhood during and after WWII than it is for Putin\u2019s war against today\u2019s Ukraine?<\/span><\/p>\n

Two Birds with One Stone<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s precisely the question we want the world to be asking: whether, in fact, \u201cglorious\u201d Soviet-Russian antifascism has ever been either glorious or non-fascist. If it\u2019s ever been anything other than a tool for brutal territorial conquest and occupation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most defamatory \u201cNazi\u201d elements of Putin\u2019s anti-nationalist hate speech clearly emanate from Soviet Stalinist anti-nationalist hate speech. And this creates a unique opportunity for undermining both by undermining either.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stalinist \u201cantifascist\u201d crimes become clear in analogy to Putin\u2019s \u201cantifascist\u201d criminal war. (It\u2019s hard to speak merely of \u201cwar crimes\u201d when Putin\u2019s entire war against Ukraine is a crime.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Vice-versa, Putin\u2019s mythology, the one that allows him to prosecute a brutal, fascist assault while defaming his victims as \u201cNazis,\u201d finds its perfect analogy in the same propaganda against the U.S.S.R\u2019s Baltic and Ukrainian nationalist victims.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cue the Tribunal<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The very fact that Putin\u2019s new war deploys a false WWII-era justification proves it is never too late, even for a 75-year overdue reckoning.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Cover, historian Timothy Snyder\u2019s book.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, as Russia pounds Ukraine into rubble so it can re-hoist the Soviet flag \u2013 and the rest of once-Soviet Europe quakes at the spectacle \u2013 an international tribunal on Soviet-era crimes seems not only imperative but also doable.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades, Russia has deployed Stalin\u2019s defeat of Hitler to stand itself in heroic moral contrast to Nazi Germany. Allies Britain, France, and the U.S. aided in the immediate post-war coverup by failing to prosecute a single Soviet mass-murderer while condemning the entire Nazi leadership.<\/span><\/p>\n

Likewise, every court dispensing WWII-era justice since that time has concerned itself with lesser Nazis, but still, only Nazis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, as Snyder\u2019s breakthrough 2012 book, \u201cBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,\u201d proved, Stalin\u2019s record of mass murder does not, in fact, pale to invisibility next to Hitler\u2019s. And with historians like Snyder leading the charge, the totalitarian nightmare of Soviet communism can still be belatedly and globally rebuked without diminishing any of the particular evils of Nazism if that is a concern.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our Third Chance <\/span>for Historical Reckoning<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

At the very least, the Soviet Union must be stripped of its \u201cmyth of victory,\u201d in which Russia still claims the monopoly on Nazi victimhood and victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the end of the Cold War, the West missed its first follow-up chance to shine a light on Soviet Russian crimes against humanity. Perhaps in that moment of apparent Soviet collapse, it seemed like overkill.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it turns out that the wounded beast only staggered into hiding and has since returned with a vengeance. And if we don\u2019t seize this third chance to put a stake in the monster\u2019s heart, we will continue to face a Russia that \u2013 unlike Nazi Germany \u2013 still never admits fault, never renounces conquest, and never provides an iota of reparative justice while traumatizing millions of new victims.<\/span><\/p>\n

The article was published in \u201cDraugas NEWS\u201d, May 2022 edition.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandy Baksys. Sometimes the buried war crimes of the past and the brazen crimes of the present vibrate at the same emotional frequency. This was clearly the case at a recent World War II \u201cVictory Day\u201d incident in a Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw. Online videos showed the Russian ambassador to Poland being spattered with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":7391,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,251],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-7394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-history-1900","category-war","tag-baksys-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7399,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7394\/revisions\/7399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.draugas.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}