The world media focussed on the 60th anniversary of the opening of Auschwitz's gates this week. It is hardly churlish to ask that the same intensity, spotlight be directed at the crimes of communism. For every zealous historian claiming that no other word conjures up evil as immediately as Auschwitz does there should be another, who reminds us that gulag was as offensive a word, as terrifying to many more millions. However, to this day, some revisionists continue to go through incredible intellectual contortions to deflect attention from the considerable loss of life exacted by the Soviet concentration camp system. Let's also remind the caring global community bent on marking the end of one evil era that the GULAG system was efficiently up and running before National Socialists even gained power, and continued for decades after Hitler's defeat, working innocents to the death for the benefit of another monstrous and inhumane totalitarian regime.
Considering that 2005 is a year when other anniversaries will be marked - end of war in Europe, Hiroshima and the first A-bomb, end of war in the Pacific - should not all these grim reminders of what evil man can do in the name of an ideology be equally covered?
Better newspapers have focused on the concept of repair this week in their coverage of this anniversary. No excuses can or should be made for murdering innocents in the millions. Yet while Germany and Germans have publicly attempted to transform those parts of their pasts by acknowledging their moral and legal guilt, made efforts at monetary compensation of victims, the Russian state and people are still in deep denial. Historical crimes can create a legacy that abet contemporary crimes, and in the case of the Nazi regime thankfully much has been done in Germany to prevent the possibility of the past repeating itself.
Can we say this with any conviction about Russia? Perhaps persecution, cold-blooded murder, repression and human slavery of innocents in the name of an ideology will never again reach the magnitude of Soviet and Nazi times. Yet recidivism, the tendency to repeat criminal acts is attributable to a moral inability to distinguish right from wrong. An inability to own up to sins of the past leads to committing them anew.
Contrast Germany's official position with Russia's and ask, why is Russia not expected to own up to their own concentration camps? Ask, can a country that actually features this past on its legal tender ever show moral responsibility to its victims?
Sociologist Alexander Etkind of the European University pointed out this banknote in an important article last summer, Remembering the Gulag (Pakistan Times, June 23, 2004). "The most arresting but unrecognised of all post-Soviet monuments to the Gulag is the 500 ruble banknote, issued in the late 1990s and widely used today. Seemingly a testament to the nation's proud history, this banknote carries a hidden message. It depicts the Solovki monastery, a historical complex on an island in the White Sea, which also served as the earliest and one of the most important camps in the Gulag. Local historians at Solovki believe that the atypical cupolas illustrated on the note date the picture to the end of the 1920s, the time of the camp's peak development." Now, the idea of a Nazi concentration camp being featured on Third Reich currency would have been difficult to accept at the time, much less on a German euro note of today. How can its Soviet equivalent be acceptable of a Russian note in circulation today?
Etkind continued: "Far more than Nazism, Communism belongs to our common European heritage. The memory of its victims is not only a national, but also a European responsibility. The work of memory is hard, expensive, and fragile. Monuments move back and forth. Capitals may be renamed. Banknotes expire. Everything may be mocked and change meaning." And this passage of time is perhaps what Russia's leaders of today are counting on - that while we remember Auschwitz we forget Solovki and all the other death camps.
Timing is critical in public relations and politics, and one totalitarian regime's sins are used to hide another. Estonian president Arnold Rüütel finds himself in the position of defending statements he made last week concerning the intentions of his Russian counterpart voiced at a private meeting. Putin made an allegedly surprise decision to join Rüütel and the Estonian-born Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei II at a Moscow meeting last week. What went on behind closed doors is known to only three men, two of whom have documented ties with the KGB. Rüütel told Estonian Radio that Putin is ready to consider repudiation of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop act. Since then, Russian media has voiced a conflicting view. Rüütel, however, is sticking to his guns, insisting that Putin did talk about the annulling of the MRP - agreeing that the act "and the actions based on it have to be condemned."
When one considers, that thanks to the MRP Stalin and Hitler were able to divide Europe into their spheres of influence, that the MRP non-aggression pact led directly to Hitler being able to build Auschwitz, Belsen-Belsen and Dachau while Stalin continued building his GULAG system, then Rüütel's statement must be heard in its proper context.
Etkind's article did not appear in a mainstream Western publication, Rüütel's views as apparently expressed have also not received the attention they should deserve in the West. At a time when Auschwitz is being seen, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote this week in The Toronto Star (January 27th) as "emblematic of the world that Hitler and the Germans were creating" the other horror of the 20th century is not being commented upon. The Holocaust is but one side of darkness, of an attempt to eradicate apeople from the face of the earth. Stalin's murderous regime was an equal if not greater evil.
Attempts to repair understanding of the past, provide hope for the future with regard to Nazi crimes have been under way for decades, this week's reminders about Auschwitz positive proof. Yet, unless the GULAG regime is condemned equally, this week’s memorials become a selective interpretation of evil. No such double standard situational ethics by historians, politicians and the media should be tolerated in today’s “enlightened” world.
Leader: Faces of evil (1)
Archived Articles | 28 Jan 2005 | EWR
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