Lack of reckoning with Soviet crimes contributed to Russia's war against Ukraine – German historian

Russia's failure to critically confront the mass crimes of the Stalin era is one of the key preconditions for the war against Ukraine, and the West bears part of the responsibility for never having firmly demanded such a reckoning.

Kai Struve, a research fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and member of the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission, said this in comments to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"Putin's goal is clear – to restore dominance over former Soviet territories and to secure for Russia a place in international relations that would echo the status of the USSR in the second half of the 20th century. Therefore, one of the preconditions for a new major war in Europe is also the fact that Russia has never undergone a truly deep, critical examination of the Soviet mass crimes of the Stalin era and of Soviet history in general," he said.

According to the historian, this failure was also due to the fact that the international community did not insist on such critical reflection with sufficient determination.

Struve pointed to a fundamental issue: for a long time, both the German-Western interpretation of May 8 as "liberation" and the Soviet-Russian interpretation of May 9 as "Victory Day" shared a significant common point – both were based on the idea that there was only one major criminal regime in 20th-century Europe: Nazi Germany.

"In 1945, the Soviet Union stood, so to speak, on the right side of history, and as a result the fact that Stalin's USSR was the second major criminal regime in 20th-century European history moved into the background. This evidently also contributed to the fact that it was ignored how the celebration in Russia of May 9, 1945 as 'Victory Day' and the memory of the 'Great Patriotic War' ideologically prepared a new war," the German historian said.

According to him, there was previously a widespread belief that the memory of the enormous sacrifices and suffering of the war would unite Germany and Russia, "and that Russia would also share the view that war must never be repeated." Against this background, Germany and other Western countries did not in fact demand critical reflection from Russia.

"The historical experience of Ukraine in particular, as well as the Baltic states, Poland, and other countries of Eastern Europe, shows that there was also a second major criminal regime – the Soviet Union under Stalin. Moreover, these countries have long warned against Russia's aggressive use of the memory of the World War and demanded critical reassessment of Soviet crimes. However, this was largely ignored in Western politics and public opinion," Struve said.

He also noted that in German memory of the Second World War, Ukraine was long virtually absent as a separate entity, despite its enormous losses of 8-10 million people. Only after the beginning of Russian aggression in 2014 did Germany begin to perceive Ukraine as an independent subject in the history of the Second World War.

"On the one hand, the idea that there is historical responsibility toward Ukraine now appears to be a generally accepted fact. On the other hand, real knowledge about the specific history of Ukraine during the Second World War among the German public remains extremely limited. In German society, knowledge about Ukraine's history in World War II rarely goes beyond the motif of Germany's 'war of annihilation' against the Soviet Union. As a result, there is no narrative in German memory culture about Ukraine's history in the Second World War as its integral part," Struve concluded.

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