This Saturday, Vladimir Putin was going to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the victory in the Second world war a large military parade in Moscow. Tanks and soldiers the army had to welcome the President. Would come XI Jinping and Emmanuel macron to Express gratitude on behalf of China and France. But the epidemic of the coronavirus prevented this ceremony, so I had to replace it at the air show.
Putin remembers the Soviet Union, when it is most convenient, and most often we are talking about the great Patriotic war against Nazism. The sacrifices would then need to add the honor and rights of present-day Russia.
The Russian leader likes to use history as a weapon, even if he has to copy it. Now he protects the Stalin Pact with Hitler to divide Poland, concluded in the beginning of the Second world war. Only when Germany in 1941 invaded the Soviet Union, Nazism was the enemy of communism.
In any case it is impossible to downplay the guilt of Nazi Germany in world war II. About 36 million Europeans had been killed and much more than half of them were Soviet citizens. The occupation and the aggression carried terror throughout the continent. Anti-Semitism became one of the cornerstones of the ideology of Hitler and the extermination of the Jews, put on stream, has become a crime which has no parallel in the history of mankind. Were also Gypsies, homosexuals and many other groups.
After that, Europe was in ruins, there was an atmosphere of hopelessness and poverty, starving refugees desperately trying to build a life again. But Hitler’s Germany was defeated. Western democracies and economies have managed to rebuild and flourish with the help and under the protection of the Americans.
Unfortunately, in the East it was not so. There war also ended in 1945 — but not quite. Totalitarianism is not dead — on the contrary, a monstrous Communist dictatorship of Stalin emerged from the war stronger than before. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and many others are States puppets of the Kremlin and its buffer zone. While one half of Europe was freed, the other enslaved.
In Eastern Europe, “post-war years was certainly peaceful compared to what happened before, but only thanks to an uninvited guest — the red Army: it was like the calm in the courtyard of the prison, supported by tanks,” wrote historian Tony Judt (Tony Judt) in his book “After the war” (Postwar).
The inhabitants of the Warsaw Pact countries regularly rose up against Soviet tyranny and its puppet regimes in the GDR in 1953, Hungary in 1956. The Prague spring in Czechoslovakia, happened in 1968, in Poland there was an uprising in 1980-1981. The riots were suppressed with the help of the army. Right in the middle of Berlin built a wall, so people couldn’t escape from the prison camp of communism.
And the house Stalin continued without stopping the execution of opponents, or, rather, all who stood in his way. His followers, too, sent dissidents to the Gulags or have them locked up in psychiatric hospitals. The security police of the GDR with its Stasi system of informers with the health agents were less well-known counterparts across the rest of Eastern Europe.
Brotherly dictatorship in China, a copy of Stalinism, created by Mao, was also born from the Second world war when hunting the assistance of the Soviet Union. In General, in the name of communism killed at least 100 million people, and it is much more than during the war.
Through three quarters of a century after the peace in Europe continues to live the aversion to Nazism and its endless crimes. This is not never happen again. But no one should forget, and came after him the monster of communism.
Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin wall as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” It’s a mockery of the victims of totalitarianism.
