World

Soviet Monuments Become Latest Target of Backlash Against War in Ukraine


REZEKNE, Latvia – Deported to Siberia by the Soviet secret police as a child and trapped there for more than a decade, Dr. Juris Vidins has for years cursed the large statue of a Red Army soldier towering in the center. His hometown is in the east of Latvia. An inscription at its base honors the Soviet “liberators” who knocked out the Nazis in 1944 – and who put their father in a prison camp and the rest of the family to an icy wilderness.

“This is not liberation, it is occupation,” said Dr. Vidins, 84, glowing in front of a statue of a Soviet soldier holding a machine gun.

“They freed me from my family, freed us from our possessions and everything we had,” he said. “If it’s liberation, I don’t want a monument to it.”

After years of trying in vain to tear down the statue, this doctor now delighted by the wave of protests against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and everything to do with its military, he may soon see his dream come true. myself into reality.

Across Eastern and Central Europe, dominated by Moscow for nearly half a century after the end of World War II, a war of memories raged over whether the Soviet Union liberated the region from fascism or slavery. The epidemic again or not has reached a decisive turning point, just because what was once a severe military stalemate in Ukraine has turned significantly against Russian forces.

Statues honoring Soviet troops in recent weeks have either been demolished or are scheduled for demolition in Latvia, Estonian, Lithuania, Poland and the Czech Republic, all NATO members have rallied to help Ukraine on the battlefield with weapons and launch a home offensive against what they see as a disgusting glorification of Russian power. .

President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, justified by false claims that the country was overrun by Nazis, who had to be crushed just like Hitler’s real Nazis, did lost his country’s economic and military strength. Mr. Putin has also drained the strongest source of moral and political legitimacy: Russia’s claim, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, to the respect of more than 25 million Soviet citizens died fighting Hitler’s Germany.

“A monument to a foreign army that committed terrible crimes,” said Latvian President Egils Levits in an interview in Riga, the country’s capital.

Last month, Russia responded with fury when authorities in Riga demolished a nearly 260-foot turret built in 1985 to commemorate Soviet soldiers killed in World War II. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has launched a series of angry diplomatic complaints that Latvia, which has not been dominated by Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, has violated a 1994 pledge to respect monuments. war concept. Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the Baltic states of indulgence in “neo-fascist-style bacchanalia”.

“Of course, Russia tried to intimidate us by using the same vocabulary that they used in Soviet times to justify expulsion and repression,” Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister, said. know in an interview. “They want to scare us.”

The war in Ukraine has largely vindicated the Baltic states’ long-standing warnings that Russia is an aggressive power that cannot be trusted. But it has also reduced its ability to terrify its neighbors, diminished the willingness of ethnic Russians abroad to rally openly on Moscow’s side, and expose the weaknesses of their military apparatus. .

Latvian Defense Minister Pabriks said: “If they weren’t crazy, they wouldn’t have tried to touch us militarily. “Most of their troops next to ours have now been sent to Ukraine,” he added, referring to troops that were previously concentrated along Russia’s western border to have been redeployed. .

The destruction of Soviet war monuments, he added, is “good and necessary” and means that “our Russian minority has a choice: They must support this country and become patriots or pro-Putin.

“There will be zero tolerance for anyone who supports his war regime,” Mr Pabriks said.

Many ethnic Russians living in Latvia, about a quarter of the country’s population, insist they want to keep the war monuments not because they support Putin but to honor loved ones who died in battle. with the Soviet army.

But it was Russia that turned World War II into a political cult and a cornerstone of allegiance to the Kremlin. Instead of paying solemn homage to those killed fighting the Nazis, Putin exploited their memory to cement his power and view his enemies as traitors. and fascists.

A law passed by the Latvian Parliament in June banned the public display of “objects glorifying the Soviet and Nazi regimes” and ordered them to be removed by November 15. The ban does not apply. for cemeteries or war graves, only monuments to Soviet power, first to Latvia in 1940 with the arrival of the Red Army following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939 that included a secret protocol about Poland and the Baltic states between Moscow and Berlin.

That occupation led to the arrest of Dr. Vidins’ father, also a doctor, and the deportation of the rest of the family to Siberia. More than 15,000 Latvians, including 2,400 children, were deported in 1941.

Soviet rule ended with the Nazi invasion in June 1941, which some Latvians greeted with relief. “Many people cannot imagine that life under Nazi Germany could be worse than it was in the Soviet Union,” said Gints Apals, the head of Latvia’s history department. career museum, a national shrine to the country’s sufferings under Soviet and Nazi domination.

There were over 90,000 Jews in Latvia before the Second World War, but only a few hundred remained by the end of the Nazi occupation; most were killed, and many others fled.

The Red Army returned to Latvia in 1944 when it swept westward into Germany, and thousands more were deported. By 1949, some 42,000 people – more than 2% of the country’s population – had been sent to Siberia, with thousands more executed and imprisoned on suspicion of being “fascist” and German collaborators. commune. This period of second Soviet occupation continued until 1991.

Mr Apals said Latvia’s official position is that “both authoritarian systems are equally bad”, not because each kills the same number of people, but because “both use the ideology of serial killer”.

Saying it is illegal in Russia, where an opposition politician, Leonid Gozmanwas jailed for a second time last week for claiming that Stalin was “even worse than Hitler”.

Edgars Engizers, a historian who advises the Latvian Foreign Ministry, says Putin’s politicization of history has wasted much of the respect once given to Russia for its role in defeating Nazi Germany. . Destroyed by a series of “falsified histories”, Latvia’s previous tolerance of war monuments, he said, was overshadowed by disgust at “the ideological cult of the War,” he said. The Second World” of the Kremlin.

“Glorifying Russia’s military heritage has become a glorification of war crimes,” Engizers said.

When Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania seceded from the Soviet Union and regained their independence in 1991, they all quickly toppled statues of Lenin, the Soviet state’s founder, but left the monuments intact. during World War II such as the Riga tower and the statue in Rezekne. .

This lingering respect for Soviet sacrifice in Latvia was set aside in June with new legislation.

Small pockets of resistance remain, especially among large Russian populations in places like RezekneVidins’ hometown, and the eastern city of Daugavpils, home to the largest concentration of Latvian Russians, is hoping to protect its own World War II monument.

Aleksei Vasiliev, first deputy mayor of Daugavpils and head of the local branch of the “Russian Federation of Latvia”, said he owes it to loved ones killed in the war to protect the monument, a metal spire. no decoration does not mention “liberation”.

“I will not lie down in front of bulldozers if they come, but I will get on my knees and pray for them to stop,” Mr. Vasiliev said.

With the deadline for the demolition of their own monuments approaching and the authorities in Riga threatening to sue towns that do not comply with the ban, the city government of Rezekne recently conducted an online survey of public opinion. , but there was no clear answer: 52% said they wanted the statue removed, 43% said they didn’t, and 4% said they wanted it removed from Central Park.

The mayor of Rezekne, caught between the law and a divided public, has yet to say publicly what will happen to the statue.

Dr. Vidins said he was confident the mayor would have to tear it down. “It should have gone a long time ago,” he said, “and I’m glad it will soon.”

But many local Russians, including an old friend of the doctor, Vadim Gilis, thought it would be an attack on their own identities and memories of Russians who died in the war.

During a visit to the town’s vast Jewish cemetery, Mr. Gilis pointed to a grassy riverbank where Nazi soldiers, helped by local collaborators, murdered thousands of people. Jew. “This is why Soviet soldiers came here,” he said. “But we’re all still fighting over what happened in World War Two.”

He said that he respects Dr. Vidins and his position. “We get along really well,” Mr. Gilis said. “It’s only when we start talking about history that the problems begin.”



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