Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe

16. The Reception of the Holocaust in Russia: Silence, Conspiracy, and Glimpses of Light

487 klas-göran karlsson 16. The Reception of the Holocaust in Russia Silence, Conspiracy, and Glimpses of Light On 27 January 2005 Russian president Vladimir Putin stood in the circle of European and Western political leaders who had gathered at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Like his colleagues, Putin emphasized that the inhuman “fascist” ideas that ultimately had led to the Holocaust were in total contrast to the “humanitarian values and democratic traditions” that permeate European history. He associated himself unequivocally with a powerful political discourse of the new millennium, in which the Holocaust constitutes the absolute , nonnegotiable evil in European history: “Any attempts to rewrite history, to put victims and executioners, liberators and occupiers on the same level, are immoral and incompatible with the thinking of people who consider themselves Europeans.” Words such as these did not separate Putin from the other participants of the ceremony. In their speeches they also conveyed the idea that the Holocaust was an unprecedented catastrophe whose meaning transcends national and temporal boundaries. In other respects, however, Putin stood out by holding onto notions of the destruction of European Jewry that were firmly rooted in the Soviet past. He did not mention the Jewish identity of the victims. Rather, he took the opportunity to speak out for the memory of the 600,000 Soviet soldiers who were killed while liberating Poland from the Nazis, and of the 27 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives during the Second World War. It goes without saying that Putin included Jews among these millions of victims, but he chose not to separate their tragic destinies from the larger mass death that fell 488 karlsson upon the entire Soviet people. Furthermore, when the Russian president in his speech subordinated the Auschwitz commemoration to the “culmination” of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, yet to take place in Moscow, he even downplayed the unique character of the Holocaust by relating it to the general Soviet suffering and victory. Finally, Putin took the opportunity to instrumentalize the Holocaust for political reasons, by warning against a contemporary threat as dangerous as that of Nazism in the war years: the threat of terrorism. It is true that Putin’s warning could be interpreted as universalization of genocide, not infrequent in today’s cultural and political discourse, but everything seems to indicate the reverse, that Putin aimed at playing the “national” card. No doubt he had Chechen “terrorists ” in mind, and the judgment he pronounced upon them was unambiguous: “Just as there could not be good or bad Nazis, so there cannot be good or bad terrorists.”1 The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that Putin’s 2005 Auschwitz speech reflects the way the Nazi genocide has been represented and used in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union. On the one hand, since the early 1990s, the Holocaust has been made visible in Russian scholarly, educational, cultural, and political life to a larger extent than during the Soviet period. It is more often referred to, and the interpretations are more often in accordance with Western ones. In this respect, it can be argued that Russia follows in the footsteps of most European countries. On the other hand, in Russian history writing and cultural events, there is still an evident disinclination to acknowledge that the vast majority of Auschwitz victims were Jews. Silence, obscurity, omissions, and misinterpretations based on nationalist , anti-Semitic, or other ideological convictions are still recurrent features in Russian historical narratives of the Second World War in general, and of the so-called Great Patriotic War in particular. The latter is the Russian term for the part of the war that was enacted on Soviet territory in the years 1941–45. The Holocaust was partly perpetrated within this territory in the period of the Great Patriotic War, but this fact is often left out of Russian historical narratives. Banalization and outright denial of the Holocaust still resonate in Russian public life. In this respect, the legacy of the Russian and Soviet past is salient in post-Soviet Russia. In order to make important aspects of 16. Reception of the Holocaust in Russia 489 this continuity understandable, as well as to demonstrate historicocultural change, this chapter gives a thorough historical background to the post-Soviet treatment of...