Europe.view: Partners in crime
Despite Russia's protests, Stalin was no less villainous than HitlerIT IS depressing that it even needed to be discussed. On July 3rd in Vilnius the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the continent’s main outfit, passed a resolution equating Stalin and Hitler. It called for August 23rd to become an official day of remembrance for the millions who were repressed, murdered, deported, robbed and raped as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. That deal, and the secret protocols that went with it, were a death sentence for the countries from the Baltic to the Black sea. The poisonous after-effects linger until today.The resolution should have met with particularly thunderous applause from the Russian side. After all, Russians by most measures suffered particularly badly under Stalin. Following Lenin’s terrible legacy, he systematised the persecution of the country’s brightest and best. Anyone reading the classic memoirs of Stalinism, such as “Kolyma tales” by Varlam Shalamov, or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Hope against hope”, or a modern history such as Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”, is suffused with the horror of those years. It is hard to imagine anyone quibbling over their condemnation. ...
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