27 January 2025: Collective Memory in Russia and Collective Amnesia in the West
By Gilbert Doctorow
Yesterday’s state television programming in Russia highlighted the visit of President Vladimir Putin to the Piskaryovo Memorial Cemetery on the outskirts of Petersburg to lay a bouquet in honor of his brother who died in the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and is buried there, and to pay his respects to the 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers of the Leningrad Front who died in the Siege of Leningrad and lie in mass graves at Piskaryovo. There were no speeches. Putin stood to attention during the minute of silence that was accorded to the dead.
As every Russian and some in the West recall, the Great Siege that Nazi Germany and its ally Finland maintained from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944 was intended to starve to death the city’s population, while the city itself was to be razed to the ground if all went to plan. It was not called genocide until recently, but that is precisely what it was in today’s definition of the word. Germans and Finns. The Wehrmacht enforced the siege, that is to say it was the German nation in arms, not merely Nazi zealots.
Following his visit to the cemetery, President Putin officiated at an awards ceremony in the city, bestowing medals on survivors of the siege and on their armed defenders, now all in the 90s, who were seated on the dais. In the audience were both descendants of the blokadniki and newly designated ‘Heroes of Russia’ who have earned their medals in the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. At the President’s mentioning the presence of these new heroes in the hall, the audience rose as one in applause. This was spontaneous celebration of the continuous tradition of self-sacrifice for the nation.
An English subtitled video of the awards ceremony is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMuoUbDfmwA
Meanwhile, 1356 kilometers away, in Auschwitz (Oświęcim), Poland dignitaries from across Europe and America were gathered to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the surviving inmates of the Nazi death camp there on 27 January 1945.
Members of royalty were in attendance, including King Charles of Britain, Felipe of Spain, Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands, Philippe of Belgium, Frederik of Denmark, Haakon of Norway and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden.
Among the presidents there were Emmanuel Macron of France, Sergio Mattarella of Italy and Alexander van der Bellen of Austria. Prime ministers came from Canada, Croatia and Ireland. Chancellor Olaf Scholz from Germany and Volodymyr Zalensky of Ukraine also were honored guests.
Who was not there? The Russians, who, after all had overall responsibility for the liberation of Auschwitz, constituting as they did the single largest contingent of the USSR’s Red Army that did the job on the spot. They were pointedly not invited, because as we all know, they are the aggressors in the ongoing bloody war in Ukraine.
I note that it was not easy to find a list of attendees, because Western media have given remarkably little coverage to what happened yesterday at Auschwitz. The online edition of The Financial Times today has not a word about the Holocaust Day event. Its biggest article of the day is dedicated to how the Chinese company DeepSeek ‘disrupted the global race in Artificial Intelligence, sinking the value of Nvidia. Today’s online New York Times also offers no articles yet about Auschwitz, instead publishing a fine gastronomy feature entitled ‘It’s dumpling week.” Was that ‘All the News that is fit to print”?
To its credit, Britain’s The Guardian does post a substantial article. The facts I cite above come from there. It also remarks on the generalized ignorance about the Nazi death camps among the young generation.
“Memories of one of humanity’s worst atrocities are fading.”
“A recent poll found that proportions of young European adults sometimes running into high double digits had not heard of the Holocaust, could not name Auschwitz or any other camp and had encountered Holocaust denial or distortion, mainly online.”
The article has a heavy editorial content, not just facts. It selects testimony from Auschwitz survivors carefully to give us the following essential point:
“With nationalist and far-right parties gaining support across Europe and disinformation increasingly distorting the history of the Holocaust, this year’s anniversary carried special weight.”
The Guardian associates the rise of far-right parties with the rise of antisemitism in Europe. It goes without saying that their reporters do not link in any way the new antisemitism with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
By the way, the largest color photo accompanying The Guardian article shows Volodymyr Zalensky placing a lighted candle at the Auschwitz museum.
From other sources, we know that on his way to Poland Zalensky made a stop in Baby Yar, a ravine near Kiev where 33,731 Jews were killed by the Nazi SS, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Wehrmacht on 29-30 September 1941. Wikipedia tells us that this was the ‘largest mass-murder by the Nazi regime during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust to that particular date.”
Nota bene that this is the same Zalensky whose regime has made heroes of Stepan Bandera and Ukraine’s Nazi collaborator movements in WWII. I find Zalensky’s visit to Babi Yar important in another way. It brings out the fundamental mistake in the widely held view that the Holocaust took place in specially engineered gas chambers of Auschwitz and other German factories of death. Yes, Auschwitz accounted for over one million deaths and was the largest operation of its kind. However, most of the other five million deaths in the Holocaust took place in ravines and open fields of East Central Europe and Western USSR, in what the historian Timothy Snyder called The Bloodlands, his very well documented book by that title. This means that murders were perpetrated by vast numbers of participants, both in uniformed army ranks and from among non-combatants in an age-old savage manner.
That Snyder went on from that landmark research to become a leading voice among Russia-haters before and during the Russia-Ukraine war is an entirely separate issue.
*****
Late yesterday, the first segment of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show on the Rossiya 1 channel provided extensive and at times eloquent discussion of the headline issue of this essay.
Of course, panelists addressed the scandalous fact that Olaf Scholz and Volodymyr Zalensky were honored guests in Auschwitz while the actual liberators of the death camp were not invited. By its very nature such a guest list reveals the ongoing rewriting of the history of the Second World War that amounts to denial of what the Russians call historical memory (историческая память) and that we might better call ‘collective memory.’ Donald Trump’s recent ‘favor’ to Russia in acknowledging that Russia ‘had helped’ America to win the war was also brought up as a demonstration of sacrilegious revisionism that is held in contempt by Russians of all political stripes.
Solovyov’s panelists called attention to the reasons for Vladimir Putin’s speaking of a Nazi regime in control of Ukraine since 2014: Nuremberg style torchlight parades in Kiev with Nazi symbols on display and the renaming of streets and monuments in honor of Bandera. From this they went on to mention the similar annual marches of SS descendants through the streets of Riga, Latvia which never attract any critical notice by other EU Member States.
Finally, one panelist brought up the shocking statement that Elan Musk made earlier in the day: that Germany should ‘move beyond Nazi guilt.’ That damning statement has not elicited the discussion it merits in Western media, whereas his Nazi Siegheil straight-arm salute at the rally celebrating Trump’s inauguration last Monday did raise questions in Western major media.
Musk’s call for selective amnesia in Germany aligns perfectly with his support in word and deed (financially) to the Alternative for Germany party. The AfD was the original voice in the country saying that today’s German nation has no collective guilt for the horrors of the Nazis and should step out confidently to restore its sovereignty. This was later adopted by the whole German political establishment and made it possible for the Greens party leader Annalena Baerbock in her position as German Foreign Minister to stand on a soapbox and denounce Russian aggression and violation of European values.
Sovereignty is one thing, and I fully support it. Air brushing out the past, is something else, and in the German case is utterly unacceptable, considering what yesterday was commemorating in Auschwitz and at Piskaryova.