Besides, Peteris already posted a link to the Economist review in the Soviet Story thread.

So, say—does reposting what I last linked to in another thread have some sort of occult significance?

/P

Aleks,

“...Nazi war criminals are reviled; their Soviet counterparts are honoured veterans to this day. Any attempt to bring them to justice prompts angry protests from Russia. ‘Hands Off Our Granddads’… .  A better question might be, “What exactly happened?”

Aleks, those are not my words.

What do you and your Russian/Latvian friends think happened?  Is anyone discussing this?  You previously dismissed the movie.  Did you actually see it? 

Aleks, you yourself, asked, “And is it really such a deadly sin to question the official Latvian interpretation of history?”
Peteris answered you that “...[T]he Stalinist falsification of history… is what many if not most Russians in Latvia indulge in. You [Aleks] pepper your own blog with recognition of that—just how anti-Latvian 9 May is, for instance—and it is unutterably silly to try to pretend that that’s just another interpretation.”

Why do only 14% of the Russians IN LATVIA think that Latvia was occupied?  Do you think it would help relations between Russians and Latvians in Latvia to honestly tackle this question? I don’t think that the relationship between Russians and Balts - Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonian - will really be able to heal or even significantly improve as long as this denial of Soviet history and of the Soviet occupation continues.  I neither understand the pathological patience of the Balts nor the pathological instransigence of the Russians.

Peteris to the rescue at the Economist:

\cedrins wrote:
May 22, 2008 13:49
Zakka wrote: “Being part of Soviet Union allowed Lithuanians and Latvians not to be written in history books as a close Nazi allies.”

That’s unutterably silly. Neither Latvia nor Lithuania existed in 1941, when the Nazis got here. Both had been occupied by the Soviets—Nazi allies—in 1940 (and Zakka anyhow apparently has trouble even naming or differentiating between Baltic states—Lithuania didn’t have a Legion; Estonia did). There were some Balts who committed heinous war crimes. But declaring subject nations “close Nazi allies” is ludicrous

I guess it all comes down to when it happened.

My grandfather used to tell me that about 1939 when tensions where building between the bolsheviks and the nazis, and the nazi’s where starting their oppression of the jewish population, everyone was on edge knowing that Germany and Russia would come to blows, and latvia would be caught in the middle. Then the Russians invaded latvia. That, in my opinion was inarguably an occupation.

My grandfather had a vitriolic hatred for the bolsheviks as he called them, and the hatred spilled over to the jews since he says he saw many of them cheering at the train stations putting flower gardlands on soviet soldiers as they came in… but wouldn’t you? faced with death and genocide on the german side I do not fault them at all.

During that period of occupation (two years I think), my grandfather’s father was killed by firing squad and his two sister deported to concentration camps in Siberia. I am told that nearly 1/3 of the population died, was deported or left latvia in that time.  That was a very trying occupation.

Then the Nazis attacked, and in their way to Russia ‘liberated’ latvia.  Well, all that pent-up anger against the Russians and the jews resulted in the participation of latvians in a horrible genocide (in Lithuania 95% of the jewish population was killed, latvia being not too far behind). My grandfather did what he considered his duty and pointed out every soviet collaborator in the 2000 employee factory in which he worked and saw them arrested and many killed. I guess for the jewish, gypsy, slavic and in general non-german population it was an invasion on the part of the germans, but if I remember right my grandfather indicated that the latvian population fared pretty well, and the nazis were viewed as liberators.

But lets not forget how close the world came to being crushed by the Nazi regime. The Russians though losing of 20 million (most due to Stalin) regrouped and incredibly forced the Nazis into retreat, russian armies crossing again over latvia on the way to germany. To the World in general this is viewed as a great liberating war, the vanquishing of the German armies. My family and grandfather retreated with the german armies. So here we have the Russians as liberators, at least to the world at large, and the few resisting latvian troops being nazi collaborators.

Well, the Russians would have kept their title of liberators if they had left… but they decided to stay and take over Eastern Europe… and became once again the Occupiers.

So Pick and choose your time frame and they swing from the hope of salvation of entire populations to despised invaders and occupiers, to valiant and glorious liberators, to oppressive masters.

Phew!  I am so glad I did not live in that time, and I pray nothing like that happens in the future.

Due to his actions during the war my grandfather was an enemy of the Soviet Union and was not allowed to return to Latvia. He died in Venezuela one year before latvia achieved independence having never gone back. His two sisters survived Siberia and moved to Finland. The entire side of my grandfather’s family corresponding to his uncle was massacred by looters in the war, none survived.

So in my opinion if the Russians want to Celebrate the day they forced the Nazis retreat from latvia… they certainly have the right to do so, having shed the blood of 20 million souls in the process. If they wanted to celebrate some date corresponding to them staying afterwards (I don’t know, the formation of Latvia SSR for example) that would be another matter.

Peteris wrote:

“There were some Balts who committed heinous war crimes...”

Is this an affirmation of known fact, historical speculation, or the repetition of standard slander ?

There were how many total Balts?
How many are “some” Balts? 
What “heinous war crimes?”
What number Balts committed what heinous war crimes?
How many Balts did not commit war crimes?
What allows you to make this general statement implicting “Balts” in committing undefined “war crimes?”
How many Balts were convicted for commiting your undefined “heinous war crimes?”
Please site your references to prove your assertions.

Please repeat this exercise for Russians.
Please repeat this exercise for other peoples/nations.

Please put this into the world context of “heinous war crimes” with the number of nationals (like Balts) committing and number “heinous war crimes” committed.

Why this readiness to “volunteer” the unspecified guilt of other Balts for crimes that you call “heinous” without additional prove of guilt or conviction?  Why reinforce some general notion of “Baltic guilt for heinous war crimes” without carefully defining numbers of Baltic participants and defining the specific “heinous” crimes?  Why not place the Baltic ability to chose any behaviors within the context of occupation?

Why not emphasize the limited participation of Balts in any crimes relative to the total population of Balts?

Labrīt!

Andrej V,

I guess for the jewish, gypsy, slavic and in general non-german population it was an invasion on the part of the germans, but if I remember right my grandfather indicated that the latvian population fared pretty well, and the nazis were viewed as liberators.

Many ethnic Latvians also suffered under the Nazi occupation; an estimated 18 000 were murdered.

Ambersun,

Protams, katra tauta kaut kur pamatos par sevi vēlas domāt tikai pašu labāko.  Zināmas paralēles ar bremzēm, kuras ālējās pie Latvijas vēstniecības Maskavā var vilkt ar bremzēm Latvijā, kuras kategoriski noliedz, ka kaut viens tautietis jelkad būtu piedalījies tajā, kas mūsu valstī pagājušā gadsimta 40. gados tika nodarīts valsts ebrejiem.  Tas nekas, ka pazīstamākā no šīm personām saucās Arājs, latvieši tajā nepiedalījās un viss, jo latvieši ir pasaules vēsturē lielākā upurtauta, un latvieši tāpēc neko sliktu nekad nevienam nevar būt izdarījuši.  Krievijā notiek apmēram tas pats…

Kārlis Streips, “Par Krievijas neizmērojamām ambīcijām”

Andrievs Ezergailis:

There certainly were numerous Latvians who were criminally guilty. Those who participated directly in the murder of the Jews should be criminally condemned, even if to speak of punishment for most of them in 1996 is too late for this world. The criminally guilty, using the criteria of the war crimes trials in the West, would involve about 500 to 600 men, 1,000 at the most. That would include four dozen journalists who wrote, edited, and published Nazi propaganda about the Jews.

Andrew Ezergailis, The Holocaust in Latvia

Re crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed by Estonians, see the Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity.

Re the participation of Lithuanians in the Holocaust, see “The Hard Long Road Toward the Truth.”

Vysu lobu,
/P

“There were some Balts who committed heinous war crimes...” is a statement of fact and there’s nothing to be gained from not facing up to it or trying to deflect it.

Sveiks, JKS,

You wrote: “There were some Balts who committed heinous war crimes...” is a statement of fact and there’s nothing to be gained from not facing up to it or trying to deflect it.

Zakka wrote (comment in May 22 ECONOMIST article reviewing the Latvian-made film - “The Soviet Story"): It’s world-wide known that joining Soviet Union was a great opportunity for some Baltic republics to be forgotten (and so forbidden) by their Nazi collaboration, as they became famous as the most efficient Jew-killing machine. Being part of Soviet Union allowed Lithuanians and Latvians not to be written in history books as a close Nazi allies. So, i think it’s an awful idea a Latvian filmmaker to stimulate nationalistic stereotypes based in a suspicious historic interpretations, in particular the Stalinist regime in 2nd World War (and post war) circumstances.

I do condemn the all the stupid waves of Russian nationalism, as well as the racist organizations that are growing in Russia. But that’s not reasonable to associate these recent phenomenons with Stalinist past. It’s an unfair confrontation with the generations that suffered under Stalinist violence and Hitler’s aggression. Don’t forget that in spite of such suffering they could win the Nazi army and contributed for the European peace with much more sacrifice than other people in the world (about 28 million Soviet people died as a consequence of 2nd World War - we should never forget that!!!!). So I think that The Economist should not recommend its readers to waste time watching such ideological nonsense made by a passionate Latvian nationalist film-maker that seems to ignore the real world history

Peteris C answered Zakka: That’s unutterably silly. Neither Latvia nor Lithuania existed in 1941, when the Nazis got here. Both had been occupied by the Soviets—Nazi allies—in 1940 (and Zakka anyhow apparently has trouble even naming or differentiating between Baltic states—Lithuania didn’t have a Legion; Estonia did). There were some Balts who committed heinous war crimes. But declaring subject nations “close Nazi allies” is ludicrous

Andrew Ezergailis, writing in The Holocaust in Latvia:  There certainly were numerous Latvians who were criminally guilty. Those who participated directly in the murder of the Jews should be criminally condemned, even if to speak of punishment for most of them in 1996 is too late for this world. The criminally guilty, using the criteria of the war crimes trials in the West, would involve about 500 to 600 men, 1,000 at the most. That would include four dozen journalists who wrote, edited, and published Nazi propaganda about the Jews.

About the “heinous war crimes” in Estonia, Peteris cites the Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity.  This investigation covers crimes against humanity committed against Estonian citizens during the occupations of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.The Estonians can speak for themselves.

About the Lithuanian participation in “heinous war crimes,” Peteris cites one source.  In fairness to Lithuanians, I can say that there are many recently published books.  The Lithuanians should speak for themselves.

JKS, maybe you can summarize and fill in the factual details of the heinous war crimes you as a Balt are facing up to.

The glare of your hypocrisy must be blinding, Ambersun. You’ve provided us with poison from the Russian Internet on more than one occasion—shock and awe! But when a fervent fan of Latvia’s favorite dictator reacts to two sentences about Jews in a discussion about Daugavpils (a city that had a Jewish plurality for quite some time) by saying that the topic is now “smeared with obligatory jewish smell,” your reaction is confined to urging “politically correct restraint” before you ask the “gentleman” to recommend a book?

Ezergailis applies Jaspers’ four types of guilt—criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical. The final sentence of the introduction I linked to (and I would highly recommend reading the entire book) is this: One can, however, register that in the Latvian intellectual community since World War II, aside from a handful of literary works, there has been little to no contemplation of the Latvian guilt in the killing of Jews of Latvia.

The Estonians can speak for themselves. The subject was Balts—not just Latvians. The Estonians do speak for themselves at the link I provided. The conclusion applies to Latvians and Lithuanians just as much as it does to Estonians, to my mind:

The Commission believes being a victim does not
preclude acts of perpetration. A people which
respects the rule of law should recognise crimes
when they have been committed, and condemn
them and those who committed them.
It is unjust that an entire nation should be criminalized
because of the actions of some of its citizens;
but it is equally unjust that its criminals should be
able to shelter behind a cloak of victimhood.

/P

”JKS, maybe you can summarize and fill in the factual details of the heinous war crimes you as a Balt are facing up to.”

The heinous war crimes I, as a Balt, am facing up to (and always have btw) are those that were committed by some Balts, regardless of my own personal innocence or the fact that most Balts did not commit war crimes. In the case of the Latvians, the factual details are well-documented by Ezergailis and if you’re looking for specific examples, the heinous crimes of the Arajs commando is a good place to start. Another specific example that my father told me of was a teacher at a local school who he says was well-known in the area for having participated in killing of Jews. My father told me other such stories he’s heard from family friends. When false accusations or generalisations are made, it’s fair to defend against them but being evasive about genuine crimes is not only immoral but damages efforts to separate fact from fiction.

Peteris,
I began this thread with a sincere attempt to diffuse some of the ill will and anger existing between the Russians and Latvians and among various combinations of the people of Latvia.  The response was not openness, honesty and soul-searching.  I read denials, evasions, and counter-accusations. I saw virtually nothing offered as a solution other than tellling Latvians to “just get over” their “victim complex,” expressed with a flippancy never dared to be displayed to Jewish victims. I also did not see the usual LOL posters who readily condemn Latvians for just about anything and bash Balts as collective criminals of “heinous war crimes” rise to the occasion to condemn “heinous war crimes” against Latvians by the Soviets - who were mostly Russians, even some Jews (!), and even some Latvians(!). Has no one read about Stalin’s purges of anyone and everyone, including Latvians and Jews and Russians, Soviet or not, and never heard of the vast scale and vast evil of the Soviet GULag?  Do you really think it’s helpful as a defense of Soviet crimes to continue whipping Balts for their crimes against Jews in particular and calling Latvians “Nazis” while remaining silent at the glorification of Stalin’s perverse “Great Victory” and denying the multitude of crimes committed against Russians, Balts, Slavs, Gypsies, women, homosexuals, atheists, Christians, and Jews?!!!  All of the crimes we are talking about are obscene and horrifying.  I have read Ezergailis.  Have you, JKS, Andrejs, Aleks, et al of the moral-outrage patrol read NO SIMPLE VICTORY, The Great Terror (Conquest), Gulag (Applebaum), The Dictators (Overy), Berlin (Beevor)?  Crimes against humanity should not be categorized by personal preference and outrage should not be in the eye of the beholder. 

Where is the morally-charged, probing discussion of Soviet crimes under this topic of May 9 and the denial of the occupation of Latvia?  It’s not about condemning only Germans, only Soviets, only Balts, and even Jews for any war crimes. War is a crime. You can’t silence the just but you can shame all the guilty. It’s about consistency in condemning, and rejecting the double standards around victor/victim morality. Peteris, why didn’t you post your “categories of crimes” list when it would have applied to the people, primarily Russians, celebrating Soviet “victory?” I’ll post it here so that we can see to apply it even-handedly.

“A people which respects the rule of law should recognise crimes when they have been committed, and condemn them and those who committed them.”

Yes, there is much vile invective spewed on the internet.  Lots of frustration and raw anger. Some of it is life-long and never resolved.  Some of it gets vented as in “Burn Baby Burn” (in All About Latvia) about torching the Baltics in retaliation for moving the statue in Estonia. I think a certain contained venting is healthy since the alternative squelching will never expose the “bruce” to allow for healing. The boundary of tolerance is elusive, context matters. Hypocrisy is rampant. 

Peteris, here to remind you is your own post (to Aleks) of “poison” and “shock and awe” about the “Red Army’s rapists” and the Soviet “occupiers:”
“...In fact, the war started in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler made friends and cut up Europe to their mutual liking. The war did not end in Latvia in 1945 — the Red Army’s rapists were accompanied by the occupation regime and the NKVD — those were “embedded” amongst the victorious “liberators,” directly so.
The same glorious veterans, so human, who hang out at these monuments, were the same glorious gentlemen who hung out here as occupiers for decades, cutting in front of the line at the gastronomiya and doing everything they could to destroy the rebirth of this country in the late 1980s.
They teach their children and grandchildren the same things — that they vanquished evil, “Latvian fascists” included, and that a sorry and illegitimate regime is attempting to “revise history.” In reality — they are some of the main proponents of a slick, deceitful historiography based upon lies, rekindling the triumphalist horrors they were quite comfortable with for most of their lives.
I think your “[n]or was the post about politics” idea is a fantastic attempt at re-leveraging utter sūdi, as Tom suggested. Of course it’s about politics, and you play politics when you weigh in about “lesser evils” and indulge in these strange dances. It’s almost like “friendship between peoples” — oh, hey, that must have been apolitical, too?
Most of the people celebrating 9 May detest this country and its people, and you yourself have admitted that — ‘hatred toward everything Latvian is enormous [my bold].’ ”

Peteris, you promptly provided the passage from Ezergailis in THE HOLOCAUST IN LATVIA.  You also listed representative studies from Estonia and Lithuania.  I must have misssed your entry - or anyone’s - of the comparable tomes of research from Russia and Russians on the occupation of the Baltic States and the condemnation of the heinous crimes committed against the people of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

About NO SIMPLE VICTORY by Norman Davies (British):

“Davies asks readers to consider what they really know about World War II and how the received wisdom might be biased or even incorrect. ...Through an exploration of...facts, particularly focusing on the role of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s Red Army and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Davies proves that the prevailing rhetoric surrounding this conflict - that it was the “triumph of good over evil” - is misgided and unjustified.  Powerfully argued, compellingly written and devastating in its conclusions, Davies’s reexamination is a powerful reminder that until we have established the real answers to basic factual matters concerning the Second World War, we cannot pass judgment on wider issue.

From The Economist
May 22nd 2008

Irena Sendler Obituary
Irena Sendler, saviour of children in the Warsaw ghetto, died on May 12th, aged 98
East News Poland

POLAND suffered more than any other European country during the second world war. And there was an extra twist: the history of that suffering was then systematically distorted by the Soviet-imposed Communist rulers, and widely misunderstood abroad. Auschwitz, for example, is still often referred to as a “Polish death camp”—rather than one run by the country’s Nazi occupiers, in which huge numbers of Polish citizens perished. And gentile Poles are typically imagined to have rejoiced, collaborated or simply stood by as their Jewish compatriots were exterminated. Poles, said the former Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir, “imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.”

Certainly prejudice was prevalent in pre-war Poland; but many Poles defied it. One of the bravest was Irena Sendler. As a doctor’s daughter, she had been brought up in a house that was open to anyone in pain or need, Jew or gentile. In the segregated lecture halls at Warsaw University, where she studied Polish literature, she and likeminded friends deliberately sat on the “Jewish” benches. When nationalist thugs beat up a Jewish friend, she defaced her grade card, crossing out the stamp that allowed her to sit on the “Aryan” seats. For that, the university suspended her for three years. All this was good preparation for the defiance she was to show after 1939, when the Germans invaded.

She was, a friend said, “born to selflessness, not called to it”. Certainly she had good genes. A rebellious great-grandfather was deported to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917, after treating patients his colleagues shunned. Many were Jewish. Leaders of the Jewish community offered money to her hard-up mother for young Irena’s education. Like many social workers in pre-war Poland, Mrs Sendler belonged to the Socialist party: not for its political ideology, she said, but because it combined compassion with dislike of money-worship. No religion motivated her: she acted z potrzeby serca, “from the need of my heart”.

Under Nazi occupation the Jews of Warsaw were herded into the city ghetto: four square kilometres for around 400,000 souls. Even before the deportations to the Treblinka death camp started, death could be arbitrary and instant. Yet a paradox created a sliver of hope. Squalor and near-starvation (the monthly bread ration was two kilos, or 4.5lb) created ideal conditions for typhus, which would have killed Germans too. So the Nazis allowed Mrs Sendler and her colleagues in and out of the tightly guarded ghetto to distribute medicines and vaccinations.

That bureaucratic loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the far better known Oscar Schindler. It was astonishingly risky. Some children could be smuggled out in lorries, or in trams supposedly returning empty to the depot. More often they went by secret passageways from buildings on the outskirts of the ghetto. To save one Jew, she reckoned, required 12 outsiders working in total secrecy: drivers for the vehicles; priests to issue false baptism certificates; bureaucrats to provide ration cards; and most of all, families or religious orders to care for them. The penalty for helping Jews was instant execution.

Names in glass jars
To make matters even riskier, Mrs Sendler insisted on recording the children’s details to help them trace their families later. These were written on pieces of tissue paper bundled on her bedside table; the plan was to hurl them out of the window if the Gestapo called. The Nazis did catch her (thinking she was a small cog, not the linchpin of the rescue scheme) but did not find the files, secreted in a friend’s armpit. Under torture she revealed nothing. Thanks to a well-placed bribe, she escaped execution; the children’s files were buried in glass jars. Mrs Sendler spent the rest of the war under an assumed name.

The idea of a heroine’s treatment appalled her. “I feel guilty to this day that I didn’t do more,” she said. Besides, she felt she had been a bad daughter, risking her elderly mother’s life with her wartime work, a bad wife to both her husbands, and a neglectful mother. Her daughter once asked to be admitted to the children’s home where her mother worked after the war, in order to see more of her.

Mrs Sendler need not have worried. Far from being honoured, she narrowly avoided a death sentence from the Communist authorities. Her crime was that her work had been authorised and financed by the Polish government-in-exile in London; later, she helped soldiers of the Home Army, the wartime resistance. Both outfits were now reviled as imperialist stooges. In 1948 repeated interrogations by the secret police in late pregnancy cost the life of her second child, born prematurely. She was not allowed to travel, and her children could not study full-time at university. “What sins have you got on your conscience, Mama?” her daughter asked her.

It was not until 1983 that the Polish authorities allowed her to travel to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honour at Yad Vashem. Many of the children she had saved sought her out: now elderly themselves, all grateful, but some still yearning for details of their forgotten parents. In 2003 she received Poland’s highest honour, the order of the White Eagle. It came a little late.

Ambersun,

There’s a book in Russian called “Icebreaker” by Viktor Suvorov, which is pretty well known among Russians. It challenges the “traditional views” on World War II and does so successfully and marvelously. His book was translated into English. I’d recommend reading it.