crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Minor defects and shortcomings notwithstanding, the law is, as I already mentioned, already there.
In the time of the Cold War, it was politically possible to freeze the question of applying the law to acts
of the victorious USSR. Similar cases were not treated alike. When Nazi Germany attacked Poland
on 1 September 1939, it was an aggressor; when the USSR attacked Poland on 17 September 1939,
it was on a liberating mission. When Hitler forced Czechoslovakia to surrender with the threat of
war, he committed aggression; when Stalin did the same with the three Baltic republics in June 1940,
he was merely preparing to defend his country in the face of approaching Nazi aggression. When
Hitler deported civilians, he committed crimes against humanity; when Stalin did so, it was all a Soviet
internal affair.
No one voluntarily accepts to play the role of collateral damage. When the Cold War ended, it
became clear that it was not possible to uphold such contradictions as described in the paragraph above
any longer. Western governments emphasized more clearly the fact that the Baltic States had been
illegally occupied and annexed by the USSR from 1940 to 1991. The European Court of Human Rights
has also clearly recognized the fact of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the
admissibility cases of Kolk, Kislyi and Penart v. Estonia (2006). In the same cases, the Strasbourg court
has accepted that the Nuremberg definitions of crimes are indeed universal. These definitions of crimes
were previously used for persecuting Nazi criminals but they can equally be applied to acts committed
by others, even including victorious powers.
So far, the government of the Russian Federation has denied that any illegal occupation might
have been carried out by the USSR in the Baltic States. All Baltic attempts to prosecute individuals
who deported civilians in the Baltic States, for example, during the Soviet mass deportation of 25
March 1949 – almost four years after the end of World War II in Europe – have been seen as unfriendly
and revisionist by the Russian government. But it is only the application of the very same standard of
international law, nothing more or less.
To sum up previous remarks, of the three types of making reparation in the international law of state
responsibility – restitution, compensation and satisfaction – the latter is probably the most needed in the
cases of mass crimes organized by governments, including occupying governments. Reconciliation is
not possible based on historical distortions such as: that the Baltic nations joined the USSR voluntarily,
and that there were no crimes such as executions or deportations in the Baltic States at all, or if there
were any, then all Soviet people suffered in the same way. Occupation, the destruction of already
established nation states in 1940, created a specific context to the Soviet crimes in the Baltic nations.
This context is determined by international law. And of course there is otherwise no exclusivity in the
suffering of the Baltic nations; we are all in favour of condemning Stalin’s regime’s crimes against the
Russian and other Soviet peoples as well.
Thus, reconciliation remains a very important and perhaps the most important goal in the process
of dealing with the past – reconciliation based on historical truth and satisfaction. 12
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For further and more detailed reading on these topics by the author, please consult: Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: the Case of
the Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR. A Study of the Tension between Normativity and Power in International Law, Martinus
Nijhoff, Leiden–Boston 2003; “Soviet Genocide? Communist Mass Deportations in the Baltic States and International Law”, Leiden
Journal of International Law, 14 (2001), pp. 757–787; “Von der Demokratie bis zur Diktatur – ein verborgener Dialog zwischen Artur-
Tõeleid Kliimann und Carl Schmitt”, Der Staat, 43 (2004), pp. 57–82; “The Definition of Genocide and the Role of Soviet International
Lawyers: Reflections on the Socialist Legacy in International Law”, Baltic Yearbook of International Law, 6, Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden–
Boston 2006, pp. 111–124.
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