crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Tunne Kelam *
Suggestions on assessment of totalitarian communism
Often, in dealing with significant periods of history, it is enlightening to look at the thoughts and
opinions of those who were instrumental in making that history. Among the letters of US President
Harry S. Truman 1 we find many statements which are helpful in making an assessment of totalitarian
Communism today:
“Mr Molotov represents a totalitarian state – a police government. Really there is no difference
between the government which Mr Molotov represents and the one the Czar represented – or the one
Hitler spoke of. I am told that there are more than 15 million people in concentration camps and at
slave labour in Russia today; and I am inclined to believe it. They are kidnapping Germans, they have
Japanese, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Finns, and they are made to work against their
wills.” 2
“Now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in
1938–39 with Hitler. A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or
Franco Spain. The oligarchy in Russia /.../ is a Frankenstein dictatorship worse than any of the others,
Hitler included. /…/ I went to Potsdam with the kindliest feelings toward Russia – in a year and a half
they cured me of it.” 3
The European continent was tragically divided during the second half of the 20 th century. While
one part of Europe succeeded in creating a common path to democracy and economic recovery, the other
part was abandoned for nearly half a century to a totalitarian power. Soviet military expansion enslaved
numerous states of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. The Baltic States were occupied and lost their
pre-war statehood. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia (a kind
of mini Soviet Union comprising the states of Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia), and
East Germany were all subjugated during the second half of the 1940’s to Communist regimes. These
countries were degraded to the status of Soviet satellites, they had to accept Soviet military bases and
Red Army divisions which formed the basis of power for the local Communist dictatorships and crushed
all attempts to restore freedom and democracy. The peoples of these satellite and occupied states were
denied basic civil rights and economic freedoms; they were forced by the Kremlin to renounce the
benefits of the Marshall Plan and thus were isolated politically, culturally and economically from the
Western part of Europe.
In the first decade after 1945, approximately one million people were killed only in the Soviet
“liberated” parts of Central and Eastern Europe; tens of thousands were arrested and deported. Popular
discontent and uprisings (1953 Berlin; 1956 Hungary) were brutally suppressed. The failure of these
attempts shows the isolation of these nations from the democratic West. Unfortunately Western powers
did not support real change within the Soviet-controlled part of Europe. As a result, the division of
Europe between the victors of World War Two established in Yalta and Potsdam remained in force.
What happened on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain was from then on considered an internal matter
of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
The post World War Two unification of Western Europe started as a result of lessons drawn from
the devastation caused by the Nazi totalitarian state. Unification was also stimulated by the threat posed
to the democratic system of Western Europe by an expansionist Soviet Union. But it was only the
collapse of the USSR in 1991 which enabled the “other lung of Europe” 4 to restart breathing with the
oxygen of freedom, and opened the way to the unification of Europe as a whole. With the enlargements
of 2004 and 2007, twelve formerly Soviet controlled countries of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe
succeeded in rejoining the family of European nations – the family, to which they traditionally had
belonged, based on a common European culture, civilization and historic experience.
* Tunne Kelam, Member of the European Parliament.
1
Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman, Pocket Books, 1973.
2
Ibid., Letter, 1946.
3
Ibid., Letter, March 3, 1948.
4
Speech by Pope John Paul II to the European Parliament October 11, 1988.
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