crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Toomas Hiio *1
“Vergangenheitsbewältigung”
The question of recognising and understanding crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide,
committed during and after World War Two by the authorities of Hitler’s Germany and Stalinist Soviet
Union has several aspects, which we have to keep in mind. European nations have different experiences
in this context and we have to accept these experiences.
Why is it important at all to tell about these crimes? The answer is, of course, that we want to avoid
such crimes in the future. 63 years have passed since the end of World War Two. But we have seen in
our recent past how crimes against humanity became possible in a European country, which seemed so
peaceful only some years earlier.
It could be asked, and has been asked, why we are dealing only with crimes against humanity
committed in Europe, if most events of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the 20 th
century took place outside Europe? The answer might be that in Europe we are currently dealing with
our own past, our common past, and we have to clear our records first. It is not a good answer, but an
honest treatment of the worst things in our history could be a good example for others.
Before the end of the Cold War, the treatment of history in Eastern and Western blocs was different.
Most of us went to school during this time and some of the prejudices of these years are still alive
today.
Every country has its own tradition of teaching history in school. Therefore the experiences are
also different. After World War Two, forgetting the bad times was a political choice for a while in some
countries in order to avoid possible conflicts within the society. This has occurred in Italy, but also in
France and even in Germany. It holds some truth that treatment of the history of the war years needs
some ‘time distance’, in the sense that it is easier to speak about bad times when the generation that
directly participated in the events, has left active life, particularly active political life.
Today almost 20 years have passed since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet-time
rulers in Eastern Europe, both on the national level as well as on the local level, and the admirers of
Soviet politics in Western Europe are leaving, or have already left the political scene. Everything has its
legacy, but nobody can avoid change.
At the end of March 2008, a number of Swedish scholars published an open letter against a Swedish
state-sponsored institution Levande historia (Living History Forum). The problem: the Living History
Forum has begun a project to introduce into Swedish curricula and textbooks the history of Communist
crimes. Scholars are protesting against possible political influence of the Government in changing the
school curricula. The Swedish Living History Forum concludes its programme of teaching the history of
Communist regimes with a sentence: “Under dictatorship the writing of history is always in the service
of the state.” The scholars, who are protesting against the new programme of teaching the history of
Communist crimes, are using the same sentence against the Living History Forum itself. But Swedish
scholars also refer in their open letter to problems which have arisen, for example, from the French
Parliament criminalising the denial of genocide against Armenians. The teaching of history seems to be a
political issue even in the very old democracies with long traditions of freedom of speech.
Here we arrive at a question: whether there can be an official history, whether a state, or a number of
states, or even the whole European Union could agree, at the political level, what is our history? The question
of the so-called rewriting of history belongs to this context, too. I will come back to this topic later.
There are some specific issues in Eastern Europe worth paying attention to in this context. Most of
the Eastern European States are younger than the Western European countries. The Eastern European
nations became independent and sovereign mostly at the end of the First World War. History, the
contemporary history, has always been an important part of the identity of our nations and statehood.
Therefore the contemporary history has always been an important part of our school curricula.
* Toomas Hiio, Estonian Foundation for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity.
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