crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
In exactly the same way, Europeans today should know about the crimes of the Soviet totalitarian
regime: because they are also part of the common history of our continent. Seventeen years separate
us from the end of the Cold War, but European society has progressed little in terms of comprehension
of the atrocities and perversion of totalitarian communism and it has not broached the real scale of its
crimes. Testimonies of victims and the horrors of Stalin’s regime revealed by the archives provoke a far
less profound disgust than the Nazi atrocities. Even if, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, these facts
were known in academic circles, very few researchers devoted themselves to their study in comparison
with those who carry out research into Nazism.
Until 1990, the lack of interest concerning the tragedy of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States
could be attributed to lack of information. At that time the information available in the West was limited
to Solzhenitsyn’s book Gulag Archipelago and lesser-known testimonies of Soviet renegades. After
1990, progressively, Soviet archives were opened to Russian and foreign researchers. In Russia and in
the West, many studies were published, but the documentation of the horrors of the Stalinist regime did
not succeed in interesting Europeans.
That lack of interest can, in part, be explained by a different perception of time in the two reunited
parts of Europe. In Western society, the Second World War and its consequences are part of a past that
is completely over, that has been lived through, discussed, condemned and set in history books. In
Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, that process is just beginning. We, on the other hand, are still in
the present, in a present that has been delayed by a silence imposed for five decades, in a time when
thousands and thousands of people can finally talk about their traumatic experiences. This frustrating
discrepancy gives motivation and a particular strength to claims for historical justice.
That lack of interest by Western society is clearly perceived by the media, publishers and the
world of cinema. There are almost no written accounts, programmes, films or documentaries about
what happened behind the Iron Curtain. There are very few translations of books written in Eastern
Europe or the Baltic States on this theme. We can see this in any large bookshop: the shelf devoted to
Nazism and the Holocaust is infinitely larger than the one reserved for the few works about communist
totalitarianism and the Gulag. I was able to appreciate the difficulty of getting publishers interested
when after a year of prospecting, by a happy chance; I succeeded in finding a publisher for the French
translation of my book With Dancing Shoes in Siberian Snows.
One of the reasons for the lack of interest is the shortage of visual images publicly available
to Western media. Even if the visual information found in Soviet archives is less abundant than that
found in the archives of the Third Reich – communists were more careful than the Nazis and avoided
leaving visual proof – this limited photographic and cinematographic iconography is insufficiently
disseminated in Europe. Thus, moving visual representations are lacking that were, in their time, so
important to unmask the Nazi atrocities, and which became embedded in the still fresh memories of
those who had lived through the war. In the absence of a visualisation that feeds the imagination, the
crimes of communism do not have the concrete nature that triggers empathy and shared emotion.
Western politicians, whether from the right or left, bear in part the responsibility for this indifference
by society: their ambiguous attitude with regard to Soviet totalitarianism, in the past and today, does not
give clear signals about the perversity of totalitarian communism. As long as there is no political will to
call things by their name, indifference will be perpetuated.
The issue regarding attitudes towards evaluation of communist totalitarianism is particularly
sensitive for the socialist and communist family. Notwithstanding incriminating evidence, the left,
for decades, looked for explanations and justifications for the Soviet terror. Still today, communists
are not the only ones who do not want to recognise their mistakes in the evaluation of communist
totalitarianism. That same evasive attitude can be found among socialists.
When in 1997 the book The Black Book of Communism was published in France, there were strong
protests from the socialists in power. Prime Minister Jospin did not hesitate to state that the number of
victims of communism was exaggerated.
In May 2005, the socialist group in the European Parliament abstained in the vote for a resolution
dealing with the 60 th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. They could not admit that, for
Eastern Europe and for the Baltic States, the end of the war was not a liberation, but the beginning of
another tyranny. They adopted a similar attitude in January 2006 at the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe concerning Resolution 1481 on “the necessity to condemn totalitarian communist
regimes”. Even the facts laid out in the report of the Political Committee of the European Parliament did
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