At the end of January, memory politics concerning World War II gained a new scale of attention. It was not only the media which engaged themselves in this conflict, but also politicians at the highest governmental level who entered the stage. The European Commission announced that the allied troops had freed Auschwitz, the magazine Spiegel specified this announcement in a meme that declared the US-Army as liberators of Auschwitz. On the other side, Russia's president Putin said in a speech that top Polish officials applauded Hitler’s plans to expel Jews from Europe. This statement provoked the Polish government and the media in Poland. The struggle for collective memory is not new but it gained new evidence when the European Parliament in September 2019 passed a resolution about the beginning of World War II, the responsibility of the Soviet Union, and the consequences for post-war Europe. We started a debate about this resolution and the conflict of collective memory in the form of an interview which the historian Professor Anke Hilbrenner gave us. We now continue the discussion with answers of the historian Professor Alexey Miller, Scientific Director of the Center for Studies in Cultural Memory and Symbolic Politics of the European University at Saint-Petersburg.
"This resolution provides no evidence"
L.I.S.A.: Professor Miller, in September 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution concerning the commemoration of the beginning of World War II. The main topic in said resolution is the historical contextualization of the Hitler-Stalin-Pact of 1939. What is your impression of the European Parliament’s resolution? And how was the resolution perceived in Russia? Was there any public attention regarding this resolution at all?
Prof. Miller: Those people in Russia, who follow memory politics, including myself, perceived the resolution very negatively immediately after it was adopted. The resolution came to broader public attention later, particularly after Vladimir Putin joined the memory war, of which this resolution is a part of, in December 2019.
L.I.S.A.: The text of the resolution implies that because of the agreement between Hitler and Stalin, both share the same responsibility for the beginning of World War II. This is astonishing and counters all historical research on the reasons for the outbreak of World War II so far. Would you consider this to be historical revisionism or do you think this new evidence makes us to rethink the responsibilities for World War II?
Prof. Miller: This resolution provides no evidence. It is an act of what Polish promoters of this resolution call “narrative offensive”. It is not actually new – the successful effort on behalf of East European states, particularly Poland and Baltic republics, to replace the old European narrative, which was centered on Holocaust as the “crime of crimes” with the narrative of two totalitarianisms has been going on since 2004. While the old European narrative was about common responsibility, the new one is about pushing all the responsibility to the external “other”, Russia. Russia is the only country which is mentioned by name in the resolution.