#16 - JRL 9146 - JRL Home
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005
From: "Branko Milanovic" <bmilanovic@carnegieendowment.org>
Subject: Another East European voice

Dear David,

I hope you will publish this short piece on the Soviet liberation of Eastern Europe. I hope this particularly since similar voices have been silenced, both in their own countries and in the US press, where it seems that only the Baltics and a few odd Poles are allowed to represent Eastern Europe.

I will answer a simple question: why was May 8-9 a liberation day? It was the Liberation day because the Soviet army saved countless millions of citizens of Eastern Europe from an almost certain annihilation. People who equate the Nazi conquest of Ukraine, Belorussia, Poland, former Yugoslavia etc. with the Soviet (or Communist) control of these countries are simply ignorant of history…or dishonest. The Nazi occupation of Minsk, Kiev, Belgrade or Warsaw was fundamentally different from the Nazi occupation of Paris and Brussels. We have it no lesser authority than Himmler that the war on the Eastern front was the war of extermination. The role that the Nazi envisaged for Poles, Russians, Serbs, Czechs, Ukrainians (and of course Jews and Roma in all these countries) was that of slaves­just in case they somehow survived. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were starved to death, summarily executed, or taken to Germany to become slave laborers. To give just one example that personally affected me. In the city of Kragujeviac in southern Serbia, in one day in September 1941, the Nazis executed around 7,000 people in retaliation for the killing of some 50 Nazi soldiers by the Communist-led partisans. (The infamous Oradour massacre was done by the Das Reich division that simply transferred the rules it “learned” on the Eastern front to the 1944 France.)

Democracy is a political system. But in order to enjoy it, one has to be alive first. And without the Red Army, most of East Europeans (except a tiny minority who collaborated with the Nazis) would not have been alive. This is why the Red Army was an army of liberation. It is as simple as that.