Whitewashing Genocide

In Germany, the notion of “two dictatorships,” i.e., Adolf Hitler’s rule by terror followed by forty years of state socialism, has long been deployed by the political center to draw an equivalency between the two regimes and sanctify the Federal Republic as the ultimate victor of history — a tolerant, democratic state that drew the correct lessons from Germany’s troubled past and dispensed with radicalism of all stripes.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, that rhetoric has gone into overdrive, with continued efforts to erase the Soviet contribution to defeating Nazism, painting the USSR as merely another totalitarianism, just as sinister as the fascist empire it defeated. Soviet-era memorials have been blown up in European capitals from Latvia to Bulgaria, seeking to erase the — evidently complicated — legacy of state socialism from public memory and inadvertently accepting Vladimir Putin’s own claim that the Red Army’s contributions are his own.

That right-wingers would use the current war to discredit the Soviet past should come as little surprise. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Eastern Europe in particular has seen a whole industry dedicated to painting the entire postwar period as one of Russian occupation and brutal repression. Yet the last few years, no doubt under the impression of Putin’s war, have seen a version of this narrative increasingly adopted by portions of the Left. The Soviet Union is seen as just another form of “Russian colonialism,” to be denounced in the same breath as classical imperialism or the illegal occupation and devastation Palestine. Russia’s war in Ukraine, abhorrent enough as it is, is recast as a “genocide,” at least a cultural one.

This kind of interpretation should be contested. It not only vastly oversimplifies the reality of life in the Soviet Union, where Ukrainians often occupied leading positions in politics and culture, but erases the colonial and truly genocidal nature of Nazi Germany’s war in the East. The Nazis were not just seeking to redraw borders or even impose their domination but pursued the wholesale extermination of entire ethnic and linguistic groups, clearing the land for German repopulation on the bones of the SS’s victims. Never before and never since has humanity witnessed industrialized killing on such a breathtaking scale. That its architects were stopped before they could realize the full extent of their plans will forever remain one of humanity’s greatest achievements, regardless of what happened afterward.

We can reject the current war in Ukraine and the Russian state’s claims to the Red Army’s legacy without forgetting what Victory Day meant to millions of people living under fascist tyranny across Europe. Nor should we forget how fascism emerged — not just as extreme nationalism, but as an organized, violent response to the rise of the socialist movement, an alliance between the propertied classes and the most reactionary political forces against those others who sought to transform society in the interests of the majority. Indeed, at a time when economic decline and social strife are fueling the rise of the far right across Europe, it is vital that we not only remember the feats of those who defeated fascism, but carry forward their struggle today as our own “Midnight of the Century” appears to draw nearer.

A War Against Communism

The causes of World War II, which most historians agree began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and ended with the German capitulation eighty years ago, were manifold, but rooted, ultimately, in the tensions between declining imperialist powers on the one hand and rising competitors on the other. Moreover, the force of the Nazis’ fanatical antisemitism in terms of the war’s sheer brutality should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, a central motivator — not only for Hitler, but also for his backers in the German elite and his collaborators across the world — was the desire to exterminate the Communist threat and with it the prospect of a world beyond capitalism. Without acknowledging that fact, we cannot account for the sheer horror that unfolded across Europe, nor the heroic sacrifice of millions who gave their lives to end it.

From the beginning of his rise, Hitler’s antisemitism was inseparable from his hatred for the workers’ movement. The specter of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” originally conjured up by reactionary White Russians to discredit the Russian Revolution, was seized upon by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg in an effort to conflate the forces of the Left with the country’s Jewish minority in the public eye and create a worldview more palatable to big capital, whose war chests the Nazis needed to fund their crusade. In an infamous meeting between Hitler, other leading Nazis, and captains of German industry held in the weeks leading up to the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections that sealed the Nazis’ hold on power, Hitler openly boasted that these would be the last free elections in Germany, after which the Nazis would wipe the workers’ movement off the map and make the country for private property. Capital happily agreed.

In the 1930s, Nazi efforts to win support abroad relied primarily on anti-communism rather than antisemitism as such. The official pact between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan that laid the groundwork for the war was officially known as the “Agreement against the Communist International” and contained secret provisions directed against the Soviet Union specifically. Years before war engulfed the world, the two sides engaged in a proxy war of sorts by supporting opposite sides in the Spanish Civil War. While the Germans and Italians provided Francisco Franco’s forces with weapons and money, the Soviet Union and the Communist International dispatched thousands of selfless fighters who realized, far more keenly than the rest of the would-be Allies, that a victory for freedom in Spain would be a victory for freedom everywhere. Franco’s complete victory over the democratic forces in April 1939 would foreshadow the German conquest to come.

Despite countless signs that Germany and Japan were preparing wars of conquest, France, Britain, and the United States resisted Soviet attempts to form an anti-German alliance. Ultimately, the Soviets had little choice but to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany. The secret (and highly illegal) clauses of this pact, including the division of Poland and Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, have been discussed exhaustively by historians keen to prove an equivalence between fascism and Communism.

But those same historians fail to explain why, if the West was so keen to fight fascism, they rebuffed Soviet diplomatic overtures throughout the 1930s and why the United States, which, according to its current president, “did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result,” waited until December 1941 to intervene, when the Holocaust and enslavement of Europe was already well underway. Could it be that their desire to see communism take a hit in Eastern Europe at least temporarily outweighed their devotion to democracy and human rights?

The Legacy of the Resistance

History is messy, and both the Soviets and the Americans sought to delay the fight with Nazi Germany as long as they could. But if the fascists waged World War II in the name of destroying communism, millions more resisted the onslaught not only in the name of democracy or national sovereignty, but as part of the struggle for a better world.

Whether the partisans in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece who drove the Germans from their lands, the underground resistance cells that terrorized the German occupiers and their collaborators in France, or the roughly thirty-five million Soviet citizens who served in the Red Army — the war against fascism was unthinkable without the struggle for socialism. The catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century — the senseless slaughter of the Great War, the pain and privations following the 1929 stock market crash, and not least the hitherto unimaginable devastation of World War II — were widely seen as products of capitalism’s inherent instability and would only repeat themselves as long our societies remained caught in its stranglehold. They would certainly be horrified by contemporary attempts to conflate that project with the fascist nightmare they gave their lives to oppose.

Much has transpired in the eighty years since Soviet troops planted the red flag on the Reichstag — not least, the Soviet Union and Communist movement it led collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Our world has since been ruled by “capitalism alone,” to quote the title of a brilliant book by Serbian economist Branko Milanović — a world in which the great battles of the twentieth century appear as romantic set pieces, and any systemic alternative to the status quo fanciful at best.

For some on the Left, glorification of the past serves in this context as a kind of ersatz for real-world struggle: they might not be able to make a difference today, but they can wave a Soviet flag or even cheer on the contemporary Russian army as if it was somehow a continuation of the anti-fascist crusade. Since the war in Ukraine began, these kinds of red LARPers have found their match in the legions of nationalists and revisionist historians who not only highlight war crimes committed by the Red Army or Communist-aligned partisans, but go so far as to suggest that Nazi collaborators were by and large merely misunderstood patriots, who chose to side with German totalitarianism against the ultimately more oppressive Soviet version.

For socialists and anti-fascists of all stripes, it should be clear that either form of historical revisionism and geopolitical chessboarding are not only dishonest, but politically irresponsible. Our world may not be that of eighty years ago, but it increasingly feels like the one that preceded World War II, as right-wing forces consolidate their hold over parliamentary democracy and the climate crisis contributes to a general sense of civilizational doom. If our century is to have any chance of ending in a better place than the twentieth did, we need not a great war, but a great transformation before it is too late. The partisans of World War II may prove inspiring today, but they offer us little guide to action in any direct sense.

The victory over Nazi Germany, which would have been impossible without the sacrifices of Soviet soldiers, not least including millions of Ukrainians, belongs to the great achievements of the twentieth century. It may very well have saved human civilization from centuries of darkness. We all owe them a debt of eternal gratitude that — more so than the question of which diplomats lay a wreath where — ought to be at the heart of today’s commemorations. May their sacrifice have not been in vain.