Soviet memorials must be defended. Treaties are to be respected.

Defending Soviet memorials also means showing up in large numbers on May 8 and9 - Photo: Little Polar Bear 2015 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Unsere Zeit

By Ulrich Schneider, Unsere Zeit, 28 March 2025. Translated by Helmut-Harry Loewen.

It may be a bit unusual to remind readers in a Communist Party newspaper of an ancient Roman legal principle that is of paramount importance for the functioning of capitalist economic relations and international politics: “Pacta sunt servanda” (“agreements must be kept”). With this principle, the “right of the strongest” was replaced by a civil principle of equality. But what does this have to do with the political treatment of Soviet memorials in the 80th year after the military defeat of fascist barbarism?

Once again, there are calls in the public debate, this time with reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for Soviet memorials commemorating the victory over fascism, some of which are associated with military symbolism, to be removed from public spaces. The legitimacy of the demands of the Springer press and other interested parties is often justified by the fact that such memorials have already been removed in various Eastern European countries.

Reference is made to the Baltic states, where not only has the stigmatization of everything Russian been taking place for many years, but also the memorials to the liberation honouring the liberators have been systematically dismantled and banned from public spaces. The way in which SS volunteers and Nazi collaborators have been simultaneously turned into new “national heroes” in these countries because they had fought for the “freedom of the Baltic States” is a visible expression of the historical revisionism in these countries. The fact that the state's historical narrative “forgets” their complicity in the murders of thousands of Jewish people from the Baltic states and those deported to the ghettos of Riga or the Salaspils concentration camp from other parts of the territories occupied by German fascism makes clear the extent to which removal of Soviet memorials is linked to Nazi glorification.

The same can be seen in Poland. In the course of so-called de-communization, not only street names, public memorials and squares that could serve as reminders of the socialist period were discarded. Soviet memorials to the liberation and the liberators have also been razed or in some cases transformed into a Polish nationalist historical narrative. In Poland, there is even a law that criminalizes the discussion of Polish collaboration in antisemitic pogroms. It is undisputed that Poland was invaded by the German Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939 and that countless crimes were committed by the Wehrmacht and SS against the civilian population. There is also no dispute that the Polish resistance struggle of the “Home Army” and the “People's Army” played a major role in the liberation of the country from Hitler's barbarism. However, it is also well-known that the fascist policy of extermination targeting Jewish people also relied on Polish collaborators.

Linked to these historical narratives is a state policy of remembrance that has systematically excluded Russian veterans from the commemoration of liberation, and not just since the war in Ukraine. In 2020, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was invited to speak at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp by units of the Soviet armed forces on January 27, 1945, but Russian President Vladimir Putin and other representatives of the Russian Federation were deliberately excluded. The same theatrics were staged again in 2025.

It would go beyond the scope of this article to list all the examples in other Eastern European countries. For example, the political dispute over the “night-and-fog” ["Nacht-und-Nebel"] operation of removing the monument to Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev, the liberator of the city of Prague, and commander-in-chief of the units that liberated the Auschwitz extermination camp, has not been forgotten. Although this act of public vandalism took place five years ago, it is still vivid in the memories of Prague's antifascists.

The political attacks on Soviet memorials, particularly in the former German Democratic Republic, fit into this context, where there are hundreds of Soviet war gravesites and memorials to the liberation and the liberators. But there are also such memorials in the western part of Germany. Only a few have supra-regional significance, such as the Stukenbrock memorial site, where over 65,000 Soviet victims are buried and an obelisk commemorates this burial place of Soviet forced labourers, prisoners of war and other victims of war. Readers of this paper know that this site has been part of the social culture of remembrance of antifascist and peace movements in the Federal Republic of Germany for more than five decades.

The Treptower Park memorial site in Berlin, where central commemorative rallies have been held since 1949, is of similar importance. Initially they were organized by the state, but with the end of the GDR they continued to be organized by volunteer groups which enjoy broad support. The significance of this site in the GDR's antifascist self-image was demonstrated in the winter of 1990, when Nazi graffiti was discovered on a large scale. A few days later, several tens of thousands of people gathered there at an antifascist rally in defence of this memorial site. In fact, there are a dozen memorials and places of remembrance in Berlin relating to the Soviet liberators and the liberation of the city in 1945. This has been a thorn in the side of historical revisionist forces of various stripes for many years. We still remember the campaign by the conservative CDU Berlin together with the Bild newspaper: “The tank must go!”, which called for the removal of the Soviet memorial in Berlin's Tiergarten. However, unlike in the Baltic states or Poland, there is a legal hurdle for such right-wing populist campaigns that can only be overcome if international agreements are violated. As part of the Two Plus Four treaties, the German government and the then GDR government committed to guaranteeing the preservation and protection of Soviet memorials. International agreements on the protection of war cemeteries also regulate the permanent right of dead soldiers to lie in state in all regions where war victims are buried. In connection with this, the memorials are under international protection. Should a German government decide, as it intensifies its ideological war readiness, that Soviet war graves and their memorials should be removed, then the mass graves on the territory of the Russian Federation, especially in the Volgograd (Stalingrad) region, would also be called into question.

As it is clearly not so easy in Germany to clear away Soviet memorials by political fiat, ideological preparation can be encouraged at the level of “scholarship.” Self-proclaimed “experts” discuss the reasons why it would make sense to remove such memorials. In mid-February 2025, for example, the Bundeswehr Centre for Military History and Social Sciences and the “Military Cultures of Violence” of the German Research Foundation (DFG) organized a panel debate on the topic of “Illegitimate violence and cultures of violence in Russian and Soviet wars of the past and present.” During this debate, the Bundeswehr “expert,” Dr. Kristiane Janeke, presented the audience with the insight that the experiences of Poland and the Baltic countries showed that if there was the political will to do so, Soviet monuments could be torn down without any moral ifs-ands-or-buts. At the same time, she backpeddled a bit to say that there were, after all, moral limits in light of German history. The cruelty of German warfare in the East presents a challenge and a problem in the debate about German cultural memory. Such “scholarly” discourses have not yet had the desired effect, but they indicate the direction of thought on the matter.

There is a dispute in Berlin and Saxony about a Soviet memorial on Olbrichtplatz in Dresden. Proponents of demolition, claiming that the memorial is “in need of renovation,” were unable to prevail, but the decision was made to “contextualize” it. In “Junge Welt,” one could read the ideological direction of the new reinterpretation, as it was developed by the Kunsthaus Dresden in 2023 and now about to be implemented: “Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the debate about Soviet monuments has flared up in many countries. In Germany, too, there have been calls for the demolition of Soviet memorials, including ... in Dresden. … [T]he classification of the memorial and of May 8th as a day of liberation raises questions that are important for a future contextualization, not least against the background of a pluralistic culture of remembrance in Europe and a differentiated remembrance of the violent history of Eastern Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century.”

In September 2019 and in subsequent resolutions on a “European vision of history,” the European Union Parliament made clear what it meant by the catchphrase “a pluralistic culture of remembrance in Europe.” We are now supposed to believe — and European funding is only available to fortify such positions — that the Second World War was started by the agreement of two dictators in August 1939, and that the military defeat of Nazi barbarism in 1945 was not actually a liberation in Eastern Europe, but merely the replacement of one dictatorship with another, so that May 8, 1945, if at all, can be seen as a holiday for the liberation by the Western Allies. The Bundeswehr provided the background music for such a scenario with its conference on “illegitimate violence by the Soviet armed forces.”

It would come as no surprise to anyone if, in the run-up to May 8, 2025, some conservative CDU/CSU grandees, assisted by representatives from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), were to be come forward to propel the topic of “razing Soviet memorials” through the media. In such a case, even antifascists and leftists can invoke the bourgeois legal system. “Pacta sunt servanda!”, which in this case means: ”Hands off Soviet memorials and commemorative monuments in Germany.”

— Ulrich Schneider is Secretary General of the International Federation of Resistance Fighters (FIR) - League of Antifascists.

Original article: “Sowjetische Ehrenmale müssen verteidigt warden. Verträge sind einzuhalten.” Ulrich Schneider, Unsere Zeit. Sozialistische Wochenzeitung der DKP, 28. März 2025.