Victory Day Parade on Red Square on 9 May 2025. Photograph Source: Kremlin.ru – CC BY 4.0

Nobody doubts the difficulty of counting the dead in war. Hence the omnipresent tomb for The Unknown Soldier which commemorates that sad reality. But sometimes deficiencies in counting are about something else. Look at Gaza’s grim counter which seems to have got stuck at 52,000 when everybody knows the number is much higher. Given that by June 2024 over 39000 Palestinian deaths had been recorded, it is hard not to believe that the West has imposed its own moratorium on reporting fatalities; perhaps in some vain attempt to assuage sensitivities back home.

One death toll that is well-known, however, at least to an older generation, is 27 million. That being the number of souls the Soviet Union lost in the Second World War. And it is generally acknowledged, by historians if not by European politicians, that the fight against Fascism could not have been won without that Soviet sacrifice – their costly victory at Stalingrad being the turning point that secured victory for the Allies. And to give the size of that death toll some historical perspective: the loss of 27 million people in 1945 would have equated to wiping out of the entire populations of Poland (24m), Lithuania (2.7m) and Estonia (1.08m).

It is therefore beyond disappointing that Europe’s current political representatives felt unable to show a modicum of respect for the horrendous suffering that preserved Western Civilisation. Indeed, Robert Fico, the Slovakian Prime Minister, who only last year was seriously injured by a far-right assassin, and Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian President, were the sole European leaders in attendance at the 80th anniversary of V.E. Day in Moscow. But whether in attendance or not, attempting to elide that immeasurable Soviet contribution brings nothing but shame on those engaged in such historical revisionism. It also serves to remind us that Fascism was not a movement confined to Nazi Germany.

Kaja Kallas, Vice President of the EU Commission, and well-known Estonian Russophobe, scolded the two leaders for breaking ranks, insisting that they should have marked the day in Kiev. Not wishing to take anything away from the suffering of the Ukrainian people both in WW2 and today, in the West’s proxy war against Russia, but Kalas knows that it was the Soviet army that liberated Slovenia and Slovakia from both the retreating German Nazis and the Fascist Ukrainian Nationalists – the Waffen SS Galicia Division – who were then supporting them. None of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but it is surely appropriate that commemoration day is spent on the soil of the liberators rather than in the country whose Fascist forces forestalled them.

Particularly on days set aside for honouring those killed in war, it is important not to besmirch their memory with political machinations emanating from the present, but unfortunately that is what is now happening. And it is happening because of European initiatives like the 2008 Prague Declaration which is a project aimed at reframing the narrative of WW2 along the lines of a ‘Double Genocide’ in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are viewed as equally complicit in war crimes. Whilst such a revisionist proposal might seem far-fetched given that it is common knowledge that the Soviet army liberated Europe from Nazi Germany – according to historian Geoffrey Roberts 80% of all combat in WW2 took place on the Eastern front – the Double Genocide construct is being deployed in order to whitewash the fact that the war against Fascism was not fought by the whole of Europe. Not only were a number of European states allied with Germany, the so-called Axis powers, but in others, particularly in the East, there was active support for Nazi efforts to exterminate European Jewry. And it is the fact of Nazi collaboration that those states, now liberated from Soviet occupation and part of the EU, are having to come to terms with.

According to the Simon Weisenthal Centre, [SWC] “the rate of Holocaust murder in the Baltics was the highest in Europe.” Many such murders were of individuals or families who were shot by their neighbours, often close to their home. Those neighbours were not criminals or thugs, but ordinary people drawn from all walks of life. Rather than acknowledging that painful reality, the governments of such states, particularly Lithuania, have chosen to downplay their complicity in the genocide by attributing the murders to the actions of a national independence movement seeking emancipation from Soviet occupiers and their communist supporters. The difficulty with that line of argument is that it implies that the murdered Jews supported the Soviet occupation of 1940, which is not true. But even if it were true, why would 220,000 Jews need to be slaughtered for their political views? Because most of these people did not die in battles, or street fights, or any sort of partisan confrontation. They were not even armed, and many were children. And what about the Jews who escaped being murdered and did join the partisans to fight the Nazis, would they be classified as war criminals, guilty of Soviet crimes? Unbelievably, under the Double Genocide dogma formalised into Lithuanian law the answer is yes.

A further problem with this notion of Double Genocide is that in order to make Soviet killings symmetrical with the Nazi genocide, the definition of genocide has to be expanded from that contained in the Genocide Convention. The definition there was specifically drafted after the war to describe Nazi actions directed against ‘a people’, i.e., a genus; and in that case the people were Jews. In order for actions or inactions to be capable of constituting a genocide they have to be directed at ‘a people’ or part of ‘a people’, and not simply at people. And what constitutes ‘a people’ is defined in the convention as something ethnic or racial or religious or national, e.g., like the Palestinians. By expanding the notion of ‘a people’ to include Social or Political groups which is what the Lithuanian Criminal Code has done in order to incorporate Soviet killings, the definition of genocide has become so diluted as to be meaningless.[1]

The ‘Prague Declaration on........

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