HISTORY has a peculiar way of testing the moral confidence of nations. Sometimes the test arrives not in war but in remembrance. The recent decision to cancel the official unveiling of a memorial honouring 37 Soviet women who fought for France during the Second World War, only for the monument to be unveiled nonetheless, is one such test. It raises a question that transcends contemporary politics: can a nation honour those who sacrificed for its freedom without first interrogating the passports they carried?

The women belonged to Rodina, an extraordinary all-female partisan detachment formed in 1944 by Soviet forced labourers who escaped from the Nazi camp at Errouville and joined the French Resistance. They were Russians and Belarusians, uprooted by war, subjected to exploitation and confronted with a stark choice between submission and resistance. They chose resistance. Their story occupies a unique place in Europe’s struggle against Nazism. They were not fighting for conquest, ideology or national prestige. They were fighting for survival, dignity and liberation. More remarkably, they were fighting for a country not their own. On French soil, under French skies, they embraced a cause larger than themselves. Such acts belong not merely to the history of one nation but to the shared moral inheritance of humanity. France once understood this instinctively. When Charles de Gaulle visited the Soviet Union in 1966, members of Rodina were among the former Resistance fighters he greeted. The symbolism was unmistakable. De Gaulle, whose stature was forged in........

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