We often hear that it is Russia’s inability or unwillingness to deal with the crimes of its past that has led to the restoration of tyranny and the military aggression that we see now. Such a narrative usually focuses only on internal Soviet deeds: forced collectivisation, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the Gulag system and so on. Some of these things were nominally recognised as crimes, but no attempt was made to hold the perpetrators to account. Russia’s perestroika democrats were generally opposed to transitional justice.

However, the most politically sensitive Soviet crime is nearly always left out of the discussion. And Russia’s failure to address this particular crime is far more dangerous and affects the fate of many nations.

That crime is the Soviet occupation of central and eastern Europe, which lasted for decades and resulted in many dead and arrested, the destruction of social and cultural life and the denial of freedom. The injustice was immense.

Internal Soviet crimes, which went unpunished, were at least legally acknowledged and their victims commemorated. External aggression and occupation were not. Аnd even Russian dissidents and liberals never risked raising the issue.

This is why, in relation to central and eastern Europe, there are two concepts of memory and history that normally cannot coexist, that clash with and contradict each other. They are totally opposed; they cannot be reconciled by diplomacy: Soviet liberation versus Soviet occupation.

It was only when Soviet troops finally withdrew from eastern and central Europe 45 years after the end of the second world war that the true liberation came, when the Soviet Union collapsed and occupied nations found their way to independence. But it was easier to restore or establish statehood and independence than to achieve sovereignty of historical memory.

The progressive image of the Soviet Union in its final days, the high hopes of the moment, shielded Moscow from serious criticism and accusations related to the occupation of eastern Europe. This restraint was the result of a surfeit of trust or, maybe, just cautionary pragmatism – the desire not to irritate Moscow and undermine its goodwill, not to burden the losers of the cold war too much. But the most important protection Moscow enjoyed was, of course, based on the status of having been victorious over nazism.

Russia, as the self-proclaimed successor state to the USSR, has built its international political profile on the Soviet liberation myth, which provides moral capital and prescribes to the former occupied territories a debt of gratitude for their “liberation” from nazism.

Yes, the Soviet losses were real. And yet it is........

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