Judge righteously

In the Brezhnev era, there was an anecdote. Vasily Ivanovich says to Petka: “What are you doing with these Beatles, well, I listened - rare shit.” And to Petkin's bewildered question, where did the division commander hear forbidden music, he honestly admits: "But Furmanov sang to me." Then it seemed very funny.

That history repeats itself like a farce would be half the trouble. But to do the opposite - it was impossible to imagine. It turns out it happens. On August 30, 2009, the Russian president, answering questions from the host of the Vesti Nedeli program, Yevgeny Revenko, among other things, confidently stated: “The Parliamentary Assembly of European countries literally just recently put fascist Germany and the Soviet Union on the same level and made them equally responsible for World War II. But this, sorry, is just a cynical lie.”

To expect from a state journalist obsequiously looking into the mouth of the head of state Petka's ingenuous question: where did Dmitry Anatolyevich get such exotic ideas about a widely published and accessible document to anyone, of course, is naive. After all, then the president would have to honestly admit that, apparently, he either did not see the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly and judges by retelling, or if he did, he deliberately distorts its content.

They retold not only the president. This false note has been played on all federal TV channels for two months now. We have to remind you that the resolution “Promotion of human rights and civil liberties in the OSCE region in the 21st century” adopted on July 3, 2009 by the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly does not contain a single word about the Second World War and whoever was responsible for it. It says only that “in the 20th century, European countries experienced two powerful totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalin, which brought with them genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The Assembly reminds the OSCE participating States of their commitment to “clearly and unconditionally condemn totalitarianism” and notes that knowledge of history helps to avoid “the repetition of such crimes in the future, and a frank and thorough discussion of history will contribute to reconciliation based on truth and respect for the memory of the dead.” The recommendatory part of the document contains only a request to the governments and parliaments of the participating states “to completely get rid of structures and behaviors aimed at embellishing the past, trying to return to it or striving to continue to exist in the future, preventing full democratization.”

The wording of the resolution is historically accurate, morally impeccable and absolutely not amenable to misinterpretation. Therefore, the incident with Medvedev's passage can only be viewed as a direct consequence of the unwillingness of the Russian authorities to "completely get rid of the structures and patterns of behavior" of the Stalin era.

Europeans, and Germany above all, strongly condemn their own totalitarian past, Angela Merkel once again, now in Gdansk, apologized for the Nazi nightmare; Europe is unequivocally calling on former members of the communist bloc to follow suit in order to reunite the once-divided continent. Russia, for the umpteenth time, at the next historical fork, turns into an independent-authoritarian dead end. Moreover, the logic of historical lies, based on the division into ours and not ours, is regularly reproduced almost exactly. Its ancestor can be considered Ivan the Terrible, who admonished the Zemstvo judges, who examined complaints about the atrocities of the royal guardsmen, with the order "judge rightly, ours would not be to blame."