/ world today news/ The Americans want an Eastern European country to speed up the destruction of monuments to the heroes of the Red Army. This was stated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergey Lavrov. It can be assumed that it is about Poland or Bulgaria, where in recent years monuments of liberating heroes have been subjected to acts of vandalism and even given for scrap. In these countries, the United States conducts active anti-Russian propaganda. /Russian. ez./
On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave an interview to three radio stations: Sputnik, Ekho Moskvy and Govorit Moskva. Among other things, he said that the United States is demanding that the demolition of monuments to the heroes of World War II in one of the Eastern European countries be accelerated. “We know what work the Americans are doing in (European) capitals, what messages they are conveying,” he said, commenting on his earlier statement that Washington is using the Ukrainian crisis to spoil relations between Russia and the EU countries.
The US is rewriting the Soviet past
“It has come to the point that in one of the Eastern European countries that was liberated by the Red Army, American emissaries are demanding that the government speed up the demolition of monuments to the heroes of World War II,” he added, without answering a clarifying question about which country he was talking about.
Let us recall that the Soviet army, not counting the republics of the Soviet Union, liberated Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia (now two separate states – the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Austria (the eastern part of the country and Vienna), Romania, Yugoslavia and a number of other countries from fascism .
Most Soviet monuments were installed in these countries. But there are monuments to the Soviet soldier in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland and France. In most central European capitals, these monuments stand in cemeteries where soldiers are buried, but in some cities, such as Budapest or Vienna, they are installed in city squares.
Reports of the desecration of monuments to Soviet soldiers have recently come regularly from Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. Apparently, it was one of these countries that the minister had in mind.
Vandalism with a Ukrainian accent
Let us note that in Ukraine there is literally a wholesale demolition of monuments to Lenin and periodic mockery of monuments to Soviet heroes, but so far these phenomena cannot be called a trend, as in other countries of the post-Soviet space. Such barbarism is more typical of Eastern European countries, which Lavrov pointed out. However, we are talking mainly not about the demolition of monuments, but about their desecration.
A week ago, the Foreign Ministry demanded a thorough investigation into the desecration of a monument to Red Army soldiers in the center of Sofia by vandals. “The particular cynicism and provocative nature of this action was manifested in the fact that it was carried out on the eve of a great historical event – the 70th anniversary of the victorious end of the Second World War, in which the greatest sacrifices were made by the Soviet army and the Soviet people,” the ministry emphasized, noting that “This is not the first time that the current leadership of Bulgaria has demonstrated connivance towards the organizers of such actions.”
As reported, on the memorial inscription at the base of the stele, vandals wrote in yellow and blue paint a call to demolish the memorial. Previously, the monument to Soviet soldiers in the center of Sofia had been painted more than once.
The loudest story with an attempt to demolish the monument to the Soviet wars in Bulgaria revolved around the monument to “Alyosha” (the prototype of the monument was a simple soldier Alexei Skurlatov) in the city of Plovdiv. Back in the late 1980s, when pro-Western leaders came to power in Bulgaria, the authorities declared the monument “a symbol of the Soviet occupation.” The city mayor’s office tried several times to dismantle “Alyosha”, but the townspeople organized a round-the-clock vigil and defended the monument. The Supreme Court put an end to this story in 1996. He ruled that the monument is a monument to the heroes of World War II and cannot be destroyed.
The monument to the Soviet liberator soldier in Vienna was repeatedly subjected to acts of vandalism. In February, unknown persons doused the monument with black paint. In May last year, it was decorated with yellow and blue paint, imitating the flag of Ukraine, and in April 2012, the monument was doused with red paint.
“When everything is bad, you can always invent an enemy in the form of the past”
According to MGIMO associate professor and European specialist Kirill Koktysh, Sergei Lavrov was talking about Bulgaria. “The Soviet army really liberated this country. However, like many other Eastern European countries. Largely because of Bulgaria’s position, the construction of South Stream failed,” Koktysh told the VZGLYAD newspaper.
The interlocutor believes that the Americans need to keep the Bulgarian government. “The Bulgarian government made a fantastically stupid decision by refusing to Moscow to build a gas pipeline. Naturally, this caused damage to the country’s economy. Now Americans need to come up with a reason to displace the real economic problem and replace it with another – fictitious one. When everything is bad, you can always invent an enemy in the form of the past,” Koktysh said.
“The point of the American emissaries’ demands is to create a new elite. The former elite and history are being crossed out. This is a blank slate format. Like, everything that happened before was bad. And what will happen in the future will, by definition, be good. The negative energy of the masses is directed towards the demolition of monuments. People forget about economic problems and social unrest,” the interlocutor said.
Moreover, the political scientist noted that this is not the first time in Eastern Europe that monuments to the heroes of the Second World War have been demolished. “We remember the cases in Estonia. It all started in Poland. It was Warsaw that was the first to adopt the lustration law and try out all these technologies. Then the same scheme will be implemented according to the established pattern in Ukraine and Bulgaria,” concluded Koktysh.
“The USA is forcing Poland to forget about the occupation of the Third Reich”
Polish political scientist, director of the European Center for Geopolitical Analysis Mateusz Piskorski is inclined to think that Sergei Lavrov had Poland in mind. According to the interlocutor, it is there that unprecedented propaganda and revisionism are being carried out. “Given the degree of pressure that the United States puts on the Polish leadership, it is possible that Sergei Lavrov had this country in mind. Polish elites usually succumb very strongly to American pressure,” he told the newspaper VZGLYAD.
“There is now a problem between Polish society and the American establishment. It lies in the fact that the United States is forcing Poland to forget about the occupation of the Third Reich. In addition, at the expense of the Americans, a number of events are being carried out in Poland that put Germany under Hitler and the USSR on the same level. Moreover, there is intensified propaganda of the so-called occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union,” Piskorski said.
Moreover, the interlocutor notes that a discourse that promotes the idea that the USSR is worse than fascist Germany is gaining momentum in Poland.
“In Poland, various conferences, seminars, and symposiums are held at which the negative role of the USSR during the Second World War is discussed. For example, there is an author like Anna Appelbaum, who is the wife of the Speaker of the Polish Parliament Sikorski. At the expense of American funds, she writes books that are actively published in Poland. They say that the USSR committed more crimes in Poland than the Third Reich,” noted the Polish political scientist.
We would like to add that at the end of February, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed concern about the increasing incidence of vandalism against World War II monuments in Poland. The reasons, according to the Foreign Ministry, “lie in the open anti-Russian campaign carried out by some Polish politicians and the media and their deliberate falsification of historical events.” They also noted that the fact that the Polish authorities also joined the “war on monuments” is of particular concern.”
According to diplomats, in February of this year, graves in the cemetery of Red Army soldiers in the city of Kalisz were desecrated, a memorial plaque to liberating soldiers in the city of Aleksandrow Lodz was broken, and a monument to Polish and Soviet paratroopers in the city of Lubasz was desecrated.
Also in Poland, last December, unknown persons desecrated a military cemetery in the city of Bialystok, where Red Army soldiers were buried. Unknown people tore 26 tombstones with a red star out of the ground and scattered them throughout the cemetery. The city authorities promised to restore the graves.
In the fall, monuments were desecrated in the Polish cities of Pruszcz Gdański (Pomeranian Voivodeship) and Nowy Sacz (Lesser Poland Voivodeship). Another incident occurred in August in the Warmian-Masurian voivodeship of Poland, where a monument to Red Army soldiers was desecrated. And in mid-May last year, unknown persons smashed a board on a monument to Soviet soldiers at the memorial cemetery on Reymonta Street in Raciborz, Poland.
Also in May, in the town of Penenzhno in northern Poland, vandals again desecrated the monument to twice Hero of the Soviet Union, commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front, Army General Ivan Chernyakhovsky.
In addition, it is in Poland that there are cases where monuments were demolished by decision of local authorities. Last July, in the city of Limanova, by order of the municipal authorities, a monument of gratitude to the Red Army was demolished. Last spring, the country’s authorities called for the demolition of the monument to Chernyakhovsky. The then Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who was openly pro-American, said that the Soviet general was “responsible for the arrest and deportation of several thousand Home Army soldiers to camps, many of whom died.” However, the fate of the monument has not yet been decided.
Last fall, vandals in Prague desecrated a monument to Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev, painting its lower half pink. Konev was a famous Soviet commander who received many medals and orders, including “For the Capture of Berlin” and “For the Liberation of Prague.” In the Czech Republic, this is one of the few Soviet monuments that have survived to this day. After the communists were removed from power in 1989, most of these monuments were demolished or sent to museums. The story of the IS-2 tank in the Prague 5 area in 1991, which a group led by the notorious artist David Černý, repainted pink, a symbol of pacifism, became very famous.
In recent years, the issue of moving the Konev monument to a less visible place or lowering the pedestal has been considered several times in different instances in Prague. But no action has been taken yet.
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