/ world today news/ The Baltic states are outraged by the demolition of the memorial plaques once placed in Russia in memory of the victims of the repressions. Where and why were these signs put up at the time, why is the reaction of the Baltic states so sharp, and what does all this have to do with real repression?
Lithuania has protested to Russia over the removal of a memorial sign in Vladimir honoring Lithuanian Archbishop Metsislovas Reinis. Chargé d’affaires of the Russian Embassy in Lithuania, Alexander Elkin, was summoned to the ministry and handed a protest note. The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry called the incident an “act of vandalism” and called for the “immediate restoration of the memorial plaque”.
A few days earlier, the Estonian Embassy in Moscow sent a similar note to the Russian Foreign Ministry in connection with the destruction of a memorial to the victims of Soviet repression at a cemetery in Vladimir. Pre-World War II Estonian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Johan Leidoner was also mentioned on one of the memorial plaques.
Estonian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikkel Tam noted that Estonia intends to request Leidoner’s memorial plaque if the Russian side decides that it can no longer be in the cemetery where the general’s remains are still located. “We raise the issue of finding Leidoner’s burial site, exhuming his remains and reburying them in the soil of his birthplace,” Tam said.
The memorial at the “Prince Vladimir” cemetery in Vladimir was erected in 1999. It is a one and a half meter high brick wall that stood at the entrance to the cemetery, on which four memorial plaques were screwed: to the Estonian general Johan (Ivan) Leidoner , of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania in the early 1920s, and later of the Catholic Archbishop of Mogilev Mecislovas Reinis, the Polish politician, one of the organizers of the Warsaw Uprising Armia Kraiova Jan Jankowski and the abstract “Japanese soldiers”, i.e. prisoners of war , although this refers to Strategic Intelligence General Akikusa Shun.
The cemetery is in close proximity to the city prison. From 1948 to 1953, the famous prison was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR, called the “Vladimir Special Purpose Prison” and was used to hold high-ranking prisoners of war, spies, war criminals, traitors, nationalists and white émigrés . And this is not an investigative arrest, but a prison – there the sentence imposed by the court was served, if the sentence indicated detention in prison conditions, and not in a camp. The most famous prisoner of this period is considered to be Hitler’s Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist.
Dead prisoners are buried in the cemetery. For example, Kleist was sentenced to 25 years for war crimes (he had already received 15 years in Yugoslavia, but the USSR secured his extradition to Moscow) and died in prison of a heart attack in 1953.
Kleist is the only German general who died in Soviet captivity, therefore, during the period of establishment of relations between Germany and the USSR, the fate of his funeral was a separate topic of diplomacy. After Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow in 1955, by agreement with Nikita Khrushchev, an amnesty was announced for German prisoners of war. All of them were repatriated to FRG and GDR. Von Kleist’s remains were exhumed, dressed in a field marshal’s uniform, and sent home for reburial.
In the 1990s, there was a wave of “repentance” for various repressions, on top of which specialized memorials appeared in different parts of the country. The national personalization of the “victims of repression” is striking. Relatively speaking, there is a large cemetery, for example, the one mentioned in Vladimir or Levashovskogo in St. Petersburg, where the victims of real repressions, including those of 1937-1939, are actually buried. There, as a rule, there is a monument to all innocents killed.
And then, in the conditional year of 1992, the Poles came, agreed and erected a separate monument only for the Poles. The point is not even that in this way the Poles turn out to be more important than all the others buried there, but in a confusion of concepts. The Poles erected monuments to all at the same time, especially in Siberia. In this way, the officers of the Home Army were equated with the nobility exiled to Siberia as a result of the three Polish uprisings of the 19th century.
The activism of the Poles became particularly irritating after the demolition of Soviet monuments on Polish territory took on the character of a state campaign. The Seimas adopted laws for the destruction of monuments to Soviet soldiers – and began their complete destruction. The answer was the quiet liquidation of specific Polish memorials that were erected without permission, for example in Tomsk and Novosibirsk.
Moreover, in at least one case, the initiative was taken by local residents. The fact is that Polish activists and representatives of the local Polish diaspora erected a cross and a memorial near a certain holiday village. The local residents tensed up, they just didn’t like such an unexpected neighborhood, and no one asked them for their opinion on the installation of the memorial. As a result, the village council proactively demolished the Polish cross, as it was built on his land without obtaining the appropriate permission.
A similar situation occurred in the northern part of the Perm region, in the remote taiga. A memorial was erected there by Lithuanians from the Siberian Road youth movement on the site where 48 Lithuanians were evicted in the 1940s. In Vilnius, the organized trips of students to Siberia for the purpose of pilgrimage to the places of exile are part of the internal education of a specific Lithuanian patriotism. The “Siberian Path” program has also been in place since the 1990s, and no one previously interfered with it, although as a result Lithuanian students received a powerful vaccine against Russophobia.
At the same time, the Lithuanians approached the issue carefully. We found a contractor in Perm and they installed a concrete structure in the distant taiga in the form of a cross, which is placed at road intersections in Lithuania. This is the national tradition. The local authorities ignored all this at the initial stage, but if such an initiative of foreign citizens and organizations is allowed, then one day it will turn out that everything will be filled with foreign memorial signs and symbols. And now they had to dismantle the concrete crosses with the help of construction equipment.
In the late 1990s, the Polish-Lithuanian activity of placing various types of memorial signs and plaques in Russia took the form of a flood. No one really keeps track of exactly who is putting all of this up. Somehow it wasn’t ethical to reveal the details. Once someone has been persecuted, it means that they are automatically a victim of repression. The perestroika press did much to ensure that the narrative of the eternal excuse for various repressions went unchallenged. Any attempt to explain that each case is individual is perceived as a moral outrage. Poles and Lithuanians, Estonians and even Japanese were considered right by definition, and Russian or Soviet identity was considered evil.
But take, for example, the Japanese general Akikusa Shun. In the intelligence department of the Kwantung Army, he led the so-called “Russian fascists” for many years and formed White emigrant detachments to fight against the USSR. And it was he who issued the order for the slaughter of Soviet prisoners of war in a camp where human experiments were conducted as part of a program to develop biological weapons. The former plaque on the brick wall of Prince Vladimir’s cemetery is dedicated, judging by the hieroglyphs, to all Japanese soldiers who died in Soviet captivity.
But only Akikusa Shun was imprisoned in Vladimir. And ordinary soldiers are kept in camps in Siberia and work on construction sites of the national economy. There are their mass graves, which are seen – and nothing bad threatens them. The military cemeteries of Italian and Hungarian soldiers in the Volgograd and Voronezh regions were landscaped in the same way, although not all veterans in Russia liked it. There is even cooperation with veteran organizations from Italy, including former Italian prisoners of war.
It is also noteworthy that the dismantling of this type of monuments has the character of retaliatory actions, similar to the mutual expulsion of diplomats. The dismantling of the plaque to the Estonian general Johan Leidoner took place immediately after the destruction of the Soviet monuments in and around Narva.
Something similar is happening, by the way, in Belarus. Recently, the destruction of Soviet monuments and Belarusian memorial signs in Poland led to the dismantling of monuments to the Polish People’s Army in the Catholic cemetery in Grodno and in the field in Solonty, where there is a mass grave of the Home Army, which unleashed terror on the Soviet army and the non-Polish civilian population of the Vilnius region after 1945.
It is quite possible, for example, that a commemorative plaque placed by the Polish diaspora in Schlissenburg still hangs today. In recent years, it has been a kind of meeting place for the Polish diaspora, as well as the Levashovo cemetery. But the more Russophobic politics in Poland become, the more obvious the possibility of a backlash. A few months ago, the Poles, led by the consul in St. Petersburg, were simply not allowed to the cemetery. They performed a ritual at the gates, singing songs and reading poetry, and then the Polish media accused the Russians of “losing national memory” and anti-Polish politics.
This is also an important detail. From the point of view of Poland and the Baltic countries, only the Russians should repent and sprinkle their heads with ashes. All of Russia – from Vyborg to Magadan – should be forced to put up crosses and schoolchildren should be taken there as part of Russophobia training. This is the practical implementation of the ideological concept of “non-heroic memory”, which was supposed to lead to total changes in the national identity of the peoples of Russia.
Another thing is that the conditional “silence” around what is happening raises questions. It’s an old Russian tradition: we don’t like to hurt other people’s feelings. Even at the expense of your own feelings. And of course, there will never be decisions at the state level to dismantle foreign monuments on the Polish model, regardless of their ideological meaning. It is more of a mass process. This makes me happy and sad at the same time. It is worrying because too much was done in the field of national memory in the 1990s. The real one, not the “unheroic” one. And that’s good, because national self-awareness hasn’t disappeared since then. And the priorities are set correctly. Even at the village council level.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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