Posted on 11/23/2017 6:20:03 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
On Sunday, a high school student from the Siberian city of Novy Urengoy made a conciliatory speech to Germany's parliament...
"I was extremely upset,"Nikolay Desyatnichenko said, "because I saw the graves of people who died innocently, and many of whom wanted to live peacefully and didn't want to fight." He ended his short speech by saying he hoped "the world would never see war again."
Not long after a Bavaria-based Russian posted the speech on Facebook with his outraged comments, thousands of posts ripped apart the high schooler, his school and his family.
Thousands of people recalled the atrocities their grandfathers had suffered at the hands of the Nazi invaders. Because Desyatnichenko is a Ukrainian name, the family was discussed as a traitorous cell. Bloggers filed complaints to the Prosecutor General's Office, accusing the boy of "exonerating Nazism," a crime in Russia. The story got big enough for Vladimir Yabarov, a legislator in the upper house of parliament, to ask the local government to review the curriculum at Desyatnichenko's school.
The backlash was fierce, but also unsurprising. The cult of Russia's World War II victory has been whipped up to a hysterical pitch by Putin, especially during his current presidential term. Russia's role in defeating Nazism has been easiest for Putin to lean on: It's sufficiently recent and interwoven with the family histories of most Russians.
It's also uncontroversial because of the nature of the enemy. Suggesting that German invaders deserved better than dying from harsh deprivation sounds absurd to Russians who know that Josef Stalin subjected many Soviets to the same treatment. Suggesting that German soldiers may not have wanted to fight is akin to blasphemy.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
The Kremlin's pushback did nothing to stem the outrage. Now, many posts on blogs and social media mention the role of Gazprom — the state-controlled Russian natural gas company that sponsors Nikolai's school and, along with its German partner Wintershall, organized the Berlin trip — and Rosneft, the state-owned oil giant for which the boy's father works as a security executive.
These are more than companies: They are pillars of the Putin regime, the main tools of its trade policy, the main conduits of Russia's economic influence on Europe and China. The wealth of Novy Urengoy residents, many of whom work for Gazprom and Rosneft, is the envy of the rest of Russia.
Some Russians responded angrily to Peskov himself. A typical tweet: "On our part, this isn't persecution but the people's opinion. It must be heard so that [Nikolai] and others like him find out what country they live in."
Putin and his team did their best to build up a patriotic frenzy after the 2014 Crimea annexation. They harnessed Russian nationalist resentments for a while by fueling rebellion in eastern Ukraine.
They used World War II imagery to back up their claims to a moral high ground in a growing conflict in the West. But this brand of patriotism is a double-edged sword. In reality, nothing binds Putin's kleptocratic, oil-fed regime to the thin-skinned Russian nationalist's worldview.
What would we say about an American student who wrote sympathetically about Nazis? You’d be ok with that?
The Nazi’s totally back stabbed the Russians and it’s a damn good thing they were stupid enough to do it, otherwise Europe at minimum would be under German / Russian rule.
America would not be the super power now that’s for sure, the world would be a way worse place.
I can’t believe this kid didn’t know his speech would piss people off. He had to know.
The kid goes to a school sponsored by one Putin regime’s pillar oil companies and they rely upon Germany for business. First of all. Secondly, do I think it’s fair to suggest that German soldiers themselves were often forced to fight against their will? That momentary truces between individual troops took place? (Some German soldiers escaped and sought refuge in Russia.) Do I think it’s fair to suggest that Stalin committed evils against the Russian people akin to that Hitler?
Yes.
What Russians went through following their Victory at the hands of their own rarely gets mentioned in Russia today.
America helped Germany overcome their losses via the Marshall Plan and De-Nazifcation.
Russia won the war and...well their journey has been more complicated. It’s a touchy subject to ask a Russian why the losers of WWII (Japan included) have far surpassed them economically.
Russians have every reason to be unforgiving of Germany. Russians have every reason to be unforgiving of communism. Russians have every reason to be unforgiving. We have never been through anything remotely like what they experienced from the Germans and their own government in WW 2. I pray we never do.
Listen to the whole speech of the student. His comment was actually picked out of cotext to make it look like he is for the Nazi.
That’s one crappy blogger and a bunch of idiots who didn’t verify the whole thing before jumping on the boy.
We have a similar bunch here jumping on Putin as being for the Soviet based on his remarks about dissolution of Soviet Union picked out of context the same way.
One thing is important in your post and it is a comment of the Kremlin spokesman which is very reasonable.
What do you want to prove with this story? Yes, Russia has its idiots too.
I don’t think you realize how massive a force these hyper-nationalists are and how embedded their narratives are to the national psyche, largely due to Putin’s own doing and his regime’s propaganda efforts in education, media, and culture.
The most revealing note is the fact that Rosneft and other oil companies are being brought up in discussion. Average Russians are experiencing declining living standards and economic prospects. Putin tries to distract from this with military parades and installments of new monuments, not to mention the foreign adventures in Ukraine+Syria. This is backfiring.
Okay. Now I see what you want to see there after ‘regime crumbles’.
The problem is they haven’t forgiven themselves or each other. And *this* is the key to understanding the Russia of today and its problems. There have not made peace with the past!
Many of the Russians living today are descendants of not just Gulag victims - but Gulag executioners, accusers, KGB-conspirators, etc...
1991 -the USSR collapse was not that long ago.
The more you study the Soviet system and how it operated, you realize that it took conscious obedience on the part of everyone to perpetrate some of the gravest atrocities - not just the evil deeds of those on top. (Hitler’s Germany is the same, despite the reluctant soldiers the boy giving the speech referenced above mentions.) That’s why Germany went through massive de-Nazification, a formal repentance process, and continues to pay the families of Jewish victims reparations.
Russia has rehabilitated Stalin’s image. Lenin remains unburied. And Putin is present for every new installation of a tsar statue because now even Ivan the Terrible is considered not so terrible. Oh and the archives of prison records, Stalin’s purges are CLOSED.
As Gulag and Ukraine-famine historian Anne Applebaum notes, “Like a pandora’s box, the past lies in wait for the next generation.”
Russia did not WIN the war. It succeeded in driving the Germans out of their country, then proceeded to enslave other countries under the guise of “Red Army liberation” from Yugoslavia to the Baltic States, Germany, Austria (they did withdraw from there), Hungary, No. Korea and Manchuria, Kurile Islands (still got them and want the Ryukus), Poland (where the Red Army let the Germans kill hundreds of thousands of Polish freedom/resistance fighters and civilians during and after the Warsaw Uprising - a late friend of mine, Stefan Korbonski, was one of the leaders of the Polish Free Army, and was declared a “Righteous Gentile” by Israel for his help in arming the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto and getting others, esp. children, out before the final assaults), etc.
If it weren’t for US military and economic aid during the war, the Russian part of the Soviet Union might have largely been conquered by the Germans. We gave Stalin over 8-10,000 railroad engines and freight cars, hundreds, if not thousands of aircraft (The Black Widows flew the P 39 Aircobra), finished metals, chemicals, food, etc. including some nuclear materials (I believe this Harry Hopkins run-around-regulations scheme was written up in Col. Jordan’s “Diaries” or by a U.S. Major who was the official liaison to the Soviets in this matter. He was overwritten on security concerns and violations by Hopkins, who later information (VENONA, etc) shows to have been a devoted Soviet sympathizer if not an actual agent/operative or asset).
Remember, the Soviets/KGB killed over 12-17,000 Polish Army Reserve Officers (about half of whom were Jewish), in the infamous Katyn Forest Massacre - there were a few survivors who testified before the US Congress about this) while blaming it on the Germans (who were not in that Forest’s area in winter when the killings took place (it had been occupied by the Red Army until the Germans drove them out of it and revealed the massacre to the world).
Millions of Russian soldiers and civilians died bravely fighting the Germans/Nazis, yet Stalin killed hundreds of thousands of them, as well as a million or more civilians, through his ruthless and incompetence. And after the war, many more were killed by Stalin for falsely supporting the German invaders (though many were killed in Ukraine for fighting the occupying Red Army).
History is very complicated, not simple. We gave freedom to the parts of Europe that we liberated. The Soviets made their conquered lands into prisons and slave labor camps.
Yes, just don’t say that today in Putin’s Russia. The Russian govt is VERY ANGRY about Poland and Ukraine removing their Lenin and Soviet-era monuments.
Well said.
The problem is they are not “unforgiving” of the horrors perpetrated upon themselves by their own. The country has rehabilitated Stalin’s image to that of hero. Lenin’s body remains unburied and in full display in the center of Red Square. And Putin’s government bullies Poland and Ukraine for wanting to remove their Lenin statues and Soviet-era monuments.
‘’’’The problem is they haven’t forgiven themselves or each other. And *this* is the key to understanding the Russia of today and its problems. There have not made peace with the past!’’’’
Khrushchev Denounces “Dictator” Stalin (1956)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DmcOsKP80es
Putin: We’re not going to keep apologising!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wfosguuwTF4
I thought there is a consensus that constant apologising over things of the distant past is counterproductive. Germans are getting a fair share of criticism over their war guilt here.
Do you believe the white American should keep apologising over slavery to this day too?
How exactly Russia is different in that?
What Russians went through following their Victory ........ Before, During and after.
Putin is referring to apologizing to the West, not to the necessary reconciliation needing to take place between STILL LIVING Russians IN Russia who experienced the fall out from the Stalin system directly.
I am of the belief that America has confronted and overcome slavery, and we have enshrined the legacy of the civil rights movement with things like Reagan’s enactment of Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.
In today’s Russia, if you even want to so far as make or show a film condemning or even exploring anything not so appetizing from the Soviet past, you will be banned, rejected, and not get funding from the Culture of Ministry.
ministry of culture* (Typo from response.)
You do realize that the Moscow Times is associated with Soros, right?
JohnBoy, look through Trump’s twitter page. He will rail against (Soros-funded) fake news media all the time but if there is a good article. He will still link to the source (CNN, WaPo, whatever.) A good article is a good article.
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