We often hear that the current return of tyranny and military aggression is the result of Russia’s inability or unwillingness to confront the crimes of the past. This narrative usually focuses only on internal Soviet crimes: forced collectivization, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the Gulag, and the like. Some of these crimes were nominally acknowledged, but there was no attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice. The democratic forces during perestroika were largely opposed to transitional justice.
However, one of the most politically sensitive Soviet crimes is almost always left out of the discussion. And Russia's failure to confront this very crime is far more dangerous, affecting the fate of numerous nations.
That crime was the Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe, which lasted for decades and brought death and arrest, the destruction of social and cultural life, and the denial of freedom. The injustice was enormous.
Internal Soviet crimes, while they went unpunished, were at least legally recognized and the victims honored. External aggression and occupation were not. Even Russian dissidents and liberals never risked raising the issue.
Therefore, when it comes to Central and Eastern Europe, there are two concepts of memory and history that usually cannot coexist, that are in conflict and mutually exclusive. They are completely opposed and cannot be reconciled through diplomacy: Soviet liberation versus Soviet occupation.
In post-Soviet states, monuments can be removed and street names changed, but it is far more difficult to achieve sovereignty over memory.
True liberation came only when Soviet troops finally withdrew from Eastern and Central Europe, 45 years after the end of World War II - when the Soviet Union collapsed and the occupied nations found their way to independence. But it was easier to restore or establish statehood and independence than to achieve sovereignty over historical memory.
The positive image of the Soviet Union in its final days and the high expectations of the moment protected Moscow from serious criticism and accusations regarding the occupation of Eastern Europe. This reserved attitude was the result of excessive confidence or perhaps cautious pragmatism - a desire not to provoke Moscow, not to jeopardize its goodwill, not to burden the losers of the Cold War too much. But the most important protection Moscow, of course, enjoyed was due to its status as the victor over Nazism.
Russia, which declared itself the successor to the USSR, built its international political identity on the myth of Soviet liberation, which gives it moral capital and imposes a debt of gratitude on the formerly occupied territories for their “liberation” from Nazism.
Yes, Soviet losses were real. Yet, tragically, those losses enabled the subjugation of peoples who yearned for freedom, replacing one dictatorship with another. The Soviet soldier, embodied in the monuments that still stand today from Berlin to Sofia, was not a liberator. He was an enslaver. No amount of Soviet blood shed in the fight against the Nazis can justify the Soviet role as an occupier.
It is no coincidence that the Soviets were reluctant to even acknowledge the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In modern Russia, any equating of the USSR and the Nazis is a crime. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as parts of Poland, Finland, and Romania. For 22 months, it was a staunch ally of Nazi Germany. This first wave of Soviet occupations cannot be disguised as “the fight against Nazism”: it revealed the Soviets’ true intentions. What followed was a geographically expanded reoccupation. This was a separate war goal, not necessarily related to defeating the Nazis.
Unfortunately, the understanding of the Soviet occupation as a crime has not become an essential part of contemporary European history. It is geographically limited to the East, obscured, underrepresented; it forms part of the histories of individual nations, but does not constitute a strong international narrative shared by the entire continent. Yet this understanding profoundly influences contemporary European life and is crucial to European security. Only when the cruelty and consequences of the Soviet occupation are fully understood can the concerns of Russia’s closest neighbors, their historically grounded fears, and their need for security be understood.
No amount of Soviet blood shed in the fight against the Nazis can justify the Soviet role as an occupier.
The eastern regions of Ukraine are now under occupation by Russian troops. For the first time since 1989, large areas of the European continent, home to millions of people, are under the control of an aggressor state. But it seems that many Europeans have already forgotten what occupation means.
Russian citizenship is imposed by force. In essence, it is a program of mass expulsion, as those who do not agree will be treated as foreigners and forced to leave. Russia is following the same path that the Soviet Union took, for example in the Baltic states, with the aim of Russifying the conquered region, reshaping its national structure and making it part of its state.
Property is confiscated and redistributed. “Settlers” are brought in to form the backbone of the occupation regime. The politics of memory is being perverted: monuments commemorating Soviet crimes are disappearing, Soviet names are being returned to the streets as symbols of Russian domination. All of this is part of an attack on national identity, an attempt to erase it.
Russian security services make extensive use of filtration methods, and anyone deemed politically unreliable can be imprisoned. Severe torture and sexualized violence are widespread. Ukrainian prisoners of war released from captivity testify to the same forms of torture, abuse, and deliberate starvation, aimed at breaking them physically and mentally.
Anyone familiar with the history behind the Iron Curtain will easily recognize the pattern. All of this was a harsh reality for Poland and Lithuania, East Germany and Romania, and others. Mass deportations, the brutal rule of the secret police, the deprivation of property and civil rights... but it never became a real stigma for the USSR, nor later for Russia. It never became something that a nation was ashamed of, something that demanded justice and punishment, recognition and repentance.
And here we are now: the occupier is back. And he's waging war just like the Soviets did.
Vladimir Putin's military has a chilling advantage over Western armies, which go to great lengths to protect their own soldiers. Russia can sustain losses that would be completely unacceptable to any Western country. But at the same time, it is technologically advanced enough to rival Western military technology.
Western science was the first to “drone” warfare, to minimize the presence of troops on the ground and use machines for new tasks. Putin’s army, while using real drones, “drones” people as well. It has made its soldiers expendable, disposable commodities.
With the full-scale Russian invasion, we have entered an era of global moral climate change. Just as a single earthquake can have worldwide consequences, or a single volcanic eruption can pollute the skies over multiple continents, so too is Russian aggression changing the political climate on a global scale.
This is another very real, yet still under-recognized, consequence of the war. Perhaps the most far-reaching of all. With thousands of troops he sends into battle and Ukrainians kill in self-defense, Putin is not just gaining swathes of Ukrainian territory - he is dismantling the world's political landscape, disrupting alliances, exhausting the patience of voters in NATO countries, and dragging us into the hell of moral relativism.
What can be done about this?
Western and southwestern Europe, which never faced the reality of Soviet occupation, must now listen to the voices of those who experienced it firsthand.
It is difficult to say whether Russia will soon be held accountable for the crimes committed against Ukraine. But in order to build a future at all, a real future, it will be crucial to develop a cultural and historical concept that opposes Russia's attempt to divide and rule.
At the initiative of Vaclav Havel, Joachim Gauck and other prominent former dissidents, 23 August, the day of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, is commemorated as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism in the European Union, or Black Ribbon Day. The understanding of the significance of this day could and should be deepened to include the broader perspective of Russian imperialism, which was part of Soviet communist policy but outlived it.
This day should become the focus of a long-term and coordinated policy of remembrance, to strengthen existing institutions such as ENRS - the European Network for Remembrance and Solidarity, which brings together mainly Eastern European countries. We should also build new ones, across continents, to counter both leftist and rightist narratives that continue to justify Russia.
The USSR collapsed because its artificial unity was imposed by violence and repression. The survival of the European Union depends on the persistence of its voluntary unity. But unity is not taken for granted. It is the result of mutual understanding and compassion, of the many cultural bridges that connect people.
It's time to start building.
The article was published in The Guardian and is an adaptation of the author's closing address at the Debate on Europe in Helsinki, 18 May 2025. The author is a Russian novelist in exile. He has lived in Potsdam, Germany, since 2018. His latest novel is The Mine Lady (2025).
Translated and edited by: A.Š.
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