Institute of Democracy and Cooperation

December 2008 - debate on revisionism in the Baltic states

Publication day: 15/4/2009

On 2 December 2008, a debate was held at IDC Paris between Mikhail Ioffe, a lawyer from Latvia, and Edouard Husson, lecturer in modern history at the Sorbonne

Ioffe is principally known for having defended Vassiliy Kononov, a former Soviet partisan born in Latvia in 1923, decorated by the Soviet Union but prosecuted by the Latvian authorities and convicted as a war criminal in 2004. Ioffe took the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where the conviction was overturned.

The Kononov case raises many questions which are of interest to the Institute. First, the question of historical memory: how are the great events of the 20th century remembered? Whereas the Second World War became one of the supreme moral reference points for the Soviet Union, as it is indeed for Britain and America, in the Baltic States the Allied victory of 1945 is presented instead as the beginning of an “occupation” by the USSR.

The view that Latvia was “occupied” by the Soviet Union, whereas in fact it was annexed by it, has had various consequences, from the creation of “museums of occupation” in the Baltic capitals to a strict citizenship policy which denies citizenship to large numbers of Russian-speakers. It has also led to war crimes prosecutions such as that of Kononov and to a certain historical revisionism on the part of certain figures in public life in the Baltic states. This revisionism includes the creation of military cemeteries at which people are honoured who died fighting on the German side, including in the SS.

Second, the question of how human rights are interpreted and applied is one on which the Institute has done work. Kononov’s case highlights the radical differences which can come when universal humanitarian principles are applied; the silence with which the European Union reacts to the treatment of the Russian minority in the Baltic states is also a striking example of the same phenomenon.

Mikheil Ioffe gave an account of the prosecution and conviction of Kononov: he also drew the audience’s attention to examples of historical revisionism in Latvia. He welcomed the decision of the Strasbourg court to overturn the conviction and expressed his hope that the ruling will be upheld on appeal. He argued that the prosecution of Kononov was undertaken by the Latvian authorities with the specific intention of correcting the “errors of the Nuremberg tribunal” – the phrase comes from the ruling which convicted Kononov in 2004, and refers to the view, widely held in Latvia, that the USSR was itself a criminal state and should therefore never have been allowed to appoint judges to Nuremberg. Yet contesting or denying the findings of the Nuremberg tribunal is in fact a crime in certain European countries, including France.

In response, Edouard Husson, a noted expert on the history of Nazi Germany who teaches a seminar on the Holocaust at the Sorbonne, spoke of historical revisionism in general and of the Baltic states in particular. Husson argued that anti-Communism is used by some historians and politicians to provide excuses for Nazism, whereas in fact the Nazi project - and especially the invasion of the 1941 - had been a uniquely evil endeavour. The invasion had had a specifically genocidal intent, including the intent to reduce large percentages of the vanquished populations to slavery, and to kill or deport the rest, something which Communism had never had. The concept of “anti-totalitarianism”, however understandable, should not be used to mitigate or excuse the specific nature of the Nazi regime.

Husson was particularly concerned to learn of the recent publication in Latvia of the Russian translation of a book which exonerates SS Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln,a senior SS and police leader in the occupied Soviet Union. In his opinion, Jeckeln was one of the worst of all the Nazi war criminals and any attempt to attenuate his record should be strongly rejected and exposed. He announced his intention to publish a review of the book on the web site of his seminar.