Russian officials have begun to talk very much about adherence to European values, although the Kremlin has been recognizing nothing but the so-called sovereign democracy in the last while. Meanwhile, Ukraine is trying not only to promote European values but also to restore historical memory.
Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev also spoke about his country’s devotion to democratic values and historical memory during his recent visit to Madrid, where the Russian Federation and the Kingdom of Spain signed a declaration on strategic partnership. The declaration notes that “strategic partnership between the two Parties is based on the shared democratic values and the principles of sovereignty, equality, and territorial integrity of states, non-interference into their internal affairs, peaceful settlement of conflicts, mutual respect, and mutual benefit.”
In Madrid the Russian president decided to turn to the experience of “the so-called transit of democracy” in Spain. “What unites us is the fact that both of our states went through the experience of totalitarianism and self-isolation and, therefore, they had to embark on the road of political, economic, and social transformations. Our countries had in fact to get rid of a very grave malady but, at the same time, direct similarities are hardly possible here: Russia and Spain have their own experience of transformation, their own experience of the developing democratic institutions, and their own successes and failures.
“In general, the experience of democratic construction always has a unique nature — the very reason why democracy exists on this planet. All these events are living history that has determined in many respects our present-day and future situations. And today we must seek points of contact in our contradictory and very complicated world and open new fields of cooperation, which will broaden the prospects for the development of relations between our states,” Medvedev said in his speech at the final session of the Russian-Spanish forum Dialogue of Civil Societies on March 2, 2009, at the Queen Sophia Center of Arts.
We can agree with the Russian president in that one should not draw analogies between the ways of reconciliation in Spain and Russia. But the actions of the two countries’ authoritarian and repressive regimes were similar in many respects. The press suffered from harsh censorship, while the political opposition and national separatist movements were severely cracked down upon. All parties (except for the Falange, which ruled Spain, and the Communist Party in the USSR) and trade unions were banned. On the whole, an estimated one million people died in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship, another 700,000 Spaniards were forced to leave their homeland, and 875,000 people were sentenced to serve prison and labor camp sentences. In the Soviet Union the figures were higher by an order of magnitude.
Yet, officially, the Caudillo pursued a policy aimed at overall reconciliation. A grandiose memorial with mass graves of civil war victims was built on his orders in the Valle de los Ca dos, 40 km from Madrid.
Tellingly, for most of Spaniards, Gen. Franco’s mutiny and the ensuing civil war is a tragic page in history. All were to blame for the tragedy — the Republicans as well as the mutineers. This kind of interpretation formed the basis of national reconciliation. The latter was achieved more or less painlessly after Franco’s death in 1975. This was largely possible because of the efforts of King Juan Carlos of Spain, who was and still is the symbol of national unity.
Conversely, present-day Russia is showing an entirely different attitude to historical reconciliation and historical memory. The Kremlin is obviously applying double standards. One standard is Medvedev’s statements in Spain and the signed declaration intended for European “consumption.”
But Russia is taking an altogether different approach to ex-Soviet countries. The proof of a different standard is found in the never-ending commentaries of the Russian foreign ministry which interprets in its own peculiar way Ukraine’s efforts to restore historical memory and the Russian president’s statement on “the so-called Holodomor.” For example, the ministry’s commentary on Nov. 28, 2008, says that “in what can be described as an act of buffoonery, a ‘pantheon’ is being finished in Lviv, on the Field of Mars, next to the Memorial to Soviet warriors who died in the Great Patriotic War, to OUN-UPA fighters guilty of mass-scale killings of Soviet soldiers, civilians, and the peaceful Polish populace in Volyn.”
In all probability, this kind of reaction could have been expected in the Soviet era, when Ukraine was part of the totalitarian empire. But now things are different, and the Russian government ought to understand that, to quote the Ukrainian foreign ministry’s response, “Ukraine is restoring its historical memory, which the Stalinist communist regime tried to destroy by means of the Holodomor, shootings of intellectuals, and bans on the right to know the true history of our people, when such attempts were punishable with years-long imprisonment sentences. We are restoring the names of the Ukrainians who bowed to neither the Hitlerites nor the communist Bolsheviks and laid down their lives for the independence of Ukraine.”
And the Russian president should address the words “we must seek points of contact in our contradictory and very complicated world and open new fields of cooperation, which will broaden the prospects for the development of relations between our states” to himself and put them in practice with respect to neighboring Ukraine. A dialogue at the highest level is lacking between Ukraine and Russia because of the latter’s unwillingness. The West should, in its turn, assess how civilized Russia is by the Russian government’s attitude to such things as Ukrainian history rather than by declarations and assurances of adhering to democratic values. What Russia is doing is, in fact, an attempt to keep the sovereign state of Ukraine from moving towards reconciliation the way Spain once did.
