Summary/Abstract |
Fighting over history is in season again in Eastern Europe. This year’s 75th anniversary of the end of World War II served as a particularly easy catalyst for revisionism. The year began ominously as Russian President Vladimir Putin, sitting around a table in the Kremlin, lectured leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) on the proper historical context of the outbreak of the war. That somewhat awkward encounter was itself a response to an earlier European Parliament resolution that advocated tearing down war monuments, insinuated that the Soviet Union shared culpability with Germany for instigating the war, and blamed Russia for ‘whitewashing crimes committed by the Soviet totalitarian regime’.
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