In the West, 1945 signified the victory of good over evil, but in Stalin's part of Europe evil had been defeated by evil, argues Dr Stefan Auer
The defeat of Nazi Germany is surely an event worth great celebrations. But the end of the second World War celebrated in Moscow this week was achieved at a price that Vladimir Rakhmanin, ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ireland, chose to ignore (The Irish Times, May 6th).
It strengthened Stalin's position in the Soviet Union and the wider world. The spread of communism destroyed millions of human lives and caused immeasurable suffering in the countries of central and eastern Europe.
It is worth remembering that the division of Europe that was symbolically overcome with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the enduring legacies of Stalin's war against Hitler.
The ambassador writes that the war "was won by all members of the coalition, by everybody . . . who proved to be strong, determined and humane and willing to stand up against inhuman power".
Does this include the victims of Katyn's massacres of March 1940, when more than 4,000 Polish army officials were brutally murdered by Stalin's henchmen?
Should the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939 be seen as a part of the Great Patriotic War, or was this Nazi-Soviet alliance that enabled Russia to invade Poland and the Baltic states in 1939 just another testimony to the great strategic wisdom of Generalissimo Stalin?
And what of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, during which the Soviet army waited passively close by, while the Nazis decimated the population of the city, killing some 200,000 people?
No one can belittle the suffering of many ordinary people in the Soviet Union during the war, and the ambassador is right to remind us that no other country suffered greater loss of life. But should we therefore forget the suffering of Stalin's victims?
If a Russian soldier was to survive Nazi captivity, he was likely to be killed upon his return to the Soviet Union as he was considered a traitor.
The tragic fact is that the first victims of the Soviet regime were always the Soviet people. If there ever was such a thing as a Soviet people, it could never have been in their interests to fight for the survival of the Soviet Union.
For that repressive regime cared very little about the survival of its own people. Not surprisingly, no democrats in Russia and elsewhere bemoaned its demise in 1991.
The ambassador argues that "we did not divide the victory into shares in 1945". Was there no meeting in Yalta in 1945, which granted the Soviet Union its "sphere of influence"? Did countries such as Poland, Estonia and Lithuania willingly become an integral part of the Soviet empire?
The end of the war did not bring about the end of suffering. Stalin's victory paved the way for the expansion of the Soviet empire. Stalinist rule was imposed on the countries of central Europe and the Baltic states.
In the West, 1945 signified the victory of good over evil. In Stalin's part of Europe evil had been defeated by evil.
To assert this in no way diminishes the horrors of Nazi Germany. The false dichotomy between the reactionary Nazi regime and the progressive communist regime of the Soviet Union constituted one of the mantras of Soviet propaganda that is as wrong as it is dangerous.
As much as democracy could not have taken root in Germany after the second World War without the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, that is a genuine attempt by the German people to come to terms with their past, democracy in Russia is endangered by the uncritical acceptance of this Soviet-style historiography.
It is regrettable that the political elite in Putin's Russia failed to use the 60th anniversary of the end of the second World War as an occasion for critical reflection on Russia's history, rather than celebrating its imperial greatness. The greatness of a democratic Russia cannot be measured just by its military achievements, but also by its willingness to frankly admit its historic failings.