In the context of Russia celebrating the victory in the Great War for the Defense of the Fatherland on May 9th and Ukraine's refusal to recognize any longer Moscow's dominant narratives regarding World War II, the Russian press writes that neo-Nazism is cultivated in the West, while in Ukraine Nazi ideology is included in the education system.
NEWS: “Nazism is being rehabilitated in the West. This process is very simple: after the sentence that starts with the word "true", a comma is placed, followed by a sentence that starts with the word "but":
True, the Soviet Union, along with the West, defeated Nazi Germany, but before that, Stalin concluded an agreement with Hitler. True, Soviet troops liberated Europe, but at the same time they raped millions of German women. True, the Nazis committed a series of war crimes, but they were people, and people make mistakes. True, Ukrainian collaborationists took part in these crimes (sometimes in the first line of perpetrators), but in parallel they fought for the independence of their country occupied by communists […].
Russia is trying to keep the condemnation of the essence of Nazism alive in people's memory, while the West, through conciliation and dialogue with those who humanize (or even glorify) the Nazis, is trying to change the mental code of the population.
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Moreover, Western leaders are sincerely convinced that the same Ukrainian Nazism can become anti-Russian. They are as confident as Chamberlain and Daladier in their attempts to make Hitler's Nazism exclusively anti-Soviet.
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Unfortunately, so far, the Western policy of deconstructing victory in Ukraine has been largely successful - after all, these actions are fully supported by the Ukrainian power led by Volodymyr Zelensky. Elected by voters in eastern Ukraine, he betrayed them, as well as his grandfather, who fought the Nazis on the front.
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Nazi ideology is now being ingrained in Ukrainians in school. "
NARRATIVES: 1. The West encourages the development of a Nazi ideology in Ukraine. 2. The heroic and liberating image of the Soviet Union in World War II is being erased from Ukraine’s collective memory; 3. The West is naive to believe that Ukrainian Nazism will be exclusively anti-Russian. 4. The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, betrayed his electorate in the east of the country and his own grandfather, who fought on the front against the Nazis. CONTEXT / LOCAL ETHOS: A special role in the political symbolism used by the Kremlin and post-Soviet Russia is played by the celebration on May 9th of Victory in World War II, which they call ‘the Great War for the Defense of the Fatherland’ (the period of German-Soviet confrontations - 1941-1945). According to the dominant narratives, inherited from the Soviet period, the USSR liberated Europe from Nazis and fascists, sacrificed itself for the future of mankind but, unfortunately, the West does not want to be grateful to Russia as heir to the Soviet Union for its past heroism.Since 2014, Ukraine has given up some of the Soviet World War II narratives, introducing a compromise holiday into its official calendar, the Day of Remembrance and Conciliation, to reconcile the representatives of the two domestic opposing trends: the descendants of Soviet Army war veterans and of those from the Insurrectionary Army, comprising Ukrainian nationalists. Although keeping a number of Soviet ceremonies and memorials, Kiev acknowledges, however, that the war started from a German-Soviet settlement, and the USSR, along with Nazi Germany, attacked Poland in 1939. The Russian press sees Ukraine’s taking over these approaches as a betrayal, an attempt to rehabilitate and revive Nazism. Moreover, it stresses the fact that the West seems to have forgotten that it was liberated by the Nazis thanks to the USSR (Russia), and now it encourages the Nazi ideology in Ukraine.It should be noted that two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, the Soviet Union attacked eastern Poland, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler shared Poland and the Baltic countries under a secret protocol. Russian officials say Moscow was forced to intervene because of the West's failure to oppose Hitler's aggression. Other robbery-like decisions followed, including the annexation of the Romanian regions of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which is not much talked about either in the Russian or the Ukrainian press. A 2019 European Parliament resolution emphasizes that World War II, the most devastating war in European history, was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet pact of non-aggression and cooperation of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by means of which two totalitarian regimes, sharing the goal of conquering the world, divided Europe into zones of influence.
PURPOSE: The purpose of these narratives is to have the public in Russia and the former Soviet states reject the Western political model. The West, the EU and Ukraine are portrayed as sympathizers of Nazism, which deliberately ignore the historical truth in order to provoke anti-Russian attitudes. The image of the foreign enemy is (re) constructed.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: In reality, we cannot talk about any rebirth or rehabilitation of Nazism in the West or Ukraine. Nazi ideology has been condemned and banned in all Western states, as well as in Ukraine. The statements made by Russian journalists in this respect are not based on facts, evidence or documents, they only rely on discursive manipulations – unless the recall of historical events is based on official Kremlin narratives, the Russian press writes that it is a lie or a Nazi approach. They just rely on the Soviet stereotype "whoever is not with us is against us." From this point of view, it is an existential cause for the Kremlin to hide the fact that Germany and the USSR collaborated, started World War II, illegally annexed territories owned by sovereign states, and after the capitulation of the Hitler regime, Moscow occupied entire states, establishing puppet regimes everywhere, including in Romania.Incapable of finding other arguments, they are trying to tap into the readers’ emotions highlighting an invented paradox according to which Zelensky betrayed his electorate in the east of the country and his own grandfather, who fought on the front against the Nazis. In reality, Ukraine has a temporary, compromise approach: condemning Nazi crimes, condemning war and violence, while recognizing the role of Soviet heroes in restoring peace. Without bringing any evidence to support the false statements about Nazism in Ukraine, the Russian press says that the West wants Ukrainian Nazism to be anti-Russian and makes a comparison with Hitler, in order to arouse negative emotions in the Russian collective mind.
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