Russia has repeatedly presented itself as fighting “fascism” in order to justify its piecemeal conquest of Ukraine. At the same time, pro-Russian apologists have been making much of the liberation of the Nazi death camps by the Red Army—even as Putin himself has praised the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. James Kirchick argues that this is part of a larger effort to distort history:
[Praising the Red Army for] the liberation of the death camps, along with hysterical Russian claims of rampant Ukrainian anti-Semitism, cohere into a Kremlin narrative that portrays Russia as a historic protector of the Jews. That narrative is a pernicious lie. . . .
Today, pro-Russian revisionists speak of the Soviets liberating Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps as if they did so out of some sort of deep-seated, philo-Semitic humanism, rather than the real, more tedious reason, which is that the camps were located along the Red Army’s march to Berlin. The Soviet Union that liberated Auschwitz was the same regime that instituted the gulag archipelago; the Red Army that liberated Eastern Europe also committed thousands of rapes and paved the way for over four decades of Soviet occupation, tragic chapters in history that are being written over with simplistic veneration of the Soviet role in defeating Hitler.
One cannot help getting the sense that all these Russian cries about “fascism” . . . are a sort of twisted, Orwellian projection. Because if there’s any regime in Europe today that resembles a “fascist” one, it is Russia. Like the Nazis, Russia has invaded a neighbor based on the principle of ethnic comradeship, is targeting a vulnerable domestic minority (homosexuals) with state-sanctioned bigotry, and officially labels any and all dissenters “national traitors.” As Moscow relives its glorious past, monopolizing the heroism of World War II and slandering its contemporary adversaries as latter-day Nazis, it inches closer and closer toward becoming the sort of fascist regime its forebears once fought against.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/190918/putin-defeats-fascism