IT SHOULD BE UNCONTROVERSIAL to say that both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes were unconscionably evil. It should be especially unremarkable to say so in free countries that were victimized by both during and after World War II. Yet, as the world commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the war’s end, a strange confusion reigned in parts of Eastern Europe about who the real bad guys had been back then—and about who they were today.
Insisting that Slovakia was “liberated” by the Soviets, Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, is the only EU and Western leader who traveled to Moscow to commemorate the end of World War II in the company of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva on May 9. As a former Communist Party member, Fico may be sincere in being a Soviet nostalgist. He certainly seemed determined to join Vladimir Putin on the Red Square: Not only did he brave the disapproval of Slovakia’s neighbors and many of his own constituents, but after the Baltic countries closed down their airspace to Slovakia’s government plane, he found a circuitous workaround over the Black Sea. Slovakia’s deputy prime minister and Fico’s coalition partner, Tomáš Taraba, who entered politics through the country’s neo-Nazi circles, has also been engaging in some historical whitewashing. His historical hero isn’t Stalin, though, but Jozef Tiso, the Catholic priest who served as president of the wartime Slovak state and sent tens of thousands of its Jewish citizens to Nazi death camps. Authoritarianism is a global problem. The only way we’re going to address it is together. Join our pro-democracy community.
The dissonance between the pro-Soviet Fico and the pro-Nazi Taraba becomes less pronounced if one accepts that the real villains of World War II were the Allies. Fico, for instance, is eager to portray the “angry and frustrated” Winston Churchill and his Fulton speech, delivered when “bodies of the last dead soldiers were still warm,” as responsible for erecting the Iron Curtain. Ľuboš Blaha, one member of Fico’s delegation and a member of European Parliament, posted a video from Moscow in which he argued that the war itself had been a culmination of “centuries” of Western efforts to destroy Russia and Slavic nations. “If anyone builds an iron curtain today,” Fico recently warned, “I assure you that I will take a hacksaw to it and create space for relations between the East and the West.” Fico’s remarkable obfuscation of the past was intended not as a warning to Putin against his aggression in Ukraine (and clandestinely throughout Europe) but against the West.
Unfortunately, Fico’s Soviet apologism is not unique to Slovakia. “Associating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, as the progressivist norm of today’s neocons dictates, is unacceptable,” former Czech President Václav Klaus said last month. Once a Thatcherite, Klaus has long been an appeaser of Russia, hostile to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and a cheerleader for Donald Trump’s trade policies. In Klaus’s view, talking about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet atrocities in Katyn, or Stalin’s war against Poland’s anti-Nazi resistance is tantamount to cancel culture. In the runup to this year’s celebrations, Klaus lashed out at Danuše Nerudová, a liberal member of the European Parliament from the Czech Republic, who recently commented that Czechoslovakia had been liberated by the United States and not by the Soviet Union, much less Russia. American troops liberated parts of the Czech Republic and even reached Plzeň, just fifty miles from Prague, but, as with Berlin, left the capital to the Red Army. But Nerudová’s point was not about the relative military contributions of Allies to the defeat of Nazis on Czechoslovak territory, but rather about what Soviet “liberation” meant in practice: forty years of Communist dictatorship and foreign domination. What makes these controversies extra extraordinary is that those minimizing Soviet and Russian tyranny are often the same ones who consider themselves defenders of national sovereignty against the real or imagined diktats of Brussels.
IN A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT CONTEXT, one of Viktor Orbán’s closest advisers, Balázs Orbán, insinuated last year that Ukraine’s decision to defend itself in 2022 had been an “irresponsible” one, drawing a parallel to the same mistake (in his view) made by the leaders of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. That is an astonishing take, as historically and politically ignorant as it is morally vacuous—especially from a self-styled Hungarian patriot (the name of European political group cofounded by Orbán’s party and other ring-wing parties in the European Parliament is “Patriots for Europe”).
The story of European politics in the twentieth century can be told many ways: As the story of freedom or dictatorship; fragmentation or integration; north vs. south or east vs. west. But another way of telling it—especially in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and to some extent Hungary—is as the story of the right of small states. Yet somehow, a story of self-determination has, in a few years, been overtaken by a crude realism, accepting that the powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. But that view of international politics is hardly the epitome of small-nation patriotism—rather it is a reflection of arrogant imperialist thinking coming from the Kremlin, and now also from the White House. It’s obvious why Fico would want to celebrate Victory Day in Moscow as Russian soldiers take a break from their daily war crimes to parade through Red Square. What is more difficult to understand is how the likes of Fico came to dominate the politics of their countries, especially under the banner of phony patriotism. As they seek to muddy the past and its moral significance—much to the Kremlin’s delight—Orbán, Fico, and Klaus are revealing more than they want about their own character. And whatever political bets they think that they are making by distorting the past, it is safe to say that future historians will not look upon them kindly.
