Recently, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of People's Republic of China's victory against Japan, the EU High Representative on Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas proceeded to a new provocative statement. During a speech, she said: “Russia turned to China and said: 'Russia and China fought in World War II, we won World War II, we defeated Nazism' and I thought: 'Okay, that's something new'. If you know history, it raises a lot of questions. Nowadays, people don't read much and don't remember history. It's clear that they buy these narratives”.
Furthermore, like other major EU officials, Kallas deliberately equates contemporary capitalist Russia with the Soviet Union, in order to defame the 20th century socialism and strengthen the most conservative ideological reflexes among Europeans.
Let's check out some public statements of Kaja Kallas one by one.
1. In 2022, while receiving the “The European Prize for Political Culture”, she said: “I was born under Soviet occupation, we didn’t have any freedom and we certainly did not have any political culture.”
A shameless lie. The Baltic states, including her native Estonia, joined the USSR after the people’s governments requested accession in 1940 — it was not an “occupation” but a socialist revolution supported by the working class. Under socialism, Estonia gained free healthcare, education, industrialization, and women’s equality — freedoms unheard of under the pre-war bourgeois republic. Political culture was present, but based on proletarian democracy (Soviets), not on bourgeois parties serving capitalist elites.
2. During a speech in the Paasikivi Society, Finland's oldest foreign policy society, Kallas said: “Although the Soviet Union collapsed, its imperialist ideology never did.”
The idea of EU's Foreign Affairs Representative talking about “imperialism” is funny by itself. But here, again, Mrs Kallas distorts history. The USSR was explicitly anti-imperialist — it dismantled colonial empires, supported liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and provided material aid to anti-colonial movements. To equate socialism and particularly the USSR's foreign policy with imperialism is ideological inversion: it was NATO and Western Europe that maintained colonial empires and neo-colonial control. The USSR supported countries like Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, unlike the U.S. and Western Europe which backed apartheid South Africa, colonial France/Portugal and hardcore dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia.
3. Again, in her speech in Finland, back in 2022, the EU High Representative on Foreign Affairs resorted to the despicable theory of “the two extremes” thus equating Communism with the monster of Nazism. After all, this is an official policy of the European Union. Here is what she said: “While the crimes of Nazism were condemned... this has not been done with the crimes of Communism.”
For any reasonable and decent human being, equating communism with fascism or nazism is a terribly false equivalence promoted by reactionary forces to delegitimize socialism. The Soviet Union and communist partisans across Europe had the most crucial role in the Great Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples. The USSR alone bore the brunt of Nazi aggression, losing more than 20 million lives — it was the communists that defeated fascism and capitalists will never forgive them for that. As for the so-called “crimes of Communism”, what are exactly these crimes? Framing the necessary measures against counter-revolutionaries and Nazi collaborators as “crimes” equal to genocide ignores both historical necessity and the immense social progress achieved.
4. “The state was not ours but theirs—the occupiers’… so it was fine to steal from the state.”, Kaja Kallas said in 2022, during a ceremony in London where she received another... prize (Grotius Prize Award Ceremony).
This is bourgeois individualism talking. In socialist Estonia, the state was the people — factories, schools, and land belonged to workers and peasants collectively. In today's capitalist Estonia, as well as in all European countries, the state is the major mechanism through which the ruling class and the monopolies impose their will on the working masses. Theft from socialist property was not resistance, but parasitism harming the working class itself. The idea that the state was an “occupier” was cultivated by émigré elites and Western propaganda, not the masses who benefited from collectivization and industrialization.
5. “The Soviet Union normalized corruption… no rule of law… collective over individual rights.” (Kallas at the Grotius Prize Award Ceremony, London).
A representative of EU's un-elected bureaucracy shouldn't even refer to “corruption” as the institutions of the European Union are, among others, nests of corruption and lobbyism. Corruption in the USSR was not “normalized”; it was harshly punished by socialist legality. Cases of abuse existed (as in any society), but the state strove to eliminate bourgeois individualism and private profiteering. “Collective over individual” was not a flaw but a socialist virtue: prioritizing the common good (healthcare, education, housing for all) over the enrichment of a few capitalists. Only servants of monopoly capital and enemies of the working people are criticizing the dominance of the collective over individualism and Mrs Kallas is one of them.
6. Kaja Kallas is one of those EU officials who have repeated the slanderous argument that “the USSR, together with Nazi Germany, started WWII…”.
This is a common revisionist lie. The true aggressors were Hitlerite Germany, aided by appeasers in Britain and France at Munich in 1938, who handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler and pushed him eastward. The 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a defensive necessity after the West betrayed collective security. It bought the USSR nearly two years to prepare for inevitable German invasion. The USSR certainly did not “start” WWII — it was the decisive force in ending it. Without the Red Army, Europe would have remained under Nazi domination.
7. “My country was part of Russia, a colonial state, for almost half a century…”, Mrs Kallas said refering to her native, Estonia.
Once again, she resorts to unhistorical absurdities. Estonia was not a colony but a union republic with its own language rights, culture, Academy of Sciences, film industry, and representation in Soviet government. Unlike colonies of the West, Estonia received massive investment and industrial development: oil shale industry, electrification, education, and healthcare expanded far beyond pre-war levels. Estonian workers enjoyed living standards among the highest in the USSR.
8. Speaking in Finland in 2022, Kallas argued that her native country, Estonia, “lost a fifth of its population to Soviet terror…”.
These figures are blatantly exaggerated by nationalist historiography. Deportations did occur, but largely targeted Nazi collaborators, former bourgeois elites, and those who actively undermined socialism during wartime. Many deaths attributed to “Soviet terror” were in fact wartime casualties from Nazi occupation (1941–1944), when tens of thousands of Estonians were killed or sent to German labor/death camps. The narrative erases the Soviet liberation of Estonia from fascism and the rebuilding that followed.
It is certain that Kaja Kallas doesn't merely express personal positions; her public statements reflect the broader ideological framework of the imperialist union that is known as the “European Union”. This framework is based on four fundamental pillars: 1) A revisionist approach to history designed to equate communism with nazism, 2) Selective memory that erases the extensive Nazi collaboration in the Baltics, 3) Bourgeois propaganda that shamelessly denies the social progress brought by socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe and 4) NATO warmongering rhetoric that weaponizes history in order to delegitimize Soviet and Russia legacy.
The message we shall deliver to Mrs Kallas and her colleagues within the EU is this: No matter how hard you try, history cannot be erased or rewritten. The collective memory of the peoples of Europe is much more powerful than your deplorable imperialist propaganda.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
