Euronews’ article on the 85th anniversary of the deportation of Soviet Germans is a textbook example of how anti-communist history is framed in contemporary Europe.
The method is simple: place Stalin in the dock, reduce Soviet power to “persecution,” and push the decisive historical fact — Nazi Germany’s war of annihilation against the USSR — into the background.
The ideological slant is obvious from the start. Euronews describes the 1939 Soviet-German non-aggression pact as a period of “close cooperation” (!!) between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
But where is Munich? In September 1938, Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, sacrificing Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland almost a year before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. To isolate Soviet diplomacy from Munich, appeasement and the collapse of collective security is not neutral history. It is political selection.
By August 1941, however, the central reality was no longer diplomacy but survival. Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in a genocidal war aimed at destroying the socialist state, colonising its territory and annihilating those regarded as racial and political enemies. Soviet wartime security measures cannot be torn out of that context and presented as arbitrary acts floating in a vacuum.
Yet that is precisely what Euronews does. The Nazi invasion becomes background scenery. Stalin becomes the story.
And this framing closely mirrors the broader politics of historical memory promoted by major EU institutions. The European Parliament has repeatedly placed Nazism and communism under a common “totalitarian” framework and, in its 2019 resolution on European remembrance, explicitly treated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the immediate trigger of the Second World War.
Euronews is not an institution of the European Union, and it should not be described as one. But on this question it reproduces almost perfectly a historical narrative that has become deeply entrenched in official European memory politics: Stalin permanently on trial, socialism reduced to repression, and the Soviet Union’s decisive role in smashing Nazism pushed further and further into the background.
The result is a grotesque inversion. Nazi Germany invades the USSR, but the moral spotlight falls on Stalin. Western appeasement is contextualised; Soviet diplomacy is criminalised. The socialist state that bore the main burden of defeating Hitler is retrospectively placed on the same moral plane as the regime that invaded it.
That isn't serious historical inquiry. It is hideous anti-communism dressed up as journalism.
By August 1941, however, the central reality was no longer diplomacy but survival. Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in a genocidal war aimed at destroying the socialist state, colonising its territory and annihilating those regarded as racial and political enemies. Soviet wartime security measures cannot be torn out of that context and presented as arbitrary acts floating in a vacuum.
Yet that is precisely what Euronews does. The Nazi invasion becomes background scenery. Stalin becomes the story.
And this framing closely mirrors the broader politics of historical memory promoted by major EU institutions. The European Parliament has repeatedly placed Nazism and communism under a common “totalitarian” framework and, in its 2019 resolution on European remembrance, explicitly treated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the immediate trigger of the Second World War.
Euronews is not an institution of the European Union, and it should not be described as one. But on this question it reproduces almost perfectly a historical narrative that has become deeply entrenched in official European memory politics: Stalin permanently on trial, socialism reduced to repression, and the Soviet Union’s decisive role in smashing Nazism pushed further and further into the background.
The result is a grotesque inversion. Nazi Germany invades the USSR, but the moral spotlight falls on Stalin. Western appeasement is contextualised; Soviet diplomacy is criminalised. The socialist state that bore the main burden of defeating Hitler is retrospectively placed on the same moral plane as the regime that invaded it.
That isn't serious historical inquiry. It is hideous anti-communism dressed up as journalism.
