Snyder: European leaders don’t want to stand close to Russian weapons

Photo: Liis Treimann

Timothy Snyder (45), American historian and professor at Yale University speaks about commemorating Victory in Europe Day – VE Day – in interview with Postimees.

On May 9, Russia shows its military might on a parade in Moscow. There’s a lot of talk about who’s going to be there and who’s not. How significant is the event?

Of course it’s very significant. For one thing, it demonstrates at what point the political elite is in considering the war. Russia at the moment is going through a phase where national elite consider this to be a national war. It wasn’t of course. But people get wrong ideas of things all the time.

Like you have said, war was won by Soviet Union, not Russia?

That ’s part of it. You can look at things at different ways. One thing is that the Red Army was a multinational army. Another thing to point out is that the war was largely fought in the western part of Soviet Union. So Leningrad and Stalingrad were horrifying battles, but most of the war in the Soviet Union was fought in Belarus and Ukraine. And those populations suffered proportionally more than Russians did. And of course the Jews of the western Soviet Union, almost all of them were killed in the Holocaust.

But there’s also the broader war perspective. If you understand war as a Great Fatherland War that happened in Europe, that means that you’re forgetting about the United States, which for Russia is politically significant.

Because if you forget about the US, then you’re forgetting about two important things: you’re forgetting that the war also happened in Asia, and the Americans basically won it by themselves in Asia.

And secondly what you’re forgetting about is technology. That when Red Army did come back to Europe, it was driving American automobiles.

Are the VE Day celebrations in Russia in a way creating a myth?

Yes, but they’re not the only ones. Commemoration is not the same thing as history. Every society picks and chooses certain things to make myths. It’s more a question whether that myth hits your own political style or not.

I would prefer a myth which was more inclusive, Russia commemorating the war in such a way that Belarus and Ukraine could consider participating, and the West could consider participating.

The main problem is not the myth itself. The main problem is the interaction between recollecting the World War Two and fighting the war in Ukraine. That’s the main problem for European leaders.

It’s very likely that this particular myth is dangerous, since it’s being used to justify an aggressive war.

So you understand why so many Western leaders are missing from Moscow and why others are present, for example the president of China, BRICS countries etc?

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that you would have a lot of leaders from Asia, and Latin America to commemorate a victory in Europe. That suggests something strange. If you’re ready to commemorate the victory over Japan, it would make more sense.

European leaders are uncomfortable at this point in history with treating the World War Two only as a military triumph. In the discourse which predominates in the European Union, the Second World War was something that simply should not have happened. I would be better that it didn’t happen. It had to be won, but war itself is undesirable.

Since there is now a war going on in Europe, European leaders generally wish to signal their view that they don’t want to be close to Russian weapons that are actually being used.

So for example if the Buk anti-aircraft missile, which shot down flight MH-17, is going to be dragged across Red Square this Saturday, it’s an uncomfortable position for European leaders to have to watch that.

In your book «Bloodlands» you describe the horrible situation, millions of deaths in Eastern Europe, many of them just because there wasn’t enough food for people. Shouldn’t the anniversary of the end of the war be about remembrance, about the victims, rather than celebrating the military victory?

Well, it’s not for me to tell Russia or anyone else, what they should do. I can tell you that from my own perspective, the significance of the war is above all the experience of the war itself. And the experience of the war, as you say, for many millions of civilians was one of horrible death by starvation, or by being shot, or by being gassed to death in the case of many of the Jews.

Each country has its own political style, and that political style says something about the historical moment that a country is in. We can talk to Russians about this but we can’t tell Russians how to commemorate events.

You spoke about integration and disintegration, about rising nation states after World War One, and you also said that there’s no durable nation state in Europe. «That’s not happened and will not happen.»* But we are now right here in Estonia, which is defining itself as an Estonian state, a nation state. As many others in Europe do. Is there no future for the system of nation states in  Europe, in your opinion?

So let me take a step back since your readers did not hear the lecture¹. What I was trying to say is that as soon as nation states arrive on the scene, they either collapse or they join some larger unit. Because a nation state, the scale of that is simply too small.

So the interwar Estonian nation state lasted for couple of decades, then it was overwhelmed. But that’s not a unique Estonian story, that’s true basically for all the nation states, even the big ones.

You mentioned Germany.

Right. Even the big ones, they don’t make it as nation states. They’re either too small or they overwhelmed with national populism and they do something crazy, like start of Second World War. So what I meant was that nation states can survive, but they survive as part of something else. It seems like a paradox, but the Estonian nation state is stronger because it belongs to the European Union, just like European Union is stronger because it includes Estonia. Without the European Union not existing today, consider where Estonia would now be?

There were actually quite a lot of people who spoke about Estonia should be like Singapore, Hong Kong. A little, self-contained country, not belonging to any bigger conglomerate.

Singapore’s on an island and Hong Kong now belongs to China.

What do you see for the near future in Europe – disintegration or more integration?

It’s up to Europeans themselves. As I see it, Europe is in the midst of a challenge, it’s facing a challenge from the outside. For the first time, really, thus far the challenges of European integration have all been challenges of politics of integration or they’ve been economic challenges. Like 1970s or the period after 2008.

Now, for the first time there’s actually a challenge from outside. That could be an opportunity for Europeans and the European elite to define what Europe is.

Or, it could lead to an ever weaker union, as Russia gathers client states and supports populist parties inside the EU. I don’t know which way it’s going to go. I think at this point it still very much depends on the choices that are made next few years.

Is Russia itself immune to disintegration? The Soviet Union certainly wasn’t.

I think for Russia main question is: Europe or China. And by alienating Europe, Russia is giving itself the answer of China. I think China has benefited a great deal from the current crisis. Russia in a way is doing a lot of intellectual and rhetorical work for China by challenging the rule of the international system, by challenging the idea of international law. These are arguments that China could later use against Russia. Not tomorrow, not in a year but perhaps in 15 or 20 years.

So, as I see, it doesn’t make that much sense for Russia to disable the international system. Because just as Ukraine is a small country next to Russia, Russia is a small country next to China. And the Chinese look at Russia much the same way that the Russians look at Ukraine. And that’s worth keeping in mind.

If Russia is a small country, then how should Estonia define itself?

(Laughing). I mean, no, but I’m quite serious – compared to China, Russia is a small country, a little bit more than 1/10 of the population and the difference in GDP is growing every year.

Russia’s problem is this: it’s too big to think of itself as being a country like Estonia perhaps, but it’s too small – I don’t mean in territory, but it’s too small in economics and technology – to function on the level of something like China. So it seems to be in between.

So its economy is the size of France’s, its exports are much like Netherland’s. It’s actually a quite normal European country in that sense, but its elites have hard time of thinking of themselves that way. I think that natural Russian policy would be the balance between Europe and China. What they’re doing now I think is in that sense unnatural and they may bounce back after a while.

For how long can the commemorating and remembering last? This is now 70 years after VE Day, 100 years from some events of World War One. People in the States of course still commemorate the events of the US Civil War...

And on the 4^th of July we commemorate independence. Really we don’t do anything, just lie on our backs to watch fireworks.

It’s a very good question. We could be having this question 30 years ago, and we could be saying, well it’s been 40 years since the end of World War Two, it’s been long time. Why are we still commemorating this?

And what’s interesting about the commemoration today is that the people who were involved, whether we are talking about the liberation of Auschwitz in January, or whether we’re talking about VE Day, people who were involved are not designing the events, they do not hold power. These things are really for the generation that grew up in the 1970s, which is remembering its grandparents at this point.

My own view is that it’ll go as far as the grandparents, but not the great-grandparents. So I believe that we will have 75, but I don’t believe in 90. I don’t think 90 is going to happen – at least not like this.

* Prof. Snyder’s keynote speech in Tallinn, at the conference «A common European memory: promise, illusion or challenge?» at the Estonian Museum of Occupations, May 4^th .