SELECTIVE MEMORY
Article by Maria ZakharovaRussia's Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on the rise of Neo-Nazi sentiments in Europe (Izvestia, August 28, 2025)
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✍️ We have been discussing the rise of neo-Nazi manifestations in Europe for many years now. First, they vilify the Red Army, and then they forget about the Holocaust.
The other day, in a letter to President Emmanuel Macron, US Ambassador to France Charles Kushner (father of US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law), expressed “deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France” and accused the government of “the lack of sufficient action by [your] government to confront it.” He also claimed that nearly half of French youth lack even basic knowledge about the Holocaust wondering “what are children being taught in French schools if such ignorance persists?” Charles Kushner has every moral right to raise this issue as a descendant of the Belarusian Jews who survived the Holocaust and were members of the Bielski Brothers partisan group.
The Élysée Palace’s reaction was ... psychotic. The ambassador was summoned to the French Foreign Ministry, where he was reminded of the “duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of another country.” In addition, he was told that his revelations “fall short of the quality of the transatlantic partnership … and of the trust that must prevail between allies.”
It is strange to be reading and hearing about “interference in the internal affairs,” because human rights, as official Paris has been convincing us for many years now, should be cross-border in nature.
Let’s turn to the main point. The situation with the collective memory of the Holocaust in the EU is a direct consequence of a purposeful policy of fragmenting the history of World War II. Westerners tried to consider the tragedy of the Jewish people without taking into account the total genocide carried out by the Third Reich in Eastern Europe as part of freeing up the “living space” for the “Übermensch” race. Then, the history of the rescue and liberation by the Red Army was systematically vilified.
This was most clearly seen in the transformation of the commemorative events in Europe on the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As you may recall, it was established by the UN General Assembly in 2005 and is observed annually on January 27, the day of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by the Soviet Army. The Polish authorities have long stopped inviting liberator veterans from the post-Soviet countries to these events.
The UN Secretariat does not invite Soviet veterans on this day, either. Only the Russian mission does this. It organises commemorative events at the UN every year on January 27, where the main heroes are the participants of the Great Patriotic War and former concentration camp inmates. We have set up scores of exhibitions, concerts, and receptions in a national capacity at the UN, without ever receiving invitations for our veterans from the “collective Western anti-intelligence” and the UN officials led by it.
Back in 2010, during the celebration of the 65th anniversary of Victory at the UN General Assembly premises in New York City, an orchestra conducted by Vladimir Spivakov performed. The veterans invited by the Russian side sang wartime songs, and when the Victory Day song was performed in closing, audience members stood up and applauded standing. I remember how in 2018, Mikhail Turetsky brought songs of Victory to the UN General Assembly and sang them with veterans residing in the United States, whom the international bureaucracy responsible for the Holocaust remembrance at the UN simply forgot about. It was more than a concert. It was a celebration of the triumph of justice and the spirit of Victory over dehumanisation. The veterans and concentration camp survivors surrounded us with tears in their eyes, and we... just couldn’t finish the performance.
Why did (and does) the West treat them, the heroes, like this? It’s just because their presence was not supposed to remind the high guests of the historical truth.
As far as I remember, in 2007, UN staff invited our veterans over. But after they told the whole truth about the liberating role of the Red Army, they were never invited again. They invited exclusively Western witnesses of those events, who told how on January 27, 1945, they “met US soldiers with the star-spangled banner at the gates of Auschwitz…”
The Eurocrats and Western European capitals, including Paris, London, and Berlin, unless they openly approved, did not react in any way to the revanchism of the “Young Europeans,” who declared war on the Soviet memorial legacy and legalised the rehabilitation of the blood-stained Holocaust executioners. This was the case, for example, in Estonian Kohtla-Järve, where, under the pretext of “reburial,” a mass grave of Red Army soldiers was dug up with an excavator. They even failed to put up a sign about the ongoing excavation work. The remains of those who died for the freedom of today’s revanchists were literally ground up by the excavator bucket. Earlier, the Mother monument had been demolished at this site, and all Soviet symbols were erased, leaving only the “victims of the Second World War” sign.
In this context, we hope that Charles Kushner will be interested in another equally alarming fact: in 2022, in the Polish city of Malbork, a monument to Soviet soldiers who fell while liberating the city from the Nazis was dismantled. Among those who died in those battles in early 1945 was Asael, one of the legendary Bielski brothers. The fact that the Deputy Minister of State Assets of Poland, Karol Rabenda, participated in the dismantling of the monument looks especially cynical.
The French Foreign Ministry, neither under Emmanuel Macron nor under his predecessors, has ever spoken out against the destruction of monuments to the Red Army soldiers in Poland, the Baltic states, or Ukraine, or against the installation of monuments to Hitler’s collaborationists. First, they rewrote history to suit their needs, erasing the names of actual liberators and glorifying criminals convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal. The next inevitable step was the oblivion of the Holocaust victims who, after all, interfere with the veneration of new pseudo-heroes.
This is often done by direct descendants of the Nazis and their accomplices. We remember how all the forces of the “united Europe” were thrown into promoting Annalena Baerbock, who is proud of her grandfather, a member of the NSDAP, to the post of Chairman of the UN General Assembly in the year of the 80th anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany. We never heard a word of repentance for his sins from her.
Letters, notes, and articles of outrage in fighting this evil of denial and fragmentation of history will not help. It’s time to learn that without the unconditional recognition of the liberating role of the Red Army, which stopped the genocide carried out by Nazi executioners and their henchmen, the memory of the victims of the Holocaust is also doomed to be forced out of the European public mind. When there are no saviours, there is no need for those who were saved.
Is there any guarantee that at some point an influential politician will show up somewhere abroad who will say, regarding the Holocaust, what Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan had to say regarding the genocide of the Armenian people, “The international recognition of the Armenian genocide is not among our foreign policy priorities.”
Such guarantees do not exist. But there is one unconditional guarantee: the Holocaust victims will not be forgotten, and the memory of the heroes who destroyed Nazism and saved the survivors will be preserved. They did not do it sporadically or under constraint, but consciously, voluntarily sacrificing their own lives to save other people. We will do everything to ensure that this truth is never forgotten.