Statement by S.L.CHUMAREV, deputy Director of the Department for Humanitarian Cooperation and Human Rights of the Russian MFA, at the conference "Combating anti-Semitism in the OSCE region" Skopje, 6-7 February 2023
1. On behalf of the delegation of the Russian Federation, I greet all the participants of this conference gathered here with the sincere intention of contributing to addressing anti-Semitism, a specific form of aggressive nationalism, racism and xenophobia, which continues to cause suffering and undermine the moral health of society.
First of all, I would like to remind the participants of this conference that the OSCE is a platform designed for dialogue and development of joint approaches to solving diverse security and cooperation problems, rather than for accusations and claims which are far from being justified.
The problem of anti-Semitism is particularly salient these days, as a policy of glorifying local Nazi collaborators and revising the results of World War II has been pursued in a number of European countries under the pretext of protecting human rights.
Let me remind that most of the Jews exterminated by the Nazis were citizens of the Soviet Union, and this is our common pain. Russia strongly opposes consigning such crimes to oblivion, which are not subject to a statute of limitations.
Hostile attitudes towards members of the Jewish community lead not only to manifestations of intolerance, but also to hate crimes. Eventually, this defies the respect for dignity and recognition of worth of a human being as well as violates the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion – the values which the OSCE regularly declares to be important to protect.
There is no justification for anti-Semitism, no matter where or how it is provoked. At the same time, this shameful phenomenon is quite widespread throughout the world, including in countries with strong democratic traditions. With its unique ability to mutate, anti-Semitism is taking on more and more new forms. Ethnic, religious or cultural conflicts have replaced the Cold War interstate confrontation which arose from ideological contradictions.
Anti-Semitic manifestations are often provoked by official policies with the use of different methods: from Holocaust denial and glorification of Nazism to imposing secularism and excluding certain social groups from the political process. This violates their civil and political rights, including freedom of religion, and incites hatred against Jews, Muslims, Africans and, recently, against Russians and Russian-speaking population.
2. As I was listening to the speeches, I involuntarily thought of the words of the French philosopher Voltaire, who said back at the turn of the eighteenth century: "Those who do not know the past know neither the present nor the future, nor themselves". His contemporary and my compatriot Mikhail Lomonosov also noted that a people who does not know its past has no future.
The Holocaust – the genocide of the Jews – is a tragic page of the world history, as were the genocides of Roma, Native Americans and other peoples which took place throughout the history. Unfortunately, the world has forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust. We observe an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. In Ukraine, Nazi ideas are being praised. In the Baltic States, accomplices of Hitlerism are being glorified, and the historical memory is being mistreated.
It is surprising that while Holocaust denial is prosecuted in a number of European countries, the policies of the authorities in Latvia and Estonia, for example, which are actively involved in erecting monuments to the Waffen-SS soldiers who actually carried out the Holocaust, go unnoticed. This is despite the fact that the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal recognized the Waffen-SS as a criminal organization.
The Holocaust means remembrance and is a warning. It is necessary to know about this tragedy and sufferings of its victims in order to respect and protect human rights as well as to prevent and avoid repeating horrific crimes in today’s world.
This requires both political will and courage as well as the desire to resist the ideology of hatred and counter the activities of its adherents.
Russia will never be able to forget victims of the Holocaust and Nazism. Mistreatment of their memory as well as attempts to glorify the Nazis and former members of the Waffen-SS are a grave insult to all the sane humans.
Russia pursues a policy which assumes that nothing of this kind should ever happen again in the history of mankind. However, as we can see, not all the countries share this position.
The present stage is characterized by a high level of historical revisionism and revanchism, a complete substitution of concepts, when cynically, to suit the current political situation, the aggressors who unleashed the war, the authors of ideologies of racial purity, are swapped with the State that opposed them – the Soviet Union, which paid for the victory over Nazism with the lives of 27 million of its citizens.
This ignores the fact that it is impossible to combat various manifestations of anti-Semitism without learning the lessons of European history.
To what kind of future will the authorities of countries that deny the Holocaust, rewrite history, make us forget about the heroism of the Soviet Army, which liberated prisoners of the Nazi death camps, and glorify those who decades ago tortured our grandfathers and great grandfathers in concentration camps, destroyed villages, cities and entire nations, lead their people to?
3. We consider the historical concepts that over the years have changed from comparing the Nazi regime with the "totalitarian" Soviet regime to attempts to place all responsibility for the war on the Soviet Union and declaring it "an even worse perpetrator than the Third Reich" to be absolutely unacceptable and criminal.
This is also the reason why the significance, and most importantly, the essence of the verdict of the Nuremberg Trials are blatantly obscured. Let me recall that this verdict put everything in its place: it outlawed war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis and their henchmen and condemned the leaders of the Nazi regime.
It was during the Nuremberg Trials that the world learned in detail about the horrors of National Socialism and the atrocious crimes committed by the followers of this ideology. And that is why the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal is a hindrance for today's adherents of a "rule-based world order".
Many observers note that history is repeating itself, and the patterns developed in Nazi Germany are being implemented today.
4. Our conference is taking place at a time when the situation in the field of combating anti-Semitism and related manifestations of hatred has drastically deteriorated, and several States, primarily Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, have intensified their attempts to settle historical scores with Russia by destroying monuments to Soviet warriors-liberators.
In a number of European countries there is a confrontation between the sensible public and the governments, which with the encouragement of external forces not only condone the introduction of neo-Nazi ideology and hateful ideas but also contribute to that process by turning a blind eye to such manifestations and retouching in passing the ugly pictures of their past, racist treatment of their own colonies and extermination of the indigenous population.
Citizens are threatened with criminal prosecution for refuting fake news spread by Western and Ukrainian media and aimed at discrediting Russia and its Armed Forces.
In practice, this attitude provokes a steady increase in racist incidents, various manifestations of xenophobia, and ethnic and religious intolerance.
5. The current authorities of Ukraine and the Baltic States, where Nazis’ accomplices are declared participants in national liberation movements that fought for the "independence" of their States, are the most zealous ones in rewriting history and promoting neo-Nazism.
Distorted interpretations of historical events that are aggressively introduced into the educational and enlightenment spheres, belittling the role and contribution of the USSR to the victory over Nazism, are aimed at destroying the historical memory of the events of World War II and reshaping public consciousness. Educational programs and cultural projects glorify the "feat" of members of national SS legions who fought for Hitler's Germany and took part in numerous massacres of civilians.
Such countries pay particular attention to taking a wide variety of measures for state support of movements that honour the collaborators. With the assistance of the authorities, national-radicals and right-wing extremists unfold their activities, often becoming the main perpetrators of a cynical "war" against monuments to Soviet soldiers-liberators. For their fight against "Russian world" and Soviet memorial legacy, nationalists are privileged to dictate the notion of "proper patriotism" to society as a whole. In most cases, the national authorities do not take any measures to stop this madness.
6. In line with the policy of total justification of the crimes of collaborators, Ukraine and the United States regularly vote against the annual resolution of the United Nations General Assembly "Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" introduced by Russia together with a wide range of co-sponsors from all regions of the world. During the voting in December 2022, 48 more United Nations Member States, including all EU countries, voted against the resolution for the first time.
While seeking to isolate Russia on the world stage, the collective West has sacrificed its morality and, essentially, suffered huge reputational losses. For the first time in the history of the United Nations, former Axis powers voted against a document that condemns the glorification of Nazism and the manifestations of neo-Nazism, as well as reaffirms the inviolability of the post-war order, the outcomes of World War II and the documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The resolution also condemns any manifestations of anti-Semitism and the denial of the Holocaust, the glorification of the Nazi movement and former members of the Waffen SS organization. Another issue reflected in the resolution is the identification of former Nazis and "those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition, collaborated with the Nazi movement and committed war crimes and crimes against humanity" as participants in national liberation movements.
7. In 2022, after the Russian Federation started the special military operation to de-nazify and de-militarize Ukraine and protect the civilian population of Donbas, the incitement to anti-Russian hatred has become particularly obvious. To this end, techniques of dehumanization tried out by German Nazis have been actively used against my fellow citizens.
In practice, this has led to a shockingly outrageous total discrimination and stigmatization of Russians, including diplomats.
Last year, the celebration of Victory Day on May 9 provoked an unimaginable Russophobe hysteria in several European countries.
The authorities in Riga blocked access of the public to the Monument to the Liberators of Riga on May 9 and removed with construction equipment the sea of flowers left at the monument by the city’s inhabitants. Aleksandr Dubyago, a 19-year-old Russian-speaking resident of Riga, was detained and prosecuted for defending his right to honour the memory of Red Army heroes near the majestic monument. A campaign to rapidly demolish all Soviet monuments has been launched in all three Baltic countries.
The major achievement of Czechia in the fight against Soviet monuments was the demolition in 2020 of the monument to Marshal Ivan Konev who commanded Red Army units that fought to liberate the city, in May 2022 it also revoked his honorary citizenship of Prague.
On 9 May 2022, Sergey Andreev, Russian Ambassador to Poland, was pelted with red liquid during the flower-laying ceremony at the Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw. On the same day, attempts were made to disrupt a similar commemorative event that was attended by Sergey Semenov, Consul General of Russia in Gdansk. In Poland, monuments to Red Army soldiers are demolished in a highly cynical manner, with officials present and live coverage on the local television.
8. The neo-Nazi ideology has already engraved itself on some segments of the Ukrainian society, and has become ingrained in the armed forces and volunteer units of the country, where Nazi symbols are not just wide-spread, but used by members of the Ukrainian military while they commit crimes against civilians in Donbass. Ukrainian officials also attach great importance to Nazi ideas and documents and find it necessary to direct the attention of the society to “memorable” moments related to the activities of the Nazis in Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War.
9. In turn, the political elites of the vast majority of European countries have been cynically implementing the policy of double standards. In keeping with the positions approved by a narrow group, they do everything possible to hide the Nazi essence of the Kiev regime from the international community. It has come to a blatant whitewashing of the advocates of neo-Nazism – fighters of the extremist Nazi Azov Regiment and other similar Ukrainian extremist groups that openly show their adherence to the neo-Nazi ideology. Any mentions of numerous atrocious crimes committed by their participants in Donbass are carefully excluded from the media landscape.
10. Acting in the spirit of the logic of "war to the last Ukrainian," Western masters are using the current Kiev regime which they control to inflict as much harm on Russian people and State as possible with the hands of Ukrainians in order to serve their own narrow interests in sustaining the illusion of Western civilization’s world leadership.
We find this state of affairs completely unacceptable. Government policy of any State leading to an increase in xenophobia and neo-Nazi sentiments should be condemned by the international community.
We intend to continue to actively resist attempts to falsify history and disseminate ideas of intolerance, racial, national or religious superiority, which pose a real threat to the world civilization.
11. In this context, the indifference of the OSCE specialized institutions, a number of structures of the European Union, and the Council of Europe is alarming. Underestimation of current situation can have dire consequences for European security.
We believe that acts of vandalism and the dismantling of the monuments to Soviet soldiers that take place in a number of CIS countries, the Baltic States, and Eastern Europe should be adequately evaluated by specialized OSCE institutions. However, we often face a condescending attitude bordering on hypocrisy, even though what is happening violates all the values underlying European culture and democracy. These are not isolated cases limited to the demolition of memorials, but a conscious policy implemented by a number of States aimed at rehabilitating and glorifying local Nazi collaborators and revising the outcome of World War II.
Public condemnation of anti-Semitism and adoption of anti-discrimination legislation are not enough in the current situation. It is important that human rights norms be embraced by as many people as possible, become part of their culture and mindsets, and be promoted through upbringing and education in the youth environment.
The Russian Federation will continue to use all mechanisms, including international ones, to counter anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance, an important element of which is raising public awareness of the Holocaust. The Holocaust topic is included in the curricula and State educational standards of the Russian Federation, as well as in the programmes of teacher training and professional development courses.
Russia actively participates in international cooperation on the Holocaust within public organizations the work of which to preserve the historical truth about this tragedy deserves deep respect and support. The same work should be done to preserve the memory of the Soviet soldiers who died liberating Europe from fascism and who saved not only Jewish, but also many other peoples from total annihilation.
According to the latest research of the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), there is no rise of anti-Semitic sentiments in our country, unlike in most European ones.
12. In concluding my statement, I wish to reiterate: Russia will always cherish the memory that the Soviet Union and all its peoples played a decisive role in the victory over Nazism. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this milestone event for all humankind. In our country, the importance of the Victory does not have to be explained. For us, that war will remain the Great Patriotic War. Its horrors and hardships affected every Russian family.
Russia continues to defend the thesis that any manifestations of racial discrimination and the glorification of Nazism pose a direct threat to the fundamental values of democracy and human rights and present a serious challenge to international and regional security and stability.
However, judging by the discussion (judging by the tone of the speeches that we heard), there is still no prospect of some States willing to unite and cooperate constructively for sustainable development and equal partnership. The events of the past year increasingly remind that the "values" of the superiority of one race or nation over other peoples and cultures that were in effect more than half a century ago prevail in a number of States.
Thank you for your attention.