Most Russians Prefer Not to Know Reality of WWII – Survey

MOSCOW, July 5 (RIA Novosti) – More than half of Russians do not want to “dig up the past” and find out the uncomfortable realities of World War II, according to a survey released Friday.

While revisionist historians in Europe and the United States have exposed the more brutal aspects of their own military campaigns during World War II, including the carpet bombing of many German cities by British and US planes, Russian historians are more reticent about the high loss of life among Soviet soldiers and some of the alleged actions of the Red Army, including the mass deportation of ethnic groups within the Soviet Union and the widespread rape of German women in 1945.

The Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany remains a key aspect of Russia’s state-endorsed national identity.

When asked about their attitude toward the Great Patriotic War – the Russian name for the 1941-1945 conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – as well as the Soviet leadership at the time, 52 percent of respondents to the survey agreed that “it isn’t necessary to dig up the past, we won’t know the whole truth anyway, people can’t come back to life and one’s got to live.”

Just 37 percent of respondents agreed that if “we don’t get to the bottom of who is guilty of causing the war, why the USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany, and why the country lost millions of people, we will be doomed to repeat such catastrophes.”

The survey, conducted by the independent Levada Center pollster, also explored people’s perception of who is to blame for the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Almost 30 percent of respondents said that mistakes by Soviet Union leader Josef Stalin, and the alliance he concluded with Nazi Germany, caused the war, while 45 percent said the war was exclusively the fault of Hitler and other Nazi leaders.

Russian officials have recently proposed legislation to control what is written and said about World War II. A bill submitted for consideration in the lower house of parliament last month envisages fines of up to $15,000 and a prison term of up to five years for denying the Red Army’s role in “maintaining international peace” or the “dissemination of deliberately false information” about Soviet forces.

The Russian parliament launched an inquiry in May into former politician Leonid Gozman for equating the Red Army’s counter-intelligence Smersh units and Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS.