My profile:
In 2004, Vasily Kononov, the former leader of a pro-Soviet commando unit in Nazi-occupied Latvia during World War II, was convicted by Latvia’s highest court for killing nine civilians in the village of Mazie Bati in 1944. On May 17, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights upheld the ruling.
As usual, the Russian authorities were outraged by the decision. Members of the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement demonstrated outside of the Latvian Embassy in Moscow.
Kononov insists that the victims, including a young pregnant woman, had been collaborating with the Nazis.
To understand the nature of the wartime actions of the “red partisans,” not only in Mazie Bati but in all occupied territories, it is important to remember the directive issued by the Council of People’s Commissars on June 20, 1941, “Do not leave the enemy a single kilogram of bread or a single liter of fuel,” and the order from the headquarters of the Supreme Command of Nov. 17, 1941, instructing saboteurs “to destroy and burn down all the settlements in the German rear at a distance of 40 kilometers to 60 kilometers from the front and within 20 kilometers to 30 kilometers of both sides of the road.”
These orders applied to all Nazi-occupied territories. NKVD troops were deployed to create diversions in the enemy rear, and they had to find a way to gain support of the local people whom they knew were already sentenced to death by Stalin. Their solution was to win support by terrorizing and plundering.
Kononov and others like him are typically referred to as “partisans,” but this is a misleading term. The word “partisan” usually refers to a local resident who has the support of the local population in waging war against the occupiers. But none of these conditions applies to Kononov.
First, Kononov was not a civilian but a special forces agent. Second, he did not fight the occupiers. On May 27, 1944, he was fighting against the civilian population. Among the nine people his commando unit killed were three women, one of whom was nine months pregnant. She was shoved back into a burning building from which they had only just managed to escape. Third, Kononov’s unit obviously did not enjoy the support of the local population. The locals hated the partisans even more than they did the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis — who themselves were occupiers — were not afraid to issue rifles to the locals so that they could protect themselves from the “reds.”
It is true that the verdicts of the Latvian court and the European Court of Human Rights are vivid examples of an attempt to rewrite history. But this is precisely the history that needs to be rewritten.
Soviet propaganda created a glorious picture of the “people’s war in the enemy’s rear.” But the reality is that a civil war was fought behind the front lines. From 1941 to 1944, the red partisans behaved exactly like the Vietcong did during the Vietnam War — that is, by terrorizing the civilian population even more than the ruthless enemy did.
The Latvian and Strasbourg court rulings have shed valuable light on a small, but extremely important, historic episode. Lets hope the correct lessons will be learned.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
The Baltic ostrichs.
A former Lithuanian,Soviet partisan Yitzak Arad, Israeli (IDF) -general, Chairman of the Yad Vashem, The Israeli Authority of rememberence, (Holocaust) , was even he, accused of warcrimes by the Lithuanian state - and couldn´t visit Lithuania because threatened with extradition, arrest, for collaborate with NKVD, a few years ago. He lost his whole family during the Holocaust.This Baltic attitude is wellknown, and arouse very seldom respect, but more of disgrace in the international community. (See: The Holocaust in the Sovietunion./ Y. Arad. (Univ.P.Nebraska) Yad Vashem 2009.)
The problem here, is that thousands of Baltic war criminals fled to Sweden, 1944 but no one was ever put to trial, (but some soldiers (146) were extradited to USSR 1946 due to allied agreement).
All this, (of course not, new facts) , has 2010 been collected in a book : Purgatorium / by the Swe-dish Holocaust-scholar : Mats Deland. (Blogg : Purgatorium.se, - which dealing with war crimes, old and new. As the Israeli goverment´s , against Swedish citizens, on board Ship-to-Ghaza , a case now for the Swedish judicial authorities. (due to the blogg.)
Some facts from Purgatorium /Estonia: (Estonian reserve-policebattlion Ostland created in July 1941. Reservpolicebataillon nr 33 to Ukraine. The 13th -14 juli 1942 they participated ,(two Estonian and a Latvian company) in the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Rowno / Riwne. Together with Ukrainian auxiliary police, they drove 5.000 victims, primary " skilled workers", that had survived the first purges, to the railway waggons.This people were then taken to a quarry at Kostopol, where they were murdered by a of a commando of Ukrainan and German SD personal.(The bataillon were dissolved between 1942-43)./Deland 2010/
(And what the Vietnamese Front de national de Liberation (FNL), ("Vietcong" is some U.S. Army derogatory term for those real partisans, victorious against France 1954, and United States 1975,
worst colonial wars of the last part of the 1900th century) - are doing in Yulia Latyniinas columns, is just unclear. Here U.S. Army, is accused of murdering some 60.000 vietnamese civilians, teach-ers,activists et al, during the CIA-operation Phoenix, a terrible project with death patrols in syst-ematic activities. The man in charge was (later) CIA- leader, William Colby, known from Sweden, during WWII, as O.S.S. -agent at the U.S- legation, made som commandoraids 1944 to Norway against the Germans, forced to withdraw from Finland, 200.000 men (with some 30.000 Soviet pows)
Estonia : 8.000 estonians were executed, died in captivity, or were shot during larger or minor Ger-man " Einsatz", during the German occupation of Estonia. This figure is estimated low, and must be much higher.(5.000 during June-Dec., 1941, some thousands during 1942. Of those, 950 Jews and 350 Romas. The rest, Communists or Sovietsympathizers. Compared to the Soviet occupation, a similar period, the German occupation was considerably much bloodier, just only concerning Esto-nian victims. Then one must add, a further 20.000 victims = Soviet prisoner of war + foreign Jews. The Omakaitse (Home Guard) and the Estonian security police was much more brutal, and murd-ered many more of the Russian minority, and Russian Pows, than the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD). The Estonian ruling circles during this peripod was nothing but a Quislingregime /Deland 2010/