by Mikhail Demurin
[Regnum] Having studied the documents about the atrocities of the Nazis and their accomplices during the war years, one should not just be outraged once again. We must give ourselves a vow not to try to seek any compromise with this public even today.
The publication by the Federal Security Service of Russia of new documents on the crimes of Latvian accomplices of the German Nazis is the right and timely thing to do. It must be said, however, that these atrocities have always been known. Trials of Nazi punishers in the Soviet Union almost always took place in public. In late Soviet times, this topic, however, was somewhat retouched, taken to the background, but there is no doubt that everyone in the USSR knew about the criminals who killed and tortured their people along with the German occupiers: how it was in the Latvian SSR, what happened on other lands of the Soviet Union occupied by the enemy. They knew in Latvia and other republics of the USSR that the true heroes of the Latvian people were those who fought against the Nazis and their allies in the ranks of the Latvian Guards Rifle Division.
Therefore, the question for us today is not how we treat these crimes - it is clear that we treat them with indignation and hatred. The question is how we behave in relation to those who today raise to the shield those who did all this on Soviet soil, who were their ideologists, who justified cooperation with Hitler and called for it. This, by the way, applies not only to Latvia, but also to other new states in the space of the former USSR, to Russia itself.
In Latvia, the socio-political system has been saturated with neo-Nazi and revanchist grounds since 1989. Then, gradually, figures of the Latvian emigration began to come and settle there more and more often in the Latvian SSR. Even if not all of them themselves served in the SD punitive teams, the auxiliary police or the Latvian SS legion, although there were some, not all of them had fathers or grandfathers there, but they were from those families who sympathized with the political and ideological attitudes that guided by those who served Hitler.
Work on the Nazification of Latvia intensified in anticipation of its takeover by NATO and the EU. In 2003, the former British brigadier general of Latvian origin, Janis Kazhotsins, who received Latvian citizenship at the same time, was appointed to the post of head of the central Latvian intelligence service. Today he is an advisor to the President of Latvia, Egils Levits, and a secretary of the Latvian National Security Council.
His father served in the same police units mentioned in the FSB documents that helped the German SS and Gestapo arrest and exterminate Jews, communists, partisans; his uncle was an officer in the Latvian SS legion. Being the director of the Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution, Kazhotsins Jr. admitted to journalists that "he himself grew up with the legionnaires."
From Kažocins, family and political ties stretch, in particular, to the established war criminal Janis Cirulis, and through him again to the current president of Latvia. According to an investigation by the Historical Memory Foundation, Janis Cirulis was involved in the massacres of civilians in the Novgorod region of Russia, near the villages of Zhestyanaya Gorka and Chernoye. Then he served as an officer in the Latvian Legion of the SS (an organization whose activities are banned in the Russian Federation), and after fleeing to Western Europe, he became one of the founders of the veteran legionnaire organization Daugava Hawks, led its West German branch. Then Cīrulis became the head of the Latvian Gymnasium in Münster, and Egils Levits graduated from it in 1973.
It is clear that the leaders of our country do not communicate with this public now. It is unpleasant, however, that they communicated. In 2005, the President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who also grew up in a family of Latvian collaborators and “absorbed the spirit of legionnaires,” was invited to celebrate the Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War, which is dearest to us.
The growth of pro-Nazi sentiments in Latvia was then evident, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reflected them in a reference document published in early 2005 “On the participation of the Latvian SS legion in war crimes in 1941-1945. and attempts to review the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in Latvia” (then our historians still wrote little on this topic, and it was not thrown into the public space at all), but the invitation nevertheless took place. It should not have been surprising later that Vike-Freiberga used her visit to Russia to
This, however, went unpunished for Riga - on the contrary, it was then that a border treaty was concluded with Latvia without any accompanying conditions, which was so necessary for it as a member of NATO and at the same time served, when discussing the issue of its ratification, for a provocative return to the thesis of keeping Latvia territorial claims against our country.
Today, the descendants of Nazi accomplices, already completely unrestrained from impunity, and the local revanchist rabble brought up by them, are destroying monuments to the victors of Nazism in Latvia, and are beginning to dig up their graves.
In a word, in connection with the publication of documents, it is important not to once again be indignant at the atrocities of the Nazis and their accomplices, but, looking at these documents, once again give yourself a vow not to try to seek some kind of compromise with this public, not to return to the old rake. The modern Latvian elite are our historical enemies, and we must consistently proceed from this when fighting for the restoration of Russia's positions in the Baltics.
