Mick Hartley

An interesting insight into memories of World War 2 in Belarus, with the Guardian's Natalie Nougayrède.

Timothy Snyder, in Bloodlands, recounts how 14 million people were murdered between 1933 and 1945 in an area that stretches from the Baltic sea to the Black sea, with Belarus worst affected: a quarter of its population were killed. It was "the worst place to be" in WW2, caught between the killing machines of Hitler and Stalin. 

Nougayrède visited three sites in the forests outside Minsk where mass slaughter took place. But the commemorations were not the same:

A fork in the road in Maly Trostenets is where tens of thousands of Jews, many from Germany and Austria, were shot over pits by SS commandos, their corpses later burned. Construction of a monument has recently started there, but strikingly it doesn’t indicate the victims’ names. This is because Belarusian officials are uneasy with commemorating the Holocaust – much as the Soviet authorities were. Instead, on trees nearby, families of victims have placed small yellow posters bearing the details of those who perished.

Not far from there, in the forest of Kuropaty, lies a place where Stalin’s men shot thousands during the 1930s. Wooden crosses of Orthodox Christianity have been planted by Belarusian civil groups and opposition activists as a way of honouring the victims. But there again, no names. And there is no official monument at all. The cult of Stalin remains untouched in Belarus, much like it has been restored in Putin’s Russia.

And a little further, in Khatyn, is a clearing in the forest where a village once stood. The Nazis massacred its entire population, pushing families into a barn and setting it on fire. They decimated hundreds of villages in Belarus this way. And here the full spectrum of Soviet‑era commemorations is deployed: a monument with names, a museum, tour guides. Khatyn symbolises the persecution of an entire nation – but it is an exclusive emblem, sitting alongside huge omissions. In Belarus the crimes of Stalinism are left largely untold, as are those perpetuated by the Nazis against the Jews.