The lessons of the Holocaust in Russia: From Perception to Actions
As a member of the Government of Russia I am glad and proud, that today the voice of my country joins the voices of the world that condemn the Holocaust as a most monstrous tragedy of the outgoing 20th Century. It is noteworthy that the Conference is held today, on January 27th – the day of the 50th anniversary since the Soviet Army liberated Oswiencim, the camp of annihilation, one of the most fearful ovens of the Holocaust where four million inmates, mostly Jews, have been burnt.

The fact that the World Forum – the first in the new millennium – is devoted to the lessons of the Holocaust, is an event of the trend. Why today, when so many years have passed since then, so many countries with such an understanding and unanimity responded to the call of Sweden?

The fact is that ideas of national superiority are reviving, the neo-Nazis and fascists are raising their heads. This can become a principal threat and a principal challenge in the new millennium. The international community should join efforts in order never again to allow new attempts to annihilate a whole people – any people.

The attitude of one or another country to the tragedy of the Holocaust is an indicator, or the litmus paper in a sense, for other states to judge whether a country is eligible to be named a civil democratic society. By the very fact of its presence at the conference among other countries of the civilised world, Russia demonstrates that the long-standing wall of silence in our country has been demolished. This, per se, is an impressive evidence of the historical choice that Russia has made: it has chosen the way of democratic development and evolution to an open civil society, that henceforth the public policy of Russia, including policy in different spheres of social life, such as education and culture, is integrated into the common policy of civilized countries which apprehend the Holocaust not only as a national catastrophe but as a tragedy common to all mankind. As a tragedy that took more than six million Jewish lives in the world, three million of which lived in the territory of the former Soviet Union. As a tragedy that turned into criminals not only the Nazis who had studded the land with death camps but also those who had become silent or overt accomplices in dissemination of a social disease of dehumanization that had affected people of different nationalities and views, i.e. misanthropy in a sense.

The farther we go from the Holocaust, the ever clearer it becomes that the Holocaust with its social and psychological consequences as other recurrences of genocide, is a most dangerous syndrome of dehumanisation of all the population of the planet Earth. The passionate formula of an outstanding Russian publicist and historian Mikhail Ghefter, founder of Russia’s first Center of the Holocaust studies, – “there is no genocide against ‘somebody’ – genocide is always against everyone” – reveals the essence of genocide as an aggression which will entail the destruction of entire mankind. Hence, fundamentalism, nationalism, fascism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves as a philosophy and ideology of not only ethno phobia, but also a misanthropy fraught, in the final historical analysis, with a holocaust of entire mankind.

This idea is alive on my mother’s mind - a common, ordinary woman. It is here, in Stockholm, that we would like to recall that the memory of the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust and its victims has always lived in the Russian hearts. As far back as 1960s and 1970s many literature and poetic works on the Holocaust were published in our country. Among them there was the poem of a well-known Russian poet, Evgeny Evtushenko, entitled “Babiy Yar” devoted to the Jews killed by the Nazis in Ukraine during the Great Patriotic War.

In the 1990s, on the initiative of the Russian Jewish Congress, the Holocaust Victims Remembrance Museum was opened on the Poklonnaya Hill, a sacred place for all Russians. It is worth to note that the first stone to its foundation was laid down by the President of Russia and its Prime Minister. Starting from 1992 the Russian public marks annually the Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day. Also Annually, international and educational conferences are being held and collective works of memoirs, documents and books published.

These and other facts testify that people of Russia have themselves been reinstating the Holocaust in their historical memory by the call of their heart and conscience. But now from actions of separate individuals - historians, writers, financiers devoted to the ever-present remembrance of the Holocaust victims, the state proceeds to the establishment of programs to form ideas of tolerant mentality and present manifestations of extremism, including anti- Semitism, in a civil society. In other words, we are proceeding to the state-sponsored actions. In our opinion, if mankind is to survive, it has to be tolerant and work out a strategy to achieve accord among people of different colour, national origin, religion, ideology and beliefs. And the process of understanding the Holocaust tragedy will occupy a prominent place in the state tolerance program being developed on the initiative of Vladimir Putin, the Acting President of Russia.

In this context, we would like to support the initiative of Mr. G. Persson, Prime-Minister of Sweden, who created the International Group on the Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Russia is open for a dialogue and is ready to take part in the activities of this international group.

I am confident that our conference will become a historic event and will be instrumental in turning the state strategy of tolerance and understanding among various countries and ethnic, religious and political forces into Ariadnes’s thread for mankind to find its way out of the maze of national conflicts and tragedies to an open world – a world in which the memory of the Holocaust will save us from self-destruction.