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This Saturday (August 23) the European Union will commemorate the victims of the totalitarian regimes that left Europe in ruins in the course of the 20th century.

Following the European Parliament’s resolution of 2 April 2009, August 23rd has been established as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

“Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its history, recognizes Nazism, Stalinism and fascist and Communist regimes as a common legacy and brings about an honest and thorough debate on their crimes in the past century,” claims the aforementioned resolution.

“The memories of Europe's tragic past must be kept alive in order to honor the victims, condemn the perpetrators and lay the foundations for reconciliation based on truth and remembrance.”

Therefore, August 23rd has been proclaimed as “a Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, to be commemorated with dignity and impartiality.” Subsequently, this decision has been endorsed also by non-EU nations like Canada, Georgia and the United States.

Millions of civilians were dead, injured and suffered rough Soviet and Nazi repression before World War II. However, tens of millions combatants and civilians from all sides were killed in action, under bombing, from starvation and repressions because of the consequences of Molotov-Ribentrop pact during and after World War II.

According to a research by a leading American expert of that epoch, Timothy Snyder, the Nazis “deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included.” For the Soviets during the Stalin period, “the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million.”

These numbers do not include the millions of combatant deaths inflicted during the World War II, or those civilians who had survived the horrors of the Gulag but for the rest of their lives had to live on deeply traumatized, both physically and psychologically, by their horrendous experieces.

Thus, according to the estimate by the famous soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the number of the victims of Stalinism alone may stand at 60 million people or more.

August 23rd has been chosen as the landmark date since on this day in 1939 the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany concluded secret protocols agreeing, in effect, to divide Central Europe into ‘spheres of interest.’

These infamous and universally rejected documents, also known as ‘the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,’ cleared the way for the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Soviet attack on Finland in November 1939 and the occupation and annexation of the three Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) and regions of Romania Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina by the Soviets in the summer of 1940.

On 23 August 1989, when the world was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the division of Europe, more than 2 million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined their hands in what has become the largest human chain in world history, spanning across more than 600 km between the three capitals of Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. In 2009, this human chain, also known as the Baltic Way, was included in the UNESCO’s International Register “Memory of the World”. 

As the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way is commemorated this year, a special website has been launched which collects and represents living memories of the participants of this civic action (http://www.thebalticway.eu/en/).