Israel’s Holocaust Museum has accused Russia of Holocaust distortion over its decision to establish a new annual memorial day to commemorate the Nazi “Genocide of the Soviet People” while omitting any mention of their Jewish victims.
The new memorial day, which was signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin last month, will go into effect this year.
“Yad Vashem condemns this latest attempt to manipulate the historical facts of Nazi persecution for current political purposes,” Israel’s Holocaust Museum said in a Thursday post on X. “This new Russian law effectively erases the distinct Jewish dimension of the Shoah, despite the fact that they were the primary target of Nazi genocide.”
The Jerusalem Holocaust museum noted that while millions of Russians were killed during World War II, many of them in targeted murders, “the Holocaust is defined by the comprehensive campaign aimed at the total eradication of Jewish existence and the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children, and as such must be recognized and remembered.”
The statement also added that the designated memorial date—April 19—set by the new Russian law has “profound significance” in Holocaust remembrance, as it marks the start of the famous uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
Around 27 million Soviet citizens died in World War Two, including about 8.7 million military casualties, the highest death toll of any nation.
Israeli academics said on Monday that Yad Vashem was right to speak out.
“It is good that this statement came out, only too bad it did not come sooner because we are in the midst of a continued process of Putin’s manipulation of World War Two,” said Samuel Barnai of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Like every other narrative, the Jewish Holocaust has to be sacrificed for the narrative of Soviet victory. where the victims are the Soviet nation.”
“The Russian law on the so-called genocide of the Soviet people is an outright fiction as the term ‘genocide’ has a narrow legal definition,” Leonid Smilovitsky, Senior Research Associate at Tel Aviv University, told JNS. “It was adopted by the Putin regime 80 years after the end of World War II to serve as a tool of political rhetoric to justify Russia’s current actions related to Ukraine and the Holocaust.”
“It is a strategy of ‘victimhood nationalism’ undertaken by the Russian government to portray Russia as the primary victim of Nazism,” Konstantin Pakhaliuk, Associate Researcher at Ruppin Academic Center, said in an interview with JNS. “The idea first emerged last decade, and since the aggression against Ukraine, it is now used to say that throughout history, Russians were always the victims of the West.”
He added that the new memorial day enacted by Russia was not a straightforward denial of the Holocaust as a Jewish genocide but a distortion of history to downplay the Jewish tragedy and to highlight the Soviet one.
“Its primary purpose is entirely political,” he said.
