Russia is in nazi crisis. Skinny bald Russian nazis beat people. Many Russians actually joined Hitlers forces in ww2.

This is ironic: "He understood that the trial was not only about Hitler and Ribbentrop. It was not just a few people who had to be punished, but an entire ideology of mass killing. " Stalin killed more innocent people than Hitler ever dreamed of. The Soviet soldier was not exactly humane either, in his march west once the war turned against Germany. It is unfortunate that there is not such a bias against Marxism as their is against National Socialism. It has proven time and again to be many times more dangerous then National Socialism ever was.

Nuernberg was a show trail for the vanquished. If we talk about crimes against humanity then a more than a couple of Allied leaders should have sat in the dock as well for what was done to civilians in Japan and Germany.   We have the remnants of how the world was run then today. America has a history of doing this sort of thing - stealing from an 'unfavored' nation and giving to the other.     You could call this aggressive war, the exception is that the Arabs, Indians (the red ones) and Negroes couldn't fight back...

To PR101: Of course Russia has some good things, both in some of its current doings and in its heritage from the past. In regard to the latter, I especially enjoy Russian music and have a modest personal collection of it. I also enjoy Russian  literature, ballet and theatre, and indulge in these as opportunity permits. But it is not Russia's good things that caused the horrible Russia-related sufferings to so many millions of people in the past, and it is not Russia's good things that cloud the future of Russians and their neighbours.

N or is Russia's untruthful slandering of Estonia, which is a feature of the current RT article, a good thing, and I have commented on it by bringing relevant facts to bear. No amount of Russian planes flying over the Antarctic makes that kind of behaviour any less bad nor any less of a threat for the future.

And please be assured, PR, that Baltic people are very, very knowledgeable in "doing business with the Russians." Indeed, they are amongst the most knowledgeable in all the world in that particular art. They have learned it over a thousand years, had an excellent crash refresher course in the recent half-century, and are practically using their wealth of knowledge to-day.

To: Marzipan6 It is sad that you almost never see good things in Russia. Here is one good news I saw today on RT website: the IL-67TD made 7000KM round trip to the South Pole. This marks the first time the farthest point of the South Pole was reached by a cargo Plane. This project was undertaken because the Americans have denied other nations refueling rights in its existing  air base in the South Pole. Russian cannot be denied. Of course,  you can  keep  posting as much Russobia as  much as you like. The Russians are busy taking care of business at home and abroad.. P/S. the New Times’ Article matters because the U.S government has been denying giving known key Nazi figures a safe haven in the name of “national security.” &n bsp; So these Nazi scientists worked both the fascists and the capitalists. So, it is possible these Nazi scientists were both loyal to the American values and the values of the Third Reich? As for those Russian hating little Baltic countries, they will soon learn to do business with the Russians.   & nbsp;

To MEJanssen: While I do not see evidence of any fundamental change of heart on the part of Russia towards facing up to its Soviet past, it is nevertheless gratifying to see the couple of little concessions you mentioned. I don't see these as indicative of any fundamental change because Russia continued to obfuscate and lie about Katyn for as long as it possibly could, with only the recent Polish air tragedy finally making it impossible for it to continue any further along that vein.

In regard to the Memorial Society, the Kremlin's relationship with it has been particulary fraught. As recently as just two years ago authorities raided its St Petersburg offices and confiscated twelve computer discs containing Memorial's complete archive of Stalin's atrocities. Memorial believes this was the direct result of Putin's displeasure with their work of disclosing Russia's past. As neither Russia nor Putin have changed their basic attitudes, and as I haven't come down in the last shower either, it occurs to me that while overt suppression of Memorial would bring uncomfortable publicity to bear on the Kremlin, investing in a Memorial project with the aim of trying to influence and control it from within would probably be the Kremlin's idea of making the best of a bad situation.

As for that "beating their breasts and slashing their wrists" bit, you trivialize an extremely important imperative in any Russian recovery from its Soviet past. Internal healing within the country, and external healing of its relations with neighbours, cannot happen unless Russia first acknowledges and then appropriately reconciles with its internal and external victims. Only then can Russia achieve the national rehabilitation that Germany has achieved.

To PR101: Two main motives power Russia's continuing preoccupation with WW2. One is certainly the enormity of the losses it suffered. The other is a deep-seated proclivity to want to legitimize Soviet failures by a heroic war epic.

Stalin and his successors already used this tactic in Soviet times. Since the Soviet collapse, Putin has tried to fill the ideological vacuum by heroizing the War even more. Each year the May celebrations grow bigger and bigger until they now assume religious dimensions. However, the idealized narrative is only partially based on fact. Much of it is also a generous serving of mythology. For details, read "Ivan's War - Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945" by Catherine Merrindale (Metropolitan Books, New York 2006).

Which brings us back to the subject of this RT article. Stalin spun his Baltic lies right from the very start when, in 1940, he invaded those countries, overthrew their governments, organised a ridiculous charade of elections that conformed to absolutely no norm of their constitutional law, and afther destroying their nationhood and submerging thie in the Soviet Union, began murdering and mass deporting their people. This all before Russia was even at war with Germany.

Stal in claimed that the Baltics freely and legally joined the Soviet Union, and according to him, their subsequent resistance to the Red Army must have been because of traitorous collaboration with Nazis.Soviet and post-Soviet Russia has continued to embrace this self-serving nonsense - theough why countries that supposedly voted for Soviet rule in 1940 fought against it so bitterly from 1941 on is something that Russian propaganda, past and present, has never been able to explain. Neither does RT. It simply repeats Stalin's propaganda that Estonians were Nazis then and that they supposedly celebrate Nazism now.

PR101, I did comment on the NY Times article, and pointed out that the fundamentals of the story have been known for 50 years. The report to which the NY Times refers merely adds some new details to an old story that has long been well-known and acknowledged by everyone with any interest in the matter.

MEJanssen What are the reasonable chances that the United States will build memorials and museums for the victims of American state violence in Latin America, Africa, Iraq, Japan?

News for everybody who wants to see Russians beat their breasts and slash their wrists: Russia is indeed looking at the past and starting to reconcile with those who were victimized by Stalin and his system.  Two examples: the Katyn monument where both prime ministers from Poland and Russia laid wreaths and prayed, and now a new announcement that the group "Memorial" is sponsoring a museum about the victims of the gulag system.  The new museum and research center will be situated near Saint Petersburg and will be substantially paid for by the Federal government, according to a new online article in the St Petersburg Times.   It is going to take time for reconciliation  with all neighbors and surviving gulag prisoners, but at least there is a start.  Anybody who tries to steer the process or speed it up will only make the Russians "dig in their heels" and halt any outreach.  Not because they are Russians but because they are human.

david winterton I do not think Russians can let go WWII that easily. in WWII, more Russians were killed in the blockade of Leningrad alone than the total British and the American dead combined. 30 plus millions Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians were killed in WWII. This figure includes perhaps 4M red Army POW who were killed through various means including forced labour, starvation and disease and outright gassing in the Third Reich death campus--. Has Hollywood ever made a movie on what happen to the people of Soviet Union in WWII? Just name a single Hollywood Movie that even attempted to address the what happened in the Eastern Front in WWII (note Emeny at the Gates is, ironically a pro Nazi story about a Soviet sniper who did what he did not out of heroism but as it turned out-out of fear!).Thus, in my view, the Russians are guilt of not doing enough in representing the WWII crimes against the Soviet people. Marzipan6 : Nobody here is questioning whether the Soviet people had suffered under Stalin and other leaders but the catastrophic event of WWII and dead of 30M soviet people in the hands of Axis forces is what we need to stress in this blog. Also, I have noticed that you've failed to respond to the New York Times article that clearly show a collusion between the CIA/The US Department of Justice and certain “high valued” Nazi members

Let's be objective and fair and let call things their right names. Since 1991 Russia and its people has looked into their own shadow and the shadow of the past more intensively and more sincerely than anyone else. One just needs to look and recognize the vast amount of released records, the many writings, and the accounts that have been produced. It is also apparent that fascism is re-emerging. It is also a fact that collaborating with fascism under whatever pretext is a crime against humanity. And to resist and oppose fascism or even complacency with it is neither "deplorable" nor "despicable," as Marzipan6 believes and would like us to believe. To paint a critique of neo-fascist or neo-nazist tendencies as "deplorable," "hypocritical," and "despicable" is hypocritical, deplorable,and despicable. To fight the neo-fascist threat is right, and it is also one's human duty. Fascism is perpetual war and imperialism on steroids. In its hitlerian form, it was not just a policy of the extermination of all the Jews, but also of all the Slavs. To try to put a sign of equivalence between this and the Soviet rule or even the Russian people as such requires a very twisted soul. Did I say "soul"? I meant insanity. Without the liberation and sacrifices of the Soviet or Russian soldiers, most of us would not be able to even have this debate today. For dead people don't bear children.

Churchill proposed execution of loosing-war leaders without trial. He was deservedly buried in Church. Stalin viewed the same situation as legally exploitable morbid stuff not only for future, but also as reversed indulgence -tool for his pre-Nuremberg political “enterprises licensed to kill”. Stalin was having no Church to get buried and stayed alive. Cronkite considered Nuremberg as the turning point of history and Fukuyama declared “the end of history”. Were it not by some Jewish intellectuals in Time magazine who found this over-simplistic, the Russian side would not have had better commentator than L. Tolstoy. He said that intellectuals are obsessed with writing dissertation to assert something what has been nonsense in the first instance.&nbs p;

I like RT for it's intelligent and different reports on world news. Please I know you can not forget the 2nd world war but do not let it eat away at you. Your neighbours suffered as much as you.

To PR101: I entirely agree, Nuremberg represented the justice of the victors, and therefore brought no justice at all for crimes committed BY the victors. Such crimes varied enormously, extending from what we might insensitively call "normal" warfare crimes of the Western Allies to the horrific premeditated mass murder and mass deportation of millions of innocent civilians and the deliberate wiping of sovereign nations from the map of the world, which was deliberate policy of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia alike.

Of course Russians themselves suffered terribly under the Soviet regime. But as well as being the victims of the Soviet regime, Russians were also the primary victimisers of others in the name of the Soviet State, a fact that Russia and its apologists conveniently forget. Today's Russia either justifies, lies about or passes over in complete silence and denial the crimes which Russians, many of whom are still living and citizens of the Russian Federation, committed under the Soviet flag. It has also failed to even investigate, much less prosecute or convict a single individual who participated in Soviet crimes against humanity.

Given this record, Russia's ceaseless criticism of its neighbours is hugely hypocritical. But worse, much of its accusations and defamation are based on distortions and on outright lies, and this is  not just hypocritical; it is despicable.

Y es, I'm well aware that some post-war refugees that the US and other countries accepted, sometimes innocently and sometimes not, included some Nazi war criminals. This has been common knowledge for over 50 years, and does not depend on a breathless NY Times revelation a week ago. It also has nothing to do with the shortcomings, distortions and untruths of the current RT article, which is the subject of my posts here.

To: Marzipan6 First, as always, one count on your unfailing anti-Russian rehtoric. Now, it is true that the Nuremberg Trials trials brought partial justice- by delimiting the conviction to key SS figures– these trials reflected the justice accoring to the victors.. It is not Estonia, it is the people of the Soviet Union-which justice also denied. I often ask myself why the massive war crimes against the Soviet people under German occuption where not brought in as key part of the Nuremberg war tribunal– but we know that Stalin, perhaps did not want a close scrutiny of some Soviet produced fabricated evidence- most of all the false claim that Katyn massacre of over 20,00 Polish officers was the work of the Third Reich. We now that it was the Soviet security agent that did this horrific crime. But why do you almost always seek to collapse Russians with Stalin and Stalinist crimes? Were millions of ordinary Russians-including the cream of the crop of the Red Army officers- who were eradicated completely by Stalin's regime not victims?Also have you seen very recent New York Times article which further backed up the common knowledge that some key figures of the Nazi regime were welcomed in the United States and that the CIA and the U.S Justice Department were fully aware that these men were fully fledged members of the SS? http://www.ny times.com/2010/11/14 /us/14nazis.html

COMMENT ON ARTICLE, PART 1

Indeed the Nuremberg Trials were invaluable, and Estonia, as one of the many countries that experienced Nazi occupation, has always applauded those trials. But unfortunately there were no corresponding trials of Soviet Communist perpetrators of crimes against humanity, and therefore the article's claim  that "nowadays we all know what a crime against humanity is," is unfortunately not true. Russia, where no similar trials were ever held, where no Russian who committed crimes against humanity in the name of the Soviet State has ever even been investigated let alone tried and convicted, appears to have a deficient understanding of crimes against humanity, especially of those in which Russians participated.

Characterizing Andrey Andronov as an "anti-fascist activist" is misleading. "Pro-Soviet activist" would be much closer to the truth. But he is right when he says that Estonia does not see the Red Army as saviours. That army invaded a peaceful and neutral Estonia in 1940 when Soviet Russia was Nazi Collaborator Number 1, overthrew the legitimate government of Estonia, destroyed its sovereignty and set about committing mass atrocities and mass deportation of its civilian population. It saved the country from absolutely nothing, merely dragged it into a Stalinist hell. Then Stalin fell out with his best friend in Berlin, and Nazi Germany occupied Estonia from 1941-44. This occupation was also brutal, but not as murderous or horrific as the Red Army's had been. The Red Army returned in 1944, to continue its horrors. Of course the people fought it in any way they could. So would you if it was your country and you were there.

(Conti nued)

COMMENT ON ARTICLE, PART 2

The Bronze Soldier monument to which the article refers was erected by Stalin as a symbol of his destruction of free Estonia, and does not commemorate its freedom. Stalin brought no freedom to Estonia, but merely replaced one brutal foreign occupation with another. The monument was built to remind Estonians who their new masters were. It was raised on the site of a wooden monument which Russians had erected a few years before and which two 15 year-old Estonian schoolgirls had demolished as retribution for monuments to the 1918-20 Estonian War of Independence which Russians were then systematically destroying throughout the country. You may see the picture of one of those girls, Aili Jurgenson, at:

http://ww w.okupatsioon.ee/eng lish/photos/index.ht ml

In 2007 the Bronze Soldier monument was removed from its downtown Tallinn position and relocated to the city's international military cemetery, and there solemnly re-dedicated as a monument to all people of all nationalities who died in all wars on Estonian soil.

The current Freedom Column to which the article refers was completed only last year. It commemorates Estonia's 1920 victory in its War of Independence against Germany and Russia, and depicts the Estonian Cross of Liberty, the country's most distinguished award, established in 1919. It long predates the rise of Nazism and contains absolutely no Nazi symbolism of any kind.

Russia' s relentless anti-Estonian campaign, which this RT article faithfully echoes is untruthful and reprehensible.