Competing Over World War II’s Memory

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/world/europe/competing-over-world-war-iismemory.html

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PARIS — When Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Front party, this month defended the record of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the wartime leader who collaborated with the Nazis, it became a flash point for debate. And after he repeated his notorious comment that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of World War II, he was forced last week to renounce his candidacy in a local French election.

The echoes of World War II have never stopped reverberating in France, but this time Mr. Le Pen’s evocation of the country’s anti-Semitic, Pétainist past revealed him as an isolated, outdated figure.

While France remains obsessed with a war that once divided the country, it has evolved toward a commonly shared view of that era, according to Denis Peschanski, an expert on the period and curator of “Collaboration,” a recent exhibit at the National Archives.

“There is a form of consensus on the collaboration, and figures like Pétain, both now seen negatively,” he said, adding that by the 1990s, polls showed a “spectacular” worsening of Pétain’s image.

Yet on the other side of Europe, in countries that were once on the war’s eastern front, there is little sign of consensus on the victory or its legacy. Instead, as Mr. Peschanski put it, there is a “competition of memories,” pitting official Soviet history against evolving nationalist narratives in countries now looking to establish their own, post-Soviet identities.

Perhaps nowhere is the divergence over the memory of the war more acute than between Russia and Ukraine. With less than a month before Victory in Europe Day — traditionally celebrated on May 9 in Moscow and much of the ex-Soviet Union, and on May 8 in Western capitals — both countries are using the last world war to fire up nationalist sentiment in a conflict still being fought, despite a cease-fire agreement, in eastern Ukraine, between government forces and pro-Russian separatists.

In Kiev, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine has shifted the holiday from May 9 to May 8, in line with the rest of Europe, and renamed it a Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation. The Ukrainian Parliament has also passed a law — now awaiting Mr. Poroshenko’s signature — banning Soviet-era symbols, which would make it difficult for Ukrainian veterans to display the flag under which they fought.

These moves were quickly denounced by Moscow, where the sacred May 9 holiday has taken on new meaning.

In 1990, as the Cold War drew to a close, Victory Day on Red Square became a more civilian affair, with marching soldiers but without the traditional display of military hardware.

Then, in 2008, the tanks, nuclear-missile launchers and fighter jets were back, a signal that Russia was ready to flaunt its military muscle and draw on its Soviet past.

Last year, as the crisis in Ukraine escalated, President Vladimir V. Putin flew to Crimea on May 9 for a victory lap to celebrate the “historic justice” of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula.

This came against the backdrop of repeated accusations in the Russian media that the Ukrainian government is a hotbed of “fascists” and “neo-Nazis,” a reference to the Ukrainian nationalists who for a time fought alongside the Germans in World War II.

This year, Moscow will again celebrate the 1945 victory with heavy weaponry but without the presence of leaders from the United States, France and Britain, former allies that have chosen to stay away because of Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

In the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, a local museum returned the snub by abruptly canceling an exhibit of wartime photographs, a tribute to Ansel Adams, Robert Capa and others, which was sponsored by the consulates of the United States and Britain. According to reports in the Russian news media, confirmed independently, the reason for the closing was political, a response to what is seen as a boycott of the May 9 parade.

The war may be long over, but the competition over its memory continues.