Wars' Legacy Endures for Belarus City

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/world/europe/wars-legacy-endures-for-belarus-city.html

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BREST, Belarus — There are many stops on the road from Moscow to Brest that bear witness to a history of war and death, treachery, surrender, victory and retreat, and occasional flashes of glory. Two armies took this road to invade Russia — Napoleon’s in 1812 and Hitler’s in 1941 — and both were forced to retreat along a similar route.

A week before the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany — celebrated on May 9 in Moscow and Minsk, and on May 8 in the rest of Europe — this blood-soaked road was showing signs of spring, less advanced in the unkempt Russian countryside than in the green, well-tended fields across the border in Belarus.

In both countries, there is little now to distinguish a battlefield from any other field. If it weren’t for the markers and the monuments, the site of the Battle of Borodino, about 70 miles from Moscow, would yield little sign of the 70,000 men who died here in September 1812, when French invaders and Russian defenders fought to a draw. In Belarus, the Berezina River, swollen by melted snow, now flows peacefully through marshy grasses where, in November 1812, Napoleon’s retreating army came under attack as it made a dash across hastily constructed pontoon bridges, eluding its Russian pursuers.

The history of World War II is fresher, and its memorials more evident along the roadside, now covered with flags ahead of the anniversary. In Belarus, the preparations are more muted and less bombastic than in Russia, where President Vladimir V. Putin is planning a full-scale display of military might, using the Soviet victory to reassert Russian pride.

This year, leaders of France, Britain and the United States are staying away from the commemorations in Moscow to protest Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Last week, in an unexpected snub, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus announced that he too would not join Mr. Putin on Red Square, opting to host a May 9 celebration in Minsk.

The most imposing war monument in Belarus is a mammoth stone head of a glowering Soviet soldier inside the 19th-century fortress of Brest on the Bug River, now the border with Poland, which came under German attack on the night of the surprise invasion on June 22, 1941. The statute commemorates the stubborn heroism of a group of Soviet soldiers who stayed to defend the fortress against all odds, earning Brest a hallowed place in Soviet memory.

Less mentioned, however, are Brest’s other encounters with history. Less than two years before German bombs fell on the fortress, Soviet and German troops had paraded together here, marking the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact that had divided Poland and incorporated Brest into the Soviet Union.

Brest-Litovsk, as it was once called, was also where, in 1918, Germany signed a peace treaty which allowed the newly installed Soviet government to withdraw from World War I.

And it was near here that on Dec. 8, 1991, the Soviet Union was summarily dissolved by President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia and his Ukrainian and Belarussian counterparts.

The memorials along this road are not just for victims of battling armies. In Katyn, a Russian village near the Belarus border, one was erected in 2000 to the 4,412 Polish officers murdered here at Stalin’s orders in 1940, and to 6,500 Soviet citizens, killed by the Soviet secret police during the Great Terror of the 1930s. The bodies of other Polish victims are still missing, buried somewhere in this region.

But it is the overlapping itineraries of the two wars that have most marked this flat, monotonous landscape. After the German Army left Brest, speeding toward Moscow, it was temporarily halted at the Berezina where the retreating Russians had blown up the bridges.

“The Berezina was almost as effective in checking Hitler’s advance as in wrecking Napoleon’s retreat,” wrote B.H. Liddell Hart in his 1970 “History of the Second World War.”

That was a rare case when history stepped in the same river twice, albeit headed in opposite directions. This year, not for the first time, politics is tugging at the memory of a war, which in this region at least, remains selective.