Память о Второй мировой войне: между прошлым и настоящим
The Memory of the Second World War: between the Past and the Present

Summary/Abstract: The article looks through the changes in the memory of the Second World War as part of the transformations in the ideas that were established after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Marxist-Leninist ideology dominance in the East European countries. The author offers her version of the transformations in the memory of the Second World War, while analyzing the process of the Holocaust ideas’ establishment and the need for condemnation of all totalitarian regimes. According to her, two parallel processes take place in Europe after 1989 – the establishment of the Holocaust as a main event during the whole world war, going from West to East, and the enforcement of the view for similarity between the two totalitarian regimes – the National-Socialist and the Bolshevik, going in the opposite direction. The second process of European revisionism requires not only condemnation of the Communist crimes against humanity in a way similar to the condemnation of the Nazi crimes through the Nurnberg tribunal, but also a full revision of the views on the reasons, the driving forces and the results of the Second World War. In such way, the confrontations between Russia and the West nowadays, related mostly to the accession of Crimea and the war activities in Ukraine, also have their impact on the past: 70 years after its end, the war is starting to look more and more not like a collision between the anti-Hitler coalition and the Axis powers, but like a fight between two totalitarian regimes, in which, for one reason or another, most of the then existing countries were included.

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