The resolution of European parliament «On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe», as construed in the Russian Mass Media, 2019

Buldakova D.I.

Abstract

The article focuses on how the Russian mass media represented the European Parliament’s resolution «On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe» (19 Sep. 2019). The author characterizes the resolution itself and the reasons why this specific topic has attracted so much of media attention. What would seem to fuel the discussion around this historical issue is the fact that Russia and the Western world have contrasting attitudes to the role of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact, signed in 1939. Accordingly, the author describes and analyzes different standpoints on that event – expressed in the 1930s and 1940s in Soviet, Nazi and Western sources as well as in the current points of view of Russian and Western historians and political essayists. Thus, the problem under study is examined both synchronically and diachronically. The article highlights the factors that link all the media materials on the given topic. It is emphasized that most of them – no matter how different they are in their attitude towards the historical events analyzed – contain references to the statements by the contemporary Russian politicians – primarily President V. Putin and M. Zakharova, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition to their pronouncements, the text deals with the views of the contemporary historians on such issues as the EU’s resolution, the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact, the outcomes and the consequences of the Second World war. Concluding, the author states that both sides – the Russian and the Western one – keep accusing each other of deliberate fact distortion and attempts to re-evaluate the events of the 1930s – 1940s. These stances are politically-generated and targeted at presenting the events that preceded the Second World War in a way that would be consistent with the present-day political aims of Russia and her Western opponents. This situation, however, is not unique and characterizes the currently existing tensions between political rivals rather than the real course of events.

Keywords

the European Parliament; resolution «On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe»; the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact; the Second World War; Russian media; Vladimir Putin; The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; historical revisionism.

DOI: 10.31249/rsm/2021.01.13

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