The greatest crime of the USSR was the Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe

By: Sergei Lebedev / The Guardian Translation: Telegrafi.com We often hear that Russia’s inability or unwillingness to confront the crimes of the past has led to the return of tyranny and military aggression that we see today. Such a narrative usually focuses only on internal Soviet actions: forced collectivization, the Great Terror of the 1930s, the gulag system and the like. Some of these things were nominally recognized as crimes, but no effo…

The greatest crime of the USSR was the Soviet occupation of Central and Eastern Europe

Russia's inability – or unwillingness – to recognise the weight of the USSR's imperialist policy towards the countries of the former Soviet bloc continues to shape relations between the latter and Moscow, explains Russian exile writer Sergei Lebedev on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Helsinki accords that marked the end of the Cold War.