Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism in Lithuania (23/08)

August 23 in Lithuania is celebrated as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, established by the decision of the Lithuanian Seimas in 2009.

Previously it was called Black Ribbon Day (Juodojo kaspino diena), and on this day many houses in Lithuania hung lowered state flags with a black ribbon attached. And the choice of date was due to the fact that on this day in 1939, the foreign ministers of the USSR and Germany: Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, on the instructions of their leaders I. Stalin and A. Hitler signed a document that became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

This pact was formally concluded for a period of ten years and included only two points: renunciation of mutual violence (this is a repetition of the provisions of the 1936 treaty) and respect for neutrality in the event of the participation of one of the parties in the war. There was nothing supernatural in these clauses of the treaty. Many countries concluded such agreements in the pre-war period.

But this document was accompanied by a secret protocol, according to which Germany and the USSR, in fact, divided the territory of Eastern Europe among themselves. Some analysts believe that Hitler benefited the most from the signed document. Albeit temporarily, Germany neutralized a dangerous rival in the person of the Red Army and gave itself a free hand for the first phase of European aggression. Soviet troops entered the Baltic states and Poland during that period.

According to the Lithuanian authorities, this pact became one of the most tragic pages in the history of the country and led the Republic of Lithuania to the loss of independence for a period of half a century.

In 2009, the Lithuanian Seimas adopted an amendment to the law on memorable dates, according to which August 23 began to be called the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. It also has a second name — Baltic Way Day, which it received in honor of the «Baltic Way» campaign. It took place on August 23, 1989, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact —, then residents of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, holding hands, formed a human chain that stretched from Vilnius to Tallinn, about 600 kilometers long; Almost 2 million people took part in the action.

On August 23, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism is also celebrated in Latvia, Estonia and a number of other European countries.

It must be said that the Russian leadership reacted negatively to the initiative to call the date August 23 the Pan-European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Because this is the actual equation of communism with Nazism, which is unacceptable, since it distorts history for political purposes.

Photo in: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H27337, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

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