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Ngộ Nhỡ viết

Truyền hình Đức nhà em thì bẩu thế này: Trước năm nay chưa từng có một nhà lãnh đạo cấp cao nào của Nga tới Katyn để tưởng niệm vụ thảm sát cùng đồng nghiệp Ba Lan.

Mấy phát biểu dũng cảm sau đây của Medvedev khi trả lời phỏng vấn Izvestia và được đăng trên trang chính thức của điện Kremlin chắc cũng đã đủ thay cho lời xin lỗi rồi chứ bác:


Trả lời câu hỏi liên quan đến vai trò của Stalin, Medvedev đã rất thành thật:

VITALY ABRAMOV: You were recently asked a question about Stalin's role in the victory. And we at Izvestia [newspaper] can’t side-step it either. And the context is as follows: it’s true that Stalin ruled the country that defeated fascism. But does this give us the right to turn a tyrant who committed many crimes against his fellow citizens into a hero? Hitler, for example, saved Germany from unemployment, built highways and so on, yet there are no highways named after him in Germany. And no one hangs his posters on holidays.

DMITRY MEDVEDEV: There are things that are absolutely clear - our people won the Great Patriotic War, not Stalin, not even the generals, as important as their role was. Yes, of course the role they played was quite significant but, all the same, it was the people who won the war as a result of enormous efforts and at the price of millions of lives.

As far as Stalin's role is concerned, different people see this differently. Some believe that the Supreme Commander played an extraordinarily important role, others don't think he did. That's not the question – the question is how we generally assess Stalin as a figure. If we are talking about the official view of him, about what our leaders think of him since the emergence of a new Russian nation in recent years, then the verdict is clear: Stalin committed a vast array of crimes against his own people. So despite the fact that he worked hard, despite the fact that under his leadership the country flourished in certain respects, what was done to our own people cannot be forgiven. That is the first thing.

Second, those who love or hate Stalin are entitled to their points of view, and it is no surprise that many veterans and people from the generation that went through the war admire him. I think they have the right to do so. Everyone has the right to their own opinion. That this kind of personal assessment has nothing to do with official attitudes towards Stalin is a different question, and I just reiterated them for you. I think that sometimes these things get exaggerated. If you talk about respect for Stalin and other leaders, I'm sure that in the 1990s there were many who admired this man, but nobody was talking then about the renaissance of Stalinism. Whereas now all of a sudden everyone is talking about that. True, historical figures can become the object of worship or idolatry. Sometimes it's young people who get involved in this, especially young people on the left. But in the end that's their business, although of course most people in the world see this particular figure very clearly: he does not evoke any sort of warm feeling.

In any case it's not true to say that Stalinism is once again part of our everyday life, that we are coming back to that symbolism, that we are planning to use some posters, or do something else of this kind. We are not going to do this and never will. That is absolutely out of the question, and that answer is both the view of current authorities and my assessment as President of the Russian Federation. So I would always insist on separating our official assessment in this regard and individual assessments.




Trả lời câu hỏi liên quan đến vụ Katyn, Medvedev thể hiện quan điểm công khai hóa sự thật:

Let’s remember the pre-war years as well, the events at the start of the war, the events that took place at Katyn, for example. This is a black page in our history, a black page on which we had no access to the truth, what’s more. I have seen that people still discuss in all seriousness who actually took the decision to execute the Polish officers. The documents on these events had already been declassified, but I decided to make them public. But these events remain debated even so. Why, because this subject was kept hidden from the public, and because it was presented from a false point of view. This was precisely an example of how history can be falsified. After all, it is not just people beyond our borders who allow history to be falsified, people in other countries, but we ourselves too, who have allowed our own history to be falsified. The time has finally come to open up the truth on these events to our own people and to foreign citizens with an interest in these matters.

This is just one page among others, but it is perhaps a very important one, because the more archival materials we publish, the more we give people free access to these materials, the better. Ultimately, I think that we need to establish a system of military archives that would give any Russian citizen and any interested foreign citizen free access to all documents that have been declassified, and this is something we need to do now for practically all kinds of documents.