WORLDVIEW/Paul Gillespie: 'Life must be lived forwards - but can only be understood backwards".
Writing about the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939 this week, the former Danish foreign minister, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, quoted this remark of Søren Kierkegaard about the perils of historical understanding.
A little history is a dangerous thing, because the little we do know is often mobilised in favour of narratives supporting the particular interests of those in power to justify their rule.
So it is in Russia these days, according to several of its historians, writers and critics who have broken ranks with the new consensus about their country's 20th-century past.
Viktor Erofeyev argues that Vladimir Putin's Kremlin "has neatly split the history of the Soviet Union into two halves, as it might split a birch log with an axe. It has cast aside the country's communist experiment as an unworkable utopia, but has begun glorifying Russia's imperial pretensions".
This is the opposite of what Krushchev did in the 1950s by sacrificing Stalin's dictatorship in the name of Lenin. "Now", he writes, "the Kremlin is sacrificing Lenin in the name of Generalissimo Stalin".
A schism in the interpretation of Russian history is creating a division in its society. Elderly, poor and not very well educated people resent Russia's transformation from a geopolitical superpower and support the rehabilitation of Stalin as a return to true values. The other half, including those made richer by perestroika and who gravitate towards the values of the worldwide middle class, knows more about Stalin than 15 years ago.
"This enlightened Russia affirms that the victory was achieved despite Stalin. It despises him for the Terror, for his failure to prepare for war, for his use of soldiers as cannon fodder, for his treatment of Soviet prisoners of war as traitors . . . Between Stalin's totalitarianism and Hitler's regime, enlightened Russia places an equals sign."
Erofeyev believes Russia has, in consequence, not been as ideologically isolated in Europe as on Victory Day this week, when it was marked by a major international ceremony in Moscow. Other Europeans' gratitude and awe for the stupendous Soviet effort in defeating Hitler was starkly interrupted by disagreements over the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which enabled Stalin to occupy the Baltic states in 1939, the partition of Poland and the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 1940 - or the gang rape of millions of women in Soviet-occupied Austria, Hungary and eastern Germany in 1945.
These disagreements cannot obscure the huge asymmetry between Hitler's eastern and western wars. An estimated 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians were killed in it, many times more than in the west. While 200,000 German troops died in all the western campaigns, four million died in the eastern one.
In the 11 months from D-Day to VE Day 110,000 American soldiers were killed - and 500,000 Russians. Some 15,000 German troops were shot for desertion, and an estimated 20,000 Soviet troops for the same reason, 12,000 of them at Stalingrad alone - and almost none on the Allied side. Not for nothing did Stalin say Britain provided the time, Americans the money and Russians the blood to defeat the Nazis.
That is why the conflict is remembered in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, on a par with the defeat of Napoleon. It is now regarded by 78 per cent of Russians as the most important event determining their fate in the 20th century and which makes 87 per cent of them most proud of their history.
According to the Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov "there is nothing else left to take pride in: the disintegration of the USSR and the failure of the post-Soviet reforms, the noticeable weakening of mass hopes, and the disappearance of the illusions of perestroika have furnished the content of a traumatic experience of national failure".
As pride erodes in Soviet achievements - the revolution, the construction of a new society, the creation of a new man, the demonstrative results of Soviet industrialisation, the military might of the superpower, and the related strength of science and technology - "the symbolic weight of Victory is increasing".
As Gudkov sees it, victory in the war retrospectively legitimises the Soviet totalitarian regime as a whole and uncontrolled rule as such. It creates a version of the past that has no alternative and provides the only possible and significant framework for interpreting history.
But as Ellemann-Jensen points out, other Baltic states cannot accept that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was necessary simply to protect Soviet security.
It "defined the spheres of interest of the two dictatorships in eastern Europe which led to the war with Finland, the occupations of the Baltic countries, the assault on and division of Poland, and probably also the occupations of Norway and Denmark. In short, this pact, with its excrescence, had an enormous impact on the history of our region, right up to this day."
The excellent web-based Eurozine, which brings together and translates essays published in various European cultural magazines, deals in its current issue with how a new grand narrative of European history might be created to deal with such deep-seated disagreements.
It includes Gudkov's illuminating essay on the resurrection of Stalinism.
The historian Timothy Snyder writes that while 1945 has a constitutive meaning for the European Union and its founding states, for most of the states admitted to the Union in May 2004 it "means a transition from one occupation to another, from Nazi rule to Soviet rule".
Eastern Europeans also know "that German occupation policies were incomparably more savage in eastern Europe than in the west. They know that the Holocaust does not nearly exhaust the record of German mass murder of civilians."
It will require considerable humility and a willingness to learn for western Europeans to accept this alternative eastern narrative - even if they cannot accept an equals sign between Stalin and Hitler.
This was acknowledged in the EU statement which said 1989, not 1945, represents the end of dictatorship for many million of Europeans.
But the EU has to temper this acknowledgment with a deep sensitivity to Russia's identity crisis by keeping lines of communication, politics, economics and culture open to its people, as was partly addressed in this week's agreement in Moscow.
Making an enemy of Russia by excluding it would betray that country's European heritage and its enlightened public opinion which takes that so seriously.
It would lay down dangerous paths for the future by not understanding the past.
pgillespie @_irish-times.ie