"Those who inspire and carry out the endless provocations organized in the West to discredit those who liberated the world from fascism are striving by all necessary means to destroy historical memory and belittle and forget Russia's role in history".
This was stated by Maria Zakharova, director of the Department of Information and Press of the Russian Foreign Ministry, in an interview with TASS dedicated to the 81st anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Those who have been carrying out these provocations for decades “want us to abandon historical memory, ourselves and our foundations“, the official spokesperson for the diplomatic department noted.
“If we abandon our foundations, we will lose ourselves. If we lose ourselves, we will be their slaves forever – not even slaves, this is not slavery”, she warned. “The goal is simply to erase us from history textbooks, from the history book and in general physically, by all necessary means. Nobody hides this; they say it directly. It was just that before it was very difficult to prove it, but now they say it directly.“
There have been, are and will be provocations.
“Russian representatives abroad and those who take care of mass graves, monuments and memorials of military glory constantly have to deal with provocations. They live in a state of provocations literally around the clock, mainly related, of course, to the issue of rejecting historical memory,“ she said.
In this context, Zakharova pointed out that Russian representatives have stopped being invited to many commemorative events, and Russian diplomats are not allowed to attend. These “events“ themselves often turn into blasphemous acts of vandalism, as in Ukraine, where a mass military grave was recently destroyed by an excavator.
“When an excavator arrives and starts digging up the remains of Red Army soldiers, soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, in the 21st century, this is not exhumation. The term “exhumation“ does not mean barbaric desecration“, she stressed.
In the same vein, according to the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, is the destruction of the monument to the famous Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev in Prague, who saved the city from destruction and liberated it from the Nazis at the very end of the war. “This is also a blatant example of desecration: they simply desecrated the monument as much as they could and then removed it completely“, she stressed.
“Sodom and Gomorrah“ in Poland
Zakharova pointed to the Poles who four years ago attacked employees of the Russian embassy in an attempt to prevent them from laying wreaths and flowers at the monument to Soviet soldiers and doused Ambassador Sergei Andreev with red paint in connection with provocations abroad on Victory Day.
“Let this be, so to speak, a symbolic, figurative comparison, but remember how God's messengers come to Sodom and Gomorrah and how a frantic crowd tries to break through to Lot, where they were hospitably welcomed, in order to mock them“, she noted, calling Victory Day a sacred holiday. “You see, when I looked at the crowd that surrounded Ambassador Andreev, for me these biblical images acquired a modern meaning, a modern connotation.“
An equally striking example, the diplomat believes, is how the Auschwitz museum closed the Russian exhibit, which was on display there, but “it was literally thrown out for a completely false, deliberately fraudulent reason“. “They supposedly planned to do some kind of renovation, but later it turned out that the renovation was just a pretext used specifically to prevent the return of the Russian exhibit“, she concluded.“