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8 May, 2010 14:18

Such parade was impossible even 10 years ago- political analyst

“Finally Europe and all the world are standing together at least on one historical question,” Samir Shahbaz, a political analyst from RIA Novosti news agency, told RT.

The analyst says that it was because a lack of trust, one of the main reasons for the Cold War, which is still there in international relations.

“The main lesson that we should learn from the war is that the most terrible, the worst war was stopped when all the countries joined together to stop it. This is the main lesson: united we stand,” says Mr. Shahbaz.

The analyst adds that to help the world remember this lesson, journalists have to show true facts about what happened.

“Facts speak for themselves,” says Mr. Shahbaz.

According to renowned Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, it was the joint effort of all allied forces that made victory over the Nazis possible.

“It is very difficult for me to say who was more important, who was less important. We have to agree that the allies, all together, were very strong and maybe, one by one, they would have had a much more difficult time just to simply fight against an enemy, the Nazis,” he told RT.

“No one was thinking of Germans as being bad people, but the Nazi movement, of course, was very, very terrible news for Europe, for the whole world,” Gergiev added. “People should not forget about the role the Soviet Union played in this war.”

“History is not a fixed narrative, so it is perfectly right and proper to study and debate it…while, of course, being respectful for the losses of lives ”, says Tony Halpin, the Moscow Bureau Chief for 'The Times' newspaper in Britain.

Mr Halpin would agree that younger generations do not know much about the contribution of the Soviet Union to the victory.

“An awful lot of what people know about the war these days comes through Hollywood movies, which are very often from the perspective of the USA or the events that took part on the western front. But anyone with an appreciation of history would know exactly how important the Eastern front was and the scale of the combat that took place here was unimaginable to most people”, says Tony Halpin, the Moscow Bureau Chief for 'The Times' newspaper in Britain

During WWII all the countries involved suffered immense damage to their cultural heritage. International agreements signed in the post-war period included the return of millions of valuable artifacts, commandeered by the Germans from the countries they invaded.

“It’s an enormous problem. I don’t think that anybody in the world knows the exact figure: what has been taken from Germany and what has been taken from Russia,” says Ekaterina Genieva, Director of the Russian State Library of Foreign Literature about the books purloined during the war. “What I know is it’s about 11.5 million books that were brought to the Soviet Union as a kind of compensation for the losses.”

The director notes that restitution is not only a cultural act, but also a question of good political will.

“What is important if we want to solve the problem one day somehow is to sit at the round table and to discuss what can be done in the 21st Century, with new technology, with the Internet and good political will,” says Ekaterina Genieva.

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