Free trade awry? On the export of ‘Double Genocide’ revisionism

Abstract

The fall of the Iron Curtain swiftly enabled free trade in goods and services between the nation states of Eastern Europe freed from Soviet domination with the West and much of the rest of the world. No less important was a new flow of ideas, generally on a west-to-east trajectory, including organizing principles for political processes and governments, education, media, the arts, and more, in short, models for societal structure and governance. Western mores and institutions readily took root in those nations with substantial anti-Soviet and often anti-Russian sentiments, both among the former Warsaw Pact nations, such as Poland and Hungary, and in some former Soviet republics, principally the three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. One common denominator was a legacy, strong by virtue of personal memory and convincingly conveyed immediate family legacy, of the facts of generally successful independent statehood in the interwar period. By contrast, new states such as Belarus and Ukraine had eastern “halves” that had been part of the Soviet Union from around the time of the Russian Revolution. Their western sectors were by contrast “lost parts” of the interbellum Polish Republic, whose official languages bore irksome similarity to Russian, and they were inclined to head, at least initially, in different directions.