European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism
<p>On 23 August 1986, around ten thousand people gathered in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, wore black ribbons on their coats, and raised the flags of nations that no longer appeared on most Western maps as independent countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and others swallowed by the Soviet bloc. They had chosen that date with grim deliberation. Forty-seven years earlier to the day, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a pact in Moscow that condemned much of Eastern Europe to occupation. The Toronto demonstrators called their gathering Black Ribbon Day, and from that protest grew the observance now marked across Europe each 23 August as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.</p>
<p>It is a day of mourning for the people crushed between two totalitarian systems, and a deliberate insistence that the crimes of both be remembered together rather than weighed against one another.</p>
<h2 id="the-pact-that-named-the-date">The pact that named the date</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>The choice of 23 August is the whole argument of the day compressed into a single date. On that day in 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov for the Soviet Union and Joachim von Ribbentrop for Nazi Germany signed a treaty of non-aggression. In public it looked like a simple agreement to stay out of each other’s way. Attached to it, however, was a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, assigning Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland and the Romanian region of Bessarabia to one side or the other.</p>
<p>The consequences arrived within weeks. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; the Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September. The Baltic states were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. Mass deportations to Siberia, executions and the long machinery of repression followed in the Soviet sphere, while the German sphere brought the horrors that culminated in the Holocaust. By fixing the day of remembrance to the date of the pact, its founders made a precise historical claim: that the catastrophe which engulfed the region was set in motion by collusion between the two dictatorships, and that neither can be remembered honestly without the other.</p>
<h2 id="from-toronto-to-strasbourg">From Toronto to Strasbourg</h2>
<p>The day did not begin in a parliament. It began with refugees. In 1985 Markus Hess, an Estonian-Canadian engineer and president of the Estonian Central Council in Canada, proposed annual demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and to keep Western attention on the human rights abuses still ongoing behind the Iron Curtain. Committees formed in cities around the world, and the first Black Ribbon Day on 23 August 1986 saw protests not only in Toronto but in London, Stockholm and other Western capitals.</p>
<p>The fall of the Soviet bloc transformed a diaspora protest into something official. As the formerly occupied countries joined the European Union, their representatives pressed for the experience of communist as well as Nazi totalitarianism to be acknowledged in shared European memory. On 3 June 2008 a group of politicians and historians issued the Prague Declaration, which proposed 23 August as a day of remembrance. On 23 September 2008, 409 members of the European Parliament signed a declaration adopting it, and the Parliament passed a resolution in 2009 formally designating the date. The observance is now recognised by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and a number of national governments.</p>
<h2 id="why-remembering-both-matters">Why remembering both matters</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
<span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span>
<ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center"
data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946"
data-ad-slot="3291553914"
data-ad-format="auto"
data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>
</div>
<p>For decades the memory of the twentieth century’s great atrocities was, in Western Europe, organised largely around Nazism, while the crimes committed under Stalin and his successors were less present in public consciousness. People who had lived through Soviet deportations often found their experience treated as a footnote. The day exists in large part to correct that imbalance, not by diminishing the Holocaust, which remains singular, but by insisting that the gulag, the forced famines and the mass deportations belong in the same European reckoning.</p>
<p>This is genuinely contested ground. Some historians warn against any framing that flattens the differences between the regimes or implies a tidy equivalence, and the debate over how to remember the two systems together remains live in academic and political circles. The day does not resolve that argument; it keeps it open and visible. What it asks is narrower and harder to refuse: that the individual victims of both systems be named, counted and mourned, and that the secret protocol of August 1939 not be allowed to fade from memory as a mere diplomatic footnote.</p>
<p>That same impulse, to insist on remembrance against forgetting, links the day to other commemorations of state violence, such as the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-of-remembrance-of-the-victims-of-slavery-and-the-transatlantic-slave-trade/">International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade</a>, which similarly holds open a chapter many would prefer to close. It is also bound up with the long campaign to compel acknowledgement, captured in the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-for-the-remembrance-of-the-slave-trade-and-its-abolition/">International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition</a>; in each case the date itself is an argument, fixing public attention on a moment that powerful interests once preferred to leave unmarked.</p>
<h2 id="the-scale-behind-the-date">The scale behind the date</h2>
<p>It is easy for a day built around a treaty to feel abstract, a matter of diplomacy and signatures. The human ledger behind it is not abstract at all. In the Baltic states alone, the Soviet deportations of June 1941 and again in March 1949 swept tens of thousands of people, families with small children among them, onto cattle trains bound for Siberia and Kazakhstan, where many died of cold, hunger and exhaustion. The German occupation that the pact’s collapse ushered in brought the systematic murder of Jewish communities across the region, town by town. The Polish population suffered from both directions at once, ground between the two occupiers after September 1939. The day exists so that these are remembered not as a single grey mass of suffering but as particular people in particular places, which is precisely why the reading aloud of names has become so central to its ceremonies.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-commemorated">How it is commemorated</h2>
<p>Across the formerly occupied countries the day is observed with notable seriousness. In the Baltic states it carries particular weight, recalling not only the pact but the Baltic Way of 23 August 1989, when roughly two million people joined hands in a human chain stretching some six hundred kilometres across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to demand independence on the fiftieth anniversary of the pact. That extraordinary act of peaceful protest is itself remembered on the same date.</p>
<p>Elsewhere the day is marked by candle-lit vigils, the laying of wreaths, moments of silence, and the reading aloud of victims’ names so that the abstract scale of suffering acquires individual faces. Museums and archives mount exhibitions; officials issue statements reaffirming a commitment to democracy. The black ribbon worn in Toronto in 1986 remains the day’s emblem, a small, quiet badge of mourning that needs no explanation to those who recognise it.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-and-traditions">Symbols and traditions</h2>
<p>The black ribbon is the enduring sign of the day, born of a diaspora protest and now worn across a continent. Candles and moments of silence form the heart of most ceremonies. But the most characteristic tradition is testimony itself: the recording of survivor accounts, the preservation of letters and photographs from deportation, the work of bearing witness. The generation that lived through the events is now nearly gone, which lends a particular urgency to the act of writing down what they saw before it slips beyond living memory.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The exact anniversary chosen, <strong>23 August 1939</strong>, is the date the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in Moscow; its secret protocol carving up Eastern Europe was officially denied by the Soviet Union until <strong>1989</strong>, fifty years later.</li>
<li>The day began not in Europe but in <strong>Canada</strong>: the first Black Ribbon Day was organised in 1986 by Estonian-Canadian engineer Markus Hess and drew an estimated 10,000 people to Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square.</li>
<li>On the pact’s fiftieth anniversary, <strong>23 August 1989</strong>, around two million people formed the <strong>Baltic Way</strong>, a human chain roughly 600 kilometres long across three countries, one of the largest such protests in history.</li>
<li>The European Parliament’s adopting declaration was signed by <strong>409 MEPs</strong> on 23 September 2008, the threshold of a majority that turned a diaspora commemoration into an official EU day of remembrance.</li>
<li>The day is sometimes called the <strong>Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes</strong>, deliberately broadening its scope beyond the two named systems.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is something fitting in the fact that this day was invented not by victors or governments but by exiles, people whose countries had been erased from the map and who refused to let the erasure be forgotten. They had no power to undo what the pact of August 1939 had set in train. What they had was a date, a ribbon and the stubborn conviction that naming the dead is itself a form of resistance. The day they created asks each generation that inherits it to perform the same small, difficult act: to look squarely at what unchecked power did to ordinary people, and to decide that remembering is worth the discomfort.</p>
Advertisement
Related Content
Advertisement
