There are thousands of official political and institutional social media accounts across the West (and beyond) posting about the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and the majority of them does NOT mention the Red Army. Only the occasional unicorn left-wing account includes the Soviet Union as the liberators. In contrast, when these social media posts describe the liberation of Dachau three months later, they explicitly credit the U.S. troops.

For this reason, this is a worthwhile case study for narrative management. The majority of the social media posts in question include the standard who, whom, what, when, where, and why that any middle school student learns to use in their introductory paragraph. But the Soviet Union is strategically left out.

This is propaganda by omission.

The writers are not technically lying, which would be more brazen (this has occasionally happened when the Americans were credited instead). But they expect that the readers’ minds would fill in the missing information. And, since the readers are (were) educated and socialized in a system that has been minimizing the leading Soviet participation in the WW2 victory for decades, the readers are likely thinking it was the Anglo-Americans who were responsible (or not thinking about it at all).

Even stylistically, these writers often deliberately use the passive voice, i.e., “Auschwitz was liberated” by some mysterious, unmentionable force, rather than the active voice, in which they’d be forced to mention the subject, “Someone liberated Auschwitz.”

Why are they leaving out the Soviet Union from the historical account? Whereas there might be some Cold War-era ideological remnants at play, it is much more likely that they would hate to mention Russia, the legal heir of the Soviet Union, in any positive context whatsoever, even if it means twisting historical facts. And so, they do!

This piece is from Nina Byzantina, a great telegram account that you might enjoy. For more articles like this please click on this link.