JBANC and the Protection of Baltic Interests

8JBANC was founded in 1961 by Baltic refugees who had come to the United States following the Second World War. It currently claims to represent one million Baltic Americans and to provide a unified voice for their main organisations – the American Latvian Association, the Estonian American National Council, and the Lithuanian American Council. The small organisation’s board of directors, composed of three members from each national organisation, meets monthly and provides oversight. Its only employee, the managing director, reports to the board and to the three organisations, who define JBANC’s course of action. The Estonian-American Karl Altau has been managing director since 1997. [9]

9JBANC was originally founded in the context of the Kersten Committee hearings [10] and the Captive Nations movement (discussed below). Since then, it has worked with Congress, across presidential administrations, to steer US policy on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. From 1961 to 1991, the network’s main focus was on upholding the official recognition of the Baltic governments in exile and preserving the Welles Declaration of 1940, through which the US government refused to recognise the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. Through the 1970s and 1980s, JBANC helped raise awareness about Baltic political prisoners and the Soviet Union’s transgressions against the 1975 Helsinki Accords’ declaration of principles, particularly with respect to violations of human rights and the self-determination of peoples. When nationalist movements rose up in the Baltic Soviet republics during the Gorbachev era, JBANC organised actions and political rallies in support of independence. [11]

10After 1991, a key issue for the organisation was ensuring that US lawmakers remained focused on the peaceful withdrawal of Russian armed forces from the Baltics, which eventually took place from 1993 to 1994. This was followed by a nearly ten-year campaign to help bring these countries into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). After NATO accession in 2004, JBANC turned its attention to human rights issues, energy security, defending against Russian cyber-attacks and disinformation in CEE, and support for Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In addition, the network engaged in annual commemorations of the 1941 and 1949 deportations [12] and of Black Ribbon Day on 23 August (JBANC, 2020).

11JBANC exerts its influence mainly via direct political pressure on Congress, close contact with congressional offices and the establishment of caucuses. The House Baltic Caucus and the Senate Baltic Freedom Caucus were both founded in 1997 by two members of Congress of Lithuanian origin, Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat) and Congressman John Shimkus (Republican). Senator Durbin had served previously in the House of Representatives and as part of a congressional delegation that had supported the Baltics since the 1980s. [13] As soon as John Shimkus was elected to Durbin’s seat in the House of Representatives in 1997, Shimkus launched a Baltic Caucus in order to “maintain strong relationships with the Baltic states, promote healthy democracies and assist them in strengthening free market economies” (House Baltic Caucus, n.d.). At a time of considerable public interest due to the NATO enlargement campaign, both caucuses grew quickly and reached their highwater marks by the early 2000s – 15 members in the Senate, and close to 80 in the House. Although the House Baltic Caucus is more active than the Senate Baltic Freedom Caucus, both of them have been met with renewed interest since the annexation of Crimea and the rise of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014.

From the Assembly of Captive Nations to the VOC Foundation

12The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation defines itself as “a non-profit educational and human rights organisation devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes” (VOC, 1993). Although its establishment only dates from 1993, its roots can be traced back to the ethnic associations and lobby groups sponsored by American hardliners during the Cold War.

13In 1959, the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC) was founded in Washington, DC, as an anti-communist advocacy group. Established by President Eisenhower according to Public Law 86-90, which introduced the Captive Nations Week, the NCNC was tasked with maintaining the Captive Nations List – a public campaign used to directly oppose policies of Détente, which émigré organisations regarded as a form of “appeasement” in the face of Soviet aggression and the “enslavement” of CEE peoples (Kádár Lynn, 2013). President Eisenhower, and every successive US president up to and including Donald Trump, has declared the third week of July to be Captive Nations Week.

14As early as 1991, Senator Steve Symms (Republican, Idaho) and the former adviser to Ronald Reagan, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (Republican, California) introduced concurring resolutions in Congress urging the construction of “an International Memorial to the Victims of Communism at an appropriate location within the boundaries of the District of Columbia.” In 1993, Rohrabacher and Senator Jesse Helms (Republican, North Carolina) sponsored amendments to the 1993 Friendship Act, which reformed the statutes governing international relations between the former Soviet republics and the United States. The Act cited “the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial holocaust” and resolved that “the sacrifices of these victims should be permanently memorialized so that never again will nations and peoples allow so evil a tyranny to terrorize the world” (US Congress, 1993). The bill authorising the construction of a memorial in Washington, DC, was passed unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law prohibited spending federal funds on the memorial but authorised the NCNC to establish an organisation, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, to construct and operate it based on donations from individuals, foundations and corporations.

15As textbox 1 indicates, their multi-positioning (Boltanski, 1973) allowed the VOC’s co-founders to act as links between three social fields: conservative thinktanks; associations of American citizens of East European descent; the US foreign policy and security community.

16

17The VOC represents an interstitial space, a “semi-structured network of organisations that traverse, link, and overlap more established social spheres” (Medvetz, 2012, p. 25). Its creation enabled the constitution of a distinct social space where actors from politics, academia, bureaucracy and ethnic advocacy groups, all of whom espouse a strong anti-communist ethos, exchange institutional credibility, access to policymakers, scholarly authority and policy-oriented knowledge. This “mutual legitimation circle” (Bourdieu, 1976, p. 90) comprises prominent figures of the American conservative establishment and various strands of anti-communism. Yet the VOC is a small organisation, recently professionalised, only hiring an executive director in 2013, [14] a director of academic programs in 2016, and a director of government relations in 2017.

Europeanised memory activism: the Platform

18The Platform of European Memory and Conscience defines itself as “a non-profit international non-governmental organisation” that brings together “public and private institutions and organisations active in research, documentation, awareness raising and education about the totalitarian regimes which befell Europe in the 20th century” (Platform, 2019a). In 2020, the Platform listed 62 member institutions in 20 countries across Europe and North America, including NGOs, archives and research centres, victims’ associations, museums/memorials and private foundations. Nonetheless, the network is driven mainly by state-sponsored institutes of national memory such as the Polish IPN (Institute of National Remembrance) and the Hungarian NEB (Committee of National Remembrance). Except for Canadian ethnic associations, its only non-European members are the VOC and JBANC. The network claims to represent “at least 200,000 European citizens and over 1,100,000 North American citizens with European roots” (Platform, 2019a), although it does not include any elected or otherwise mandated representative body.

19The Platform resulted from the coordinated actions of a variety of memory entrepreneurs seeking a pan-European condemnation of communism. The idea to establish a research institute that would include a museum and raise awareness of the “totalitarian crimes” of communism was first formulated by the conservative EPP (Europe’s People Party) in 2004, and reiterated in the Recommendation accompanying Resolution 1481 on the “Need for International Condemnation of Crimes of Totalitarian Communist Regimes” adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the European Council (PACE) in 2006 (PACE, 2006). The “Prague Process” launched in 2008 by an eclectic group of Czech memory activists – politicians, former dissidents and staff of the Czech ÚSTR (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) provided the decisive impetus to bring the project forward: it prompted the European Parliament (EP) to include, in the 2009 Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism, a call for the creation of a pan-European documentation centre/memorial (Neumayer, 2019). The Platform, established in Prague in 2011, was initially financed by the International Visegrad Fund [15]. Since 2014, its main financial support has come from the Hungarian government.

20The creation of the Platform was driven by a pan-European memory claim: in addition to improving coordination between homologous institutions and advocacy groups, the network aims to raise awareness about communist crimes and disseminate, within European institutions, an interpretation of communism based on the totalitarian paradigm. Accordingly, its executive board covers an area at the juncture of the EP, institutes of national memory and victims’ associations (Platform, 2019c). Its trustees, who have an advisory function, are mainly current and former members of the European Parliament – with the notable exception of Stéphane Courtois, an emblematic figure in the totalitarian historiography of communism. [16]As textbox 2 indicates, the Platform’s leadership has brought together, in various configurations since 2011, elected members of European assemblies and the staff of institutes of national memory.

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22The Platform’s purposes are threefold: First, it has an educational mission and seeks to promote human rights and strengthen democracy by “increas[ing] public awareness about European history and the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes and [encouraging] a broad, European-wide discussion about the causes and consequences of totalitarian rule, as well as about common European values, with the aim of promoting human dignity and human rights […] with the goal of avoiding future threats to democracy.” Second, the Platform commits to “work[ing] toward creating a pan-European documentation centre/memorial for victims of all totalitarian regimes.” Finally, it takes a legal and judiciary stand to support “initiatives at the European level with a view to giving indiscriminate treatment to all crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as to their victims” (Platform, 2011, pp. 3-4).

Memorials and Museums

24In the 1970s, the Nazis’ extermination of Jews acquired in the Western world a “general, decontextualised and universal” status, based on a personalisation of the victims (Alexander, 2002, p. 35). Since then, globalised patterns of collective memory have presupposed that tragedies should be remembered and victims should be given a voice. One common form of such commemorations are so-called “memory museums” modelled primarily on the Holocaust Museums in Washington, DC, and in Jerusalem, which are conceived from the point of view of the victims and aim to influence visitors’ emotions and to promote human rights. As it is the case with many museums of communism (Apor, 2010; Zombory, 2017), the VOC and the Platform seek to apply these mnemonic codes to depict the various socialist regimes and pay tribute to their victims. They have engaged in parallel actions because each planned museum has a distinct scope: the 2009 EP resolution called for a museum encompassing all former European totalitarian regimes, whereas the VOC aims to portray communism on a global scale and highlight its current threat to freedom.

25In response to a lack of interest from Western EU member states for the erection of a memorial for the victims of totalitarian regimes in Brussels, the Platform relied on the support of CEE governments, which took up this agenda during their EU presidencies. [18] In 2016, the Platform organised a public competition sponsored by the Slovak EU Presidency and the Hungarian EU Commissioner for Education and Culture. Young Europeans were invited to submit proposals for a memorial to be erected in Brussels, with the successful entries exhibited during the commemoration of the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarianism on 23 August 2016 in Bratislava. Five students, all of them from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, were honoured at this event, which was however not attended by any Western European politician and lacked any meaningful follow-up. [19]

26In May 2017, the Platform tried to give new momentum to the project with the official patronage of the newly elected president of the EP, Antonio Tajani (EPP, Italy). It organised another competition for a “Pan-European Memorial for the Victims of Totalitarianism in Europe” to be located in the heart of the European district in Brussels. According to the announcement, this memorial would cover National Socialism, fascism and communism, and would “celebrate the process of European integration as an achievement made possible by learning from the lessons of the past” (Platform, 2017a). This second competition, under the patronage of Tajani, as well as the Hungarian commissioner for Education and Culture and the Czech ambassador to Belgium, yielded 39 anonymous entries from artists and architects. The British-Chinese architect Tszwai So won the competition, the ten top ranking entries of which were displayed in the EP in April 2018, courtesy of MEP László Tőkés, one of the Platform’s trustees. At the time of writing, however, no concrete steps have been taken towards the construction of the monument.

27The building of a memorial in Washington, DC – the raison d’être of the VOC – has proven equally difficult. In the mid-1990s, Lee Edwards and Lev Dobriansky obtained permission to build a monument on a small unused plot within view of the US Capitol, donated by the National Park Service. Their initial plan was to “raise $100 million for the construction of a museum and monument to the 100 million victims of communism” (Edwards, 2007). This objective collided with reality when, by 1999, the foundation had raised less than half a million dollars. Conversely, plans to build a brick-and-mortar museum close to the National Mall with the same research and education functions as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which would include an exhibition space, auditorium, archives, and resident scholars, were put off as attention was placed on the construction of a one-million dollar monument.

28The VOC reached out to donors and ethnic communities throughout the United States. Vietnamese Americans, followed by Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Hungarians and others donated money to the cause. The VOC also convinced private companies and conservative foundations such as The Heritage Foundation, the educational non-profit Fund for American Studies and the youth organisation Young America’s Foundation, to pitch in. In 2003, President George W. Bush accepted a nomination to serve as honorary chairman of the VOC Foundation. After months of debate, the VOC’s board of directors unanimously selected the Goddess of Democracy, which had been erected by Chinese student protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, as the core of the Memorial. [20] Several factors account for this choice: the Goddess of Democracy called to mind the continuing oppression in the world’s largest country, China; it was based on the Statue of Liberty in New York; it had become a global symbol of freedom and democracy with replicas in several cities around the world. The Californian sculptor who had previously crafted San Francisco’s replica agreed to create a bronze statue to be placed in Washington, DC. The Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated by President George W. Bush on June 12, 2007 – a date chosen as the twentieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s famous Brandenburg Gate speech during which he intoned, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The memorial’s front pedestal reads, “To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty.” Its back pedestal reads, “To the freedom and independence of all captive nations [21] and peoples.”

29The VOC also wanted to break ground on a museum in 2017, in time for the centennial of the October Revolution. In 2014, it launched the “Build the Museum” project with a three-fold purpose: memorialise the victims; educate the public; and document the evidence. Despite donations from private donors and foreign governments, [22] this project has again been put on hold for lack of funding. The timing of the opening of the museum remains uncertain. Rather than building its own facilities, the VOC is looking for an existing building to buy and renovate, while gathering archives on communism and developing the museum’s programming. [23]

Educational Material: Exhibitions, Textbooks and Online Museums

30A similar divergence in scope is visible in the educational material produced by the VOC and the Platform. The VOC presents communism as a global evil ideology and a continuing threat to freedom worldwide, underscoring the alleged danger caused by the rising popularity of socialism among American millennials. By contrast, the Platform expresses a memory claim framed as a call for recognition of Eastern Europe’s “double legacy of victimhood” (Zombory, 2017).

31In 2009, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the demise of the Soviet Bloc, the VOC launched an online Global Museum on Communism, which it described as “the first Internet museum that tells the complete story of communism from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to current events in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea” (Edwards, 2006). Its mission statement read as follows: “The museum serves as a symbol of hope and a needed place of remembrance in a day when many are forgetting the high price communism exacted from the captive people [24] and the rest of the free world. Its mission is to educate this generation and future generations about the history, philosophy and legacy of Communism” (Global Museum on Communism, 2009). Some entries were written by representatives of CEE national memory institutes that belong to the Platform. [25]

32The Global Museum included the histories of the 37 nations that experienced communism; a multi-media Timeline of Communism from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the present; a Gallery of Heroes, depicting those who led the struggle against communism; a Hall of Infamy illustrating the instruments of repression used by communists such as the Berlin Wall, the Gulag, the KGB, the Stasi and the Laogai; and a Victims Registry that allowed people to submit their experiences under communism in video, text or audio format. In 2011, the Global Museum was complemented by an online Gulag exhibition and a Witness Project. The latter consisted of interviews with high-profile opponents to communism who were later awarded the VOC’s Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, including László Tőkés, Václav Klaus and Vladimir Bukovsky. The VOC’s website was hacked in June 2016, during a policymaking event marking the Tiananmen massacre. Since then, both the Museum and the Gulag exhibition have remained off-line. The VOC is preparing a more modern version to replace them. [26]

33In 2013, a curriculum on the “ideology, history, and legacy” of communism written by Lee Edwards, Paul Kengor and Claire McCaffery Griffin [27] was made available for use in high schools. Its scope is global: the curriculum presents not only “Karl Marx and his legacy,” “Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution” and “Stalin and the Soviet Union,” but also “Mao and China,” “Kim Il-Sung and North Korea,” “Pol Pot and Cambodia” and “Cuba, Castro and Che.” Two entries have a specific American angle: “America and Vietnam” and “Captive Nations and the End of the Cold War.” Each entry consists of an overview, a background essay, several student handouts and teacher resources, all ready to use in the classroom – including a lesson plan and topics for student essays (VOC, 2016). The textbook is regularly presented by VOC staff to teachers during professional development days. The VOC also produces an Annual Report on US Attitudes Toward Socialism that warns of the increasingly positive perception of socialism among millennials (VOC, 2019).

34The Platform’s educational projects – a textbook for high school students and a travelling exhibition – are meant to cover all twentieth-century European totalitarian regimes. However, their content was provided by CEE institutes of national memory and is clearly focused on Central European history and on the supposed equivalence of Nazism and communism. The travelling exhibition “Totalitarianism in Europe – Fascism – Nazism – Communism” was organised by the Platform in 2012, with financial support from the European Union and the International Visegrad Fund. To date, this exhibition has been shown in thirteen European countries, at the EP, at PACE, as well as at the VOC Foundation in Washington, DC. It offers statistics on the victims and on “the structures of totalitarian power responsible for war crimes and/or crimes against humanity” in thirteen European countries, the leaders of which are identified with a photograph and a short biography (Platform, 2013a, p. 1). The exhibition is geographically lopsided: it covers all post-communist EU member states, but only two longer-standing member countries – Germany and the Netherlands. Fascism is only featured by means of Italy’s occupation of Slovenia, while the regimes of Pétain, Franco, Salazar and the Greek colonels are ignored. In addition, although the exhibition is intended to “illustrate the [totalitarian] regimes’ historical interrelations,” the very design of its catalogue reifies their equivalence: a black album made up of panels classified by country and totalitarian regime, with one side presenting the Nazi or fascist regime, and the other side the communist regime.

35The introductory text also makes a memory claim deploring the lack of justice for communist-era crimes. The exhibition features the number of prosecutions after the fall of the regimes, guilty verdicts reached and prison sentences actually served. More than just a tribute to the victims, it marks an intensification of the Platform’s mobilisation in favour of the prosecution of former communist leaders at the European level. This mobilisation has resulted in the “Justice 2.0” campaign launched in 2015, aimed at the creation of an EU-level court similar to the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. No such court has been created to date, but the campaign has yielded two results: Legal proceedings were opened in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic for the killings of East German refugees at the borders of former Czechoslovakia in the 1980s (Platform, 2019b). The ministries of justice of eight post-communist EU member states also committed to the establishment of a Council for the Investigation of Crimes of Communist Regimes to deal with crimes against humanity committed by these regimes (Platform, 2017b).

36In 2013, a second EU grant enabled the Platform to publish the textbook Lest We Forget: Memory of Totalitarianism in Europe. A Reader for Older Secondary School Students Anywhere in Europe. Containing “30 remarkable life stories of people affected by totalitarianism from 16 European countries” (Platform, 2013b, p. 4), the textbook describes the persecutions suffered by opponents to communism and Nazism, as well as by the Roma and the Crimean Tatars during the twentieth century. It was published in English, French and German and subsequently translated into Czech, Polish, Ukrainian and Italian. The geographical scope and available languages of the publication suggest that the textbook’s aim is to spread knowledge on CEE history throughout Europe in order to shape a pan-European narrative that asserts an equivalence between communism and Nazism. The ten countries that entered the EU between 2004 and 2007 are covered, as are Ukraine and Moldova, alongside only four longer-standing member states (Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Austria).

37An introduction by Stéphane Courtois picks up the main tropes of the totalitarian paradigm and its assertion of the equally criminal nature of Nazism and communism. The Holocaust is qualified as “a genocide that left more than five million dead,” and the text mentions the “extermination war against the Slavs” waged by the Nazis. Courtois then adds that “the war situation enabled totalitarian powers to secretly engage in [civilian] massacres and collective deportations against groups defined according to ideological criteria: racial for the Nazis – targeting specifically the Jews imprisoned in ghettos – and social for the Communists – targeting the economic elites, deported with their families to the USSR” (Platform, 2013b, p. 10). This symmetrical vision of history logically leads to the denunciation of the “double standard” allegedly applied in the retrospective assessment of communism and Nazism. On 23 August 2014, on the occasion of the first celebration of Black Ribbon Day in the United States, an event was jointly organised by the VOC and JBANC at the VOC memorial in Washington, DC, in anticipation of which the Platform sent a copy of the textbook to all senators and members of Congress.

Organisation of policy-oriented events

39The VOC, JBANC and the Platform regularly organise parliamentary hearings and conferences with policymakers. These meetings are characterised by a high redundancy in the speakers, references and approaches deployed by each organisation, which produce “a self-confirmation and self-reinforcement effect, thereby the illusion of self-evidence” (Bourdieu & Boltanski, 1976, p. 61). During these events, distinctions such as prizes and medals are bestowed by the VOC and the Platform to individuals and organisations that epitomise anti-communism worldwide, enhancing the credibility of both organisations by lauding high-profile memory entrepreneurs active in both.

40The VOC organises two types of policy-oriented events to increase its public profile and raise funds. To finance the construction of the memorial, it initiated in 1999 an annual awards event at which a Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom is bestowed to an organisation or individual, in America or abroad, who “demonstrated lifelong opposition to communism and […] support of freedom and democracy” (Edwards, 2007). Since the completion of the VOC memorial in 2007, these medals have been awarded during a Roll Call of Nations wreath-laying ceremony. This event is held at the memorial every year around 12 June, a date chosen to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre, and is attended by diplomatic staff, former dissidents, ethnic associations and human rights organisations. The first four recipients were Soviet dissident Elena Bonner; former Lithuanian independence leader and MEP Vytautas Landsbergis; former Bulgarian Premier Philip Dimitrov; and Lane Kirkland, former president of the AFL-CIO and active supporter of Solidarność in the 1980s. [29]

41Selected awardees of the Truman-Reagan Medal include prominent Eastern European dissidents such as Lech Wałęsa, Václav Havel, László Tőkés and Vladimir Bukovsky, as well as Pope John Paul II and conservative politicians from the region like Václav Klaus and Viktor Orbán. American anti-communist figures such as William F. Buckley Jr (founder of the National Review), the Cold War liberal Henry “Scoop” Jackson, historians Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest, and the former president of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus Tom Lantos, have also been awarded the Medal. A third category of recipients comprises contemporary South American and Asian civil rights activists such as Chen Guancheng (China), Guillermo Fariñas Hernández and Armando Valladares (Cuba), Father Nguyen Van Ly (Vietnam) and Cardinal Joseph Zen (bishop emeritus of Hong Kong). In 2017, the VOC launched a second series of fundraising galas called “Triumph of Liberty Conference and Gala Dinner” with members of the US administration, foreign diplomats, members of the military and academics. MEPs Tunne Kelam and Sandra Kalniete, two of the most active trustees of the Platform, were jointly awarded the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, alongside former Lithuanian President Valdus Adamkus, during the 2018 gala.

42

43The Platform also created a prize in 2014 with a focus on European activists. Its past recipients include the leader of the Crimean Tatar People, Mustafa Dzhemilev, the Russian opposition activists Alexei and Oleg Navalny, the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, and Ilmi Umerov, deputy head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People in Crimea. [30] The Platform also holds events at the EP to push for EU-level policies directed against the perpetrators of gross human rights violations, including the conferences “Legal Settlement of Communist Crimes” in 2010 and “Justice 2.0” in 2015. These small-scale events, however, typically reach only a narrow segment of the Assembly. In addition, the Platform and the VOC regularly organise separate events to commemorate turning points in the history of communism. In October 2017, both advocacy groups organised two “sister conferences” in order to mark the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution and denounce its disastrous impact on the world. Amongst the hosts of the VOC’s Centennial Commemoration were two active Platform Trustees, Stéphane Courtois and Vytautas Landsbergis. In line with its global perspective and ambition to topple existing communist regimes, the VOC’s presentation of the event read:

44

On a cold night in Petrograd, one hundred years ago, a small group of Red Guards seized the Winter Palace and installed the world’s first communist government. The Bolshevik Revolution marked the beginning of a century in which adherents to communist ideology committed some of the worst and most widespread atrocities known to history. This November, we will gather to honor the memory of the more than 100 million victims of communism, to celebrate liberty where it has triumphed, and to further our pursuit of a world free from communism (VOC, 2017).

45These events typically lead to the adoption of Declarations and Resolutions that allow both advocacy groups to reiterate their, as of yet, unfulfilled claims. After the conference “100 Years of Communism: History and Memory” held in Paris in November 2017 under Courtois’s auspices and dedicated to “the dark legacy of communism and Communist dictatorships,” Platform members issued a Memorandum which repeated three claims that have been made by its representatives for years: an official, European-wide prohibition of the public presentation of communist symbols; the building of a memorial to the victims of totalitarianism in Brussels; and the creation of an International Tribunal for Communist Crimes (Platform, 2017c).

The Commemoration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

46The commemoration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is the most telling instance of mutual inspiration through the circulation of narratives and mnemonic practices between the Platform, the VOC and JBANC. Although this powerful symbol is shared across the Atlantic, the mobilisations aiming at institutionalising an official commemoration of the Soviet-Nazi Pact through a legislative act have come up against distinct obstacles: the Platform has faced a dilution of the anti-communist cause in the EU, while the lack of support in the US Senate has to date created a dead-end for the VOC and JBANC in the United States.

47During the Cold War, anti-communist memory entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic had already understood the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a powerful symbol of both the commonalities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and their shared responsibility for the Second World War and its fateful consequences in Europe (Budryte, 2004). The idea of using a black ribbon, a symbol of grief in European cultures, to publicly denounce the Pact and commemorate the victims of totalitarianism, was born in Canada in 1985. Its originators were Markus Hess, a Canadian of Estonian origin, and David Sommerville, then leader of a libertarian organisation called the National Citizens Coalition. On 23 August 1986, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was commemorated for the first time in Northern America, Western Europe and Australia with popular demonstrations and speeches by politicians, dissidents and exile activists. Black Ribbon Day also featured academic sessions, press conferences and secular and religious ceremonies commemorating the victims, prisoners, deportees and refugees who suffered under totalitarian regimes. Subsequent anniversaries were accompanied by ever more successful demonstrations. In the late 1980s, the Black Ribbon Committee supported Baltic independence movements and contributed to the formation of a human chain, known as the Baltic Way, which connected Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn on 23 August 1989 (Troebst, 2012; Soltys, 2014).

48This mnemonic practice continued after the Cold War on opposite sides of the Atlantic, albeit under different names. During the Prague Process in 2008-2009, memory activists and conservative MEPs advocated for 23 August as the ideal date to commemorate the victims of Nazism and Stalinism across Europe. Social-Democrats disagreed with the choice of a date that singled out these two regimes, thereby overlooking other dictatorships. As a compromise, the EP Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism adopted in 2009 confirmed the date of 23 August, but proclaimed it “a Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes” (EP, 2009). This resolution, alongside the Platform’s subsequent work to raise awareness of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact throughout Europe, inspired JBANC and the VOC to lobby Congress for a similar commemoration in the United States. [31] After two years of campaigning by JBANC, a “Black Ribbon Day” resolution was introduced in the US House of Representatives in 2013 by the Chair of the Baltic Caucus, Rep. Shimkus, with nearly 50 co-sponsors. Although the reluctance of the Speaker of the House to consider commemorative resolutions for a vote on the floor slowed down the process, a modified version of the legislation passed in the House in May 2014. Due to a lack of sponsors, however, the Senate failed to pass a matching Resolution. In April 2019, in the run-up to the eightieth anniversary of the Pact, the House Baltic Caucus co-chairmen Rep. John Shimkus and Rep. Adam Schiff (Democrat, California) introduced a second text reiterating this claim. House Resolution 300, which expressed “support for the designation of 23 August 2019 as Black Ribbon Day to recognize the victims of Soviet and Nazi regimes,” was subsequently referred to the Committee on Oversight and Reform (US Congress, 2019).

49The failure to pass a Black Ribbon Day Resolution in the Senate in 2014 prompted the VOC and JBANC to use the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution to raise awareness about communism and its legacies. Thanks to the VOC’s contacts in the White House, President Trump issued a statement that declared 7 November 2017 a National Day for the Victims of Communism, condemned communism as a political philosophy “incompatible with liberty, prosperity, and the dignity of human life” and underscored its “continued threat today” (White House, 2017). Again, this initiative fell short of the VOC’s goal: although President Trump issued a similar message on 7 November 2018, only legislation could make this commemoration permanent (and thus akin to that on the Captive Nations).

50The VOC was also instrumental in the establishment of a bi-partisan Victims of Communism Caucus, modelled upon the Baltic Caucus, in the House of Representatives, [32] dedicated to “raising awareness of how Communism victimized and enslaved more than one hundred million people in the past and how its tyranny in the five existing Communist countries (China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam) and its legacy in the post-Soviet sphere shapes international relations today” (Philipp, 2017). This caucus – the VOC’s primary vehicle for its engagement with Congress – became operational on 7 November 2017. One of its first actions was to introduce a resolution in support of the VOC’s Museum in Washington, DC. In May 2018, the caucus co-chairs wrote to EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, urging him not to appear or speak at the unveiling event of the statue of Karl Marx that the People’s Republic of China had gifted to Marx’s hometown, the city of Trier in Germany. The Platform simultaneously protested against this unveiling in a separate statement.