Russians Leave Germany Minus Fond Farewells

How do you say “bum’s rush” in German?

The approximate translation is a deplorable seven syllables long, but no matter. The expression has been vividly played out all around greater Berlin this spring and early summer, in the final act of the great piece of theater known as the end of the Cold War: Germany’s back-of-the-hand farewell to the Russians.

Half a century ago, it was the Red Army that captured Berlin from its Nazi defenders, virtually single-handedly, at a cost of more than 300,000 Soviet lives. British and American troops counted for little in the final three weeks of fighting for Hitler’s capital; the whole of the bloody street-to-street fighting fell to the Soviets. To this day, the bodies of 20,000 Soviet soldiers lie buried within the Berlin city limits, and tens of thousands more rest in 525 Red Army cemeteries in the surrounding countryside.

Ask a German today whether the fall of Berlin marked a defeat or a liberation for Germany, and he or she will almost certainly call it a liberation. Polls show again and again that Germans are glad their side lost the war, and that virtually no one would have wanted to live in Germany had Hitler’s National Socialists prevailed.

But you would never know the Germans were grateful to judge by the way they are showing the door to their erstwhile liberators.

The Russians kept 339,000 troops, along with 211,000 dependents and civilian support personnel, in East Germany during the Cold War. By comparison, the Western Allies committed token occupation forces to West Berlin: about 12,000 Americans, British and French. Now that all of these occupation forces are going home, the French, Americans and British have been repeatedly feted with parades, fireworks, barbecues and assorted other merriments.

The French even saw fit to hand out baguettes and bottles of wine as their tanks rolled by in one parade earlier in the spring. And on June 18, they joined the Americans and British in marching in review down the Strasse des Siebzehnten Juni, one of Berlin’s grandest and most historic thoroughfares, before an estimated 75,000 respectful Berliners.

Meanwhile, here are the Russians, holding their farewell party amid the weed-choked window boxes and cracked pavements of Wuensdorf, a tumbledown military base an hour’s drive out of Berlin. Instead of appreciative thousands at the curbside, there were only fellow Russian dependents watching, and some curious German onlookers invited in from nearby villages.

“This is not good,” says Dmitri Suchorukov, a Russian private who has come out for the festivities and is milling around the wurst stand with his buddies.

“Both of our grandfathers died fighting Germany,” adds Marina Jatchmeniova, a Red Army nurse who is queuing for a snack with a girlfriend. “My mother was born in 1944, and she never even saw her father. No one knows where he was buried.”

“We think the ceremonies for all the Allies should be together,” says Suchorukov.

But it might have been even worse. Earlier this year, the German government had planned to give the Russians their send-off in Weimar, 150 miles southwest of Berlin--a town that was, in fact, captured not by the Soviets but by American troops at the end of World War II.

Russia’s top commander in Germany, Gen. Matvei Burlakov, rebelled at this historical snub in an angry news conference--and a few days later, the Germans said the Russians could march in Berlin after all. But only in an outlying suburb. And not with the other Allies.

The Russians held their parade Saturday in the eastern part of Berlin. “Live well Germany, homeland here we come,” sang the 1,500 soldiers of the elite 6th Motorized Defense Brigade, based in Karlshorst. About 40 armored vehicles took part in the parade past about 30,000 Germans, a much smaller crowd than turned out for the Allies.

“The West is the winner, the East is the loser--that is how everything is done in Germany,” says Lothar Bisky, chairman of this country’s Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the former East German Communist Party. “The Cold War never ends.”

The humbling of the once-great Red Army doesn’t stop at chintzy farewell parties and poorly attended parades in the middle of nowhere. All over what used to be East Germany, symbols of Russian valor and might are disappearing. Monuments have been taken down, streets are being renamed, and even the late Russian general who governed Berlin for a few months after V-E Day has been posthumously stripped of his honorary citizenship.

Then there are the revisionist goings-on at the Museum to the Unconditional Surrender, a Berlin institution dedicated to the Red Army victory over fascism. It has been housed since 1966 in the building where the formal instruments of surrender were signed by German and Allied officers in the spring of 1945, and which was subsequently used as a kind of martial-law city hall by East Berlin’s early Soviet overlords.

For 28 years, the Museum of the Unconditional Surrender has been an unabashed shrine to Red Army valor. Fourteen rooms have been filled with busts of Russian officers, photographs of Russian troops and combat maps bearing Cyrillic legends. The workroom of Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the Soviet commander who led the assault on Berlin, has been left untouched; his uniform, now a bit faded, still hangs in a glass case. By the front entrance stands a Russian tank, with the inscription, “For my homeland.”

Now, however, with fewer than 7,000 Russian troops left in Germany and those scheduled to be gone by Aug. 31, the museum has been closed for a complete overhaul. Inside, a team of German historians and their assistants has been taking apart the exhibits and packing the pieces off to a warehouse. When the museum reopens under German management next year, the entire concept will be different. Instead of Red Army heroism in 1945, it will showcase German-Russian relations over 75 years.

“The old exhibit focused mainly on the war,” confirms Viktor Gorynia of the German Historical Museum, who is overseeing the renovations. “Now, we want to cover the whole period from 1917 to the 1990s.” Instead of telling the story of the Russian ground-pounder, the place will present both Russian and German points of view, and document the sufferings of soldiers and civilians of each belligerent, he says. There will even be a room given over to the three other Allied nations.

All of this goes down poorly with some of the young, white-gloved aides who are dismantling the Russian exhibit under Gorynia’s supervision.

“I’m packing these items away, and they’ll go into storage, and then they will never come back,” complains Stephan Boehmer, who is wrapping historic black-and-white photos in tissue paper and packing them into cardboard boxes. He reaches into a box and pulls out a photo of a German bone-grinding machine--a piece of concentration-camp hardware designed by Nazi authorities to turn the evidence of mass murder into fertilizer.

“This picture will never come back” when the museum reopens, says Boehmer. “In a certain sense, I think you could say we are rewriting history. But I believe that a monument is a monument, representing a certain time in history. This museum should stay as it is.”

Few Germans--particularly Germans in what used to be the West--would share Boehmer’s sympathy for the Russians’ current plight. Having watched their Western keepers prevail in the long-fought ideological contest with Moscow, Germans are in general reluctant to cling to the least reminder that the Soviets won the military struggle.

No one here can forget that it was the Soviets, after all, who followed up their 1945 liberation with the 1948 blockade of Berlin. Or that it was the Soviets, in the summer of 1953, who sent tanks into Berlin to brutally put down an East German construction workers’ uprising. Or that it was the Soviets who approved construction of the Berlin Wall, and who, in general, served as the puppeteers behind the East German regime.

“The five years since the fall of the Berlin Wall do not cancel out the 45 years that went before,” says Joachim Thies, foreign editor of the newspaper Die Welt, and a conservative authority on international affairs. “The Russians were oppressors. As individuals, they are poor people, and they must certainly feel very miserable now. But for me, they are still the representatives of the oppressors, and they will be until the last moment.”

Compounding the brutality of Russian domination stirring in the German mind has also been the shock here over the condition of the Russian bases in what used to be East Germany. After the pullout began, incoming Germans found a running series of pocket disasters on the lands managed by the Red Army: unexploded ordnance scattered about, drums of hazardous chemicals tilting in stream beds, rusted-out vehicles left in the woods and meadows.

Even the barracks and dependents’ housing was filthy, and in some cases the departing troops had ripped out faucets and other fixtures to take back to Russia with them.

For many Germans, this is but another reinforcement of their long-held stereotype about the Russians: that they are scarcely more than barbarians, an army that raped its way westward in 1945 and never reformed.

“The Russians committed atrocities even in the countries that did not attack them,” says Thies. “I would hate to whitewash this difficult relationship. We Germans were, with good reason, excluded from the (D-day commemoration ceremonies on) Omaha Beach, and the Russians were, with good reason, excluded from the Allied joint ceremonies in Berlin.”

However unwilling mainstream Germans may have been to come witness them, the Russian farewell activities in Wuensdorf were, in fact, stirring and well orchestrated. The ground rumbled as Warsaw Pact tanks and armored personnel carriers went rolling down Wuensdorf’s narrow asphalt lanes. Helicopters with large red stars on their undercarriages flashed by overhead at treetop level.

On the reviewing stand, Gen. Burlakov wept openly into his handkerchief.

“The Russian military leadership has helped us make our way to the new Germany,” the governor of the state of Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe, said in his goodby speech. “Keep us in your memory. We have been friends, and we will stay friends.”

“This was going too far,” Joachim Thies said of Stolpe’s remarks in an interview afterward. “You can’t say, ‘Now we have lost friends!’ I am a bit ashamed of this country. How can one so mix up liberators and oppressors?”