Scratch the happy surface of Monday's 60th anniversary ceremony in Moscow commemorating the end of World War II and you will find deep apprehension about Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The Russian president is using national pride in the triumph over Nazi Germany to rally support for his increasingly authoritarian government, say European online commentators. Putin, says the BBC, is struggling to regain some of his country's "lost prestige" and to combat Western influence in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic republics. Russian journalist Alexander Golts, writing in the Moscow Times, says the May 9 Victory Day celebration has been "appropriated for Putin's private use" and "become a tool for settling international scores."
As a result, President Bush's criticism of Russia and his visit today to the former Soviet nation of Georgia is winning him positive coverage even in countries where his foreign policies have often proved unpopular.
"Could it be that there secretly lies within Bush a European statesman who has a better understanding of the current divides on the European continent than many a European?" asks Volksrant, a Dutch daily quoted by Radio Netherlands.
The problem, says Deutsche Welle, Web site of Germany's public broadcasting network, is Russia's "distortion of memory." Putin is using Russians' "patriotic sensitivities on the 'Day of Victory' to appeal for unity among the population."
May 9 is Russia's most popular holiday after New Years, according to D-W. "In 2004, around 60 percent of Russians said they actually celebrate the 'Day of Victory.' More than 70 percent saw it as the most important day of commemoration and wanted it to remain a holiday."
Russia's social and ethnic strife, the memory of losing the Soviet Empire and current threats of terrorism enable Putin to use the World War II victory "as a political tool" to discredit those countries that stand up to Russia today, D-W says.
The connection between Russian pride in 1945 and Russia's worldview in 2005 is evident in the commentary of Victor Litovkin, an analyst for the RIA Novosti news agency in Moscow.
Litovkin wrote that the loud applause greeting Soviet war veterans at Monday's ceremony showed the world paying tribute to "the valor of Soviet people." By contrast, he said the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Georgia who spurned Putin's invitation to attend this "wonderful celebration" were virtually fascist sympathizers.
"They have not merely missed the rare occasion to mix with top leaders of the world's foremost countries and greet victorious veterans. Willingly or unwillingly, they have joined hands with politicians whose ambitious schemes were thwarted with the triumph of the global civilized community over nazism," Litovkin said.
But in Paris the editors of Le Monde criticized the impulse "to celebrate historical myths, not to examine conscience." They noted that for the Baltic countries annexed by Russia after 1945, liberation did not come until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, a fact that Russian propagandists continue to deny.
The leftist daily credited Bush with pushing for a more honest accounting of history. In a speech over the weekend, Bush acknowledged America's "shame" in practicing slavery and racial segregation, as well as its acceptance of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Bush, the French daily said, demonstrated that the United States is "not a status quo power but a power of democratic change."
"One regrets that the European Union does not use the same language of democratic firmness in its relations with Moscow," said the editors.
Le Monde also ran an interview with Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili whom Bush visited today. Saakashvili said the peaceful revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine "arose from the will of the people not from a CIA plot," as some Russians claim.
A liberal British paper was more critical of Bush.
"Bush treats the defeat of Nazi Germany as though it were all of a piece with the war he launched in Iraq," complained The Independent (by subscription) in London. "He sees one long line of US armed intervention which began with the liberation of Europe 60 years ago and is destined to culminate in the victory of democracy across the Middle East."
"It suits Mr Bush to lump together the epochal turmoil of a world war, which was no war of choice for the Europeans who resisted Nazi Germany, with the largely peaceful transition to democracy of the countries held in thrall to Soviet communism, and the electoral processes in train in places such as Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. And Iraq is seen through the same prism as just one more achievement for democracy and freedom along the way," the London daily said.
"To interpret the Iraq war as proof of a lesson learnt from the war against Nazism is at best self-delusion and at worst cynical self-justification. There is no direct line that links Berlin to Baghdad," they conclude.
But for most European pundits, the issue on the 60th anniversary of the war's end is not Bush's words but Moscow's denial. Europe, says the Paris daily Liberation (in French) "must speak the truth to Russia."
