The Soviet war memorial, the EU parliament, and the long argument over who saved Europe

On 22 June 2026, the Russian-aligned Telegram channel Two Majors published a short video accusing Western governments of "falsifying history" by erasing Soviet contributions to the Allied victory in the Second World War. The post framed the argument in familiar terms: that European memory culture has spent years quietly removing references to the USSR, and that the project accelerated after February 2022.

The complaint is not new, and it is not coming only from Moscow. From Riga to Vilnius to Warsaw, governments have spent the last three years removing Soviet-era monuments, renaming streets, and rewriting the captions under museum exhibits. Russian officials, and Russian-aligned media, call that a campaign of erasure. The governments doing the work call it a reckoning with an imperial power that occupied their territory for nearly half a century. Both framings are partial; both contain enough truth to make the argument intractable.

The deeper question is what gets put in place of what gets taken down. History is being rewritten in real time, and the European public is not being given much of a window into the editorial decisions being made on its behalf.

The monuments are going, the caption wars are not

The most visible front is physical. The Soviet war memorial in Sofia's Lozenets district has been the subject of a years-long political tug-of-war. Local councils in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states have voted in sequence to dismantle Red Army statues, citing the Soviet occupation that followed liberation. According to the channel's 22 June post, the project is presented in Western media as a simple democratic cleanup; the post argues the framing omits that the same troops who arrived in 1944–45 went on to install one-party rule across Central and Eastern Europe.

That is a defensible complaint, and a familiar one. The USSR did break the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin; roughly 27 million Soviet citizens died in what Moscow calls the Great Patriotic War. But it also occupied the Baltic states from 1940 (with a German interregnum from 1941), refused to withdraw from Eastern Europe after victory, and suppressed national Communist parties that tried to chart their own course. A monument that commemorates one of those facts inevitably obscures the other.

The cultural-desk version of the argument is more interesting than the monument version, because the audience is bigger. The Two Majors clip circulated against the backdrop of a continuing European debate about how to teach the war to schoolchildren. Germany has been rewriting its textbooks for years; France has been re-examining the Vichy period; Britain has been forced to confront its own imperial record. The Russian complaint, stripped of its polemic, is asking a question that is genuinely live: when a national curriculum foregrounds the Holocaust and de-emphasises the Eastern Front, what gets lost?

The counter-narrative the channel does not air

There is a counter-narrative that the post elides, and it is the one the European governments doing the removals actually articulate. From Tallinn to Wrocław, the officials removing monuments argue that the statues in question did not, in 1945 or in 2024, primarily commemorate the war dead. They commemorated the Soviet state that came behind the soldiers — a state that deported, expropriated, and in some cases executed the very populations now being asked to honour it. The Bronze Soldier affair in Tallinn in 2007, in which a Soviet war memorial was relocated and triggered two nights of rioting, is the canonical case study.

It is also the case that the Russian state has its own interest in keeping the 1945 frame front of mind. Victory Day on 9 May has, since 2014 and especially since 2022, become the central piece of the Putin-era civil religion — the one story that ties the Russian Federation to a heroism it did not earn and a sacrifice it cannot question without questioning the state itself. When the channel accuses Western institutions of "falsification," it is asking them to preserve a frame that is, in its own telling, indispensable to domestic Russian legitimacy.

That does not make the underlying complaint false. It makes it politically loaded in a way the post does not acknowledge. Erasure and re-framing are not the same act; one removes evidence, the other changes the caption over evidence that remains. The 27 million figure is not contested in any European curriculum Monexus has been able to identify; the place of the USSR in the story is. The distinction matters.

A structural reading, in plain language

The bigger pattern here is the convergence of memory politics and live geopolitics. In 2022 the European Union moved with unusual speed on a number of cultural fronts: banning RT and Sputnik from distribution, restricting Russian state media, freezing the broadcasting licences of outlets linked to the Russian state. The decisions were framed as responses to disinformation; they were also, in practice, decisions about whose version of recent history European audiences would be permitted to encounter.

Memory is a soft-power asset, and the contest over it is older than the current war. Western institutions spent the Cold War foregrounding the liberation of Western Europe and the Berlin Airlift, and de-emphasising the price the USSR paid in blood. Russian institutions spent the same period foregrounding the Eastern Front and minimising the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. Both projects were selective. Both produced textbooks that satisfied a domestic political need. The current argument is what happens when the two projects collide and the institutions on both sides are openly hostile to each other.

The interesting question is not whether the Soviet contribution is being erased. The honest answer is: in some places, yes, and the people doing the removing are open about why. The question is who controls the frame for the next generation of European schoolchildren, and on what terms the compromise is being negotiated.

What remains unresolved

The evidence is genuinely thin in places. The Two Majors post is a 90-second clip, not a research document; it does not name specific monuments, museums, or curricula. The wider claim — that a coordinated campaign of "falsification" is under way — is plausible, but the underlying specifics are matters of degree rather than kind. The Soviets are still taught as the decisive Eastern Front belligerent in most European school systems; what has shifted is the volume on adjacent material, including the occupation, the deportations, and the suppression of local Communist parties.

What is not in dispute is that the politics of the past three years have made the 1945 frame harder to hold in a single image. A statue of a Red Army soldier now carries at least three sets of meaning at once: the soldier who fought, the state that followed, and the war that made the current order possible. Governments from Warsaw to Tallinn have decided that the second meaning has to be the loudest. Moscow has decided the third meaning has to be the loudest. The European public is, as ever, the audience for an argument it did not write.

Monexus framed this as a contest over cultural authority rather than a morality play about historical truth. The wire services tend to report individual monument removals as discrete national stories; we are reading them as a single trans-European pattern whose terms are still being set.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/two_majors
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_occupation_of_the_Baltic_states