A Vaccine Against the Brown Plague – Lessons from History
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By Irada Zeynalova
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
This phrase – embraced by military analyst Clausewitz, philosopher Santayana, and even Buddha Gautama – teaches us something simple, yet so easily forgotten: Learn from history and do not try to rewrite it. Everything bad that is forgotten will come back and repeat itself – often in an even uglier form. There are no exceptions.
This year is especially important for all of us, across all continents. We are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory – the Victory that gave birth to the world we live in today. We are witnessing how a new world is emerging – one in which our children will live. The same way it was emerging in the early 19th century with all its wars before the eyes of Clausewitz. The same way it was emerging in the early 20th century before the eyes of Santayana.
And in 1945, when the Soviet soldiers raised the banner of Victory over the Reichstag, it became a symbol of our shared memory:
Never again!
Never again would the brown plague raise its head!
Never again would we allow anyone to bring back again the ideas of “superhumanity” and segregation by blood and race.
And the Soviet Union stood for the ideas of independence and decolonization, which would become a guarantee of the ending of the horrors of slavery and oppression. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium and Germany – all of them lost their colonies. And the United Nations was born, the greatest outcome of that victory.
That is why it was such a shockfor Russia to see Nazi symbols appearing in Ukraine – among those who seized power after the 2014 coup. It was a shock to see Bandera’s collaborators hailed as heroes by those who decided to give up sovereignty and to voluntarily become a colony of the West. It was a shock to see how a nation was divided – between those who considered themselves true Ukrainians and those who wanted to speak the Russian language and preserve historical ties between our peoples. We, Russians and Ukrainians, had always stood together: in the same trenches, against Hitler. We rebuilt our common country together after the war.
That is why it was such a shock to see how the nationalists, together with the army, attacked those in Donbas who didn’t accept the results of the coup. Moreover, those who supported that coup – the EU leaders – refused even to recognize it. As had already happened during the Arab Spring in the Middle East, the leaders of the coup – those who were actually enabling chaos and destruction in the country — were proclaimed fighters for democracy. Everybody knows what the result was.
What happened in Ukraine? It led to the civil war that lasted for eight long years against those who simply wanted to preserve their freedom and their customs. And Russia was trying to draw the world’s attention: Donbas was being shelled by those who glorified Nazi collaborators and claimed purity of blood, killing civilians who disagreed. We were trying to remind people that the world had already come through that evil once, and our country paid the incredibly high price to eradicate the scum of Nazism: 27 million lives. We were trying to remind people that the brown Nazi uniform doesn’t have half tones and that the West had already made that mistake before, turning a blind eye to the danger of Hitler and his ideology, no matter for what reasons: geopolitics, the desire to weaken the Soviet Union, the greed of arms dealers. Anyway, it was a horrible mistake. And our common tragic history. A history that we have to remember.
As a reporter, I travelled to both Ukraine and Donbas. Week after week, year after year, from the very first day of the military coup in Kiev in 2014, I reported only what I saw with my own eyes. I covered how those called “freedom fighters” by Western media burned unarmed police with Molotov cocktails. I reported how provocateurs, armed with sniper rifles, shot innocent people in the centre of Kiev, creating false images of martyrs in order to ensure a legend for the new regime. I covered how Ukrainian artillery shelled its own citizens in Lugansk and Donetsk, how Crimeans defended themselves against neo-Nazis and asked my country for protection, and how Ukraine cut off their water supplies – an act that the UN defines as genocide.
I remember the horror of Odessa, when people were burned alive, and those who were responsible for that tragedy laughed and were called heroes. And I do remember how the OSCE mission ignored the deaths of civilians and my fellow journalists, who had been trying to prove – for eight long years, week after week – that the Minsk agreements, signed under the guarantee of France and Germany, were being systematically violated by Ukraine. And those agreements could have led to peace, because all that Donbas asked for was simple:
A chance to live the way they had chosen.
The right to speak the Russian language.
The right to raise children without neo-Nazis.
After eight years of trying to negotiate peace, we realized there was nothing to wait forany longer.
We demanded the disarmament of neo-Nazis and the right for the people of Donbas to determine their own future. But nothing changed – just as it happened once with the Soviet Union, no one wanted to talk to us. Our arguments were turned upside down. A hybrid war was unleashed against us – with missile deliveries and information attacks — which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides and will cost yet more lives if peace negotiations are refused.
Yes, we continue to insist: history must not be allowed to repeat itself. The West’s ongoing arms supplies are not about Ukraine or Russia – they reflect a broader unwillingness to stop the war and to confess that the lessons of the past have not been learned.
I remember one of my first trips to Donbas in 2015. We came into a house where two young girls were hiding in a basement – their parents had been killed by Ukrainian shelling. They were living without electricity and water, with almost no food left. Everything happened exactly as Zelensky’s predecessor, President Poroshenko, had promised: “Our children will go to school, and the children of Donbas will be hiding in basements.”
At that moment I made a promise to myself –
I will always tell what is going on in Donbas. The whole world must know the truth. I will not allow this to happen again.
Because history is ruthless to those who have not learned its lessons.
Irada Zeynalova is the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation in the Republic of Mauritius.
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 9 May 2025
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