A comradely chat about the lion and the lamb

Now that the Russian Federation has restored good old Uncle Joe Stalin to his real or virtual pedestals, the Kremlin feels free to whine on about plans to move a certain monument in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, out of the centre of town.

The statue in question shows a Soviet-Russian soldier as "the Liberator" of Estonia. It was erected in 1947 at the start of the Soviet occupation.

Even today the Russians claim they "liberated" Estonians from the evil Nazi occupation and this is quite true. What is not mentioned is that this was in order to enslave the nation even more thoroughly.

Under Stalin more than 50,000 Estonians were deported to Siberia and hundreds more were murdered by KGB toughs in case the message was not entirely clear.

The Estonian parliament has now passed a law giving permission to move the liberation/occupation statue/eyesore out of the centre of the city to a "more appropriate"/obscure location on the outskirts.

In Moscow, the Duma has predictably declared that this is a new proof that Estonians "admire Nazism and agree to its ideology" and the Estonian ambassador has been obliged to explain that his people never admired the Nazis and have not changed their minds on the matter. There are indeed no monuments to commemorate the German occupation/mass visit.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has never bothered with such self-lacerating nonsense, preferring to continue believing that the Second World War, like love, means never having to say you’re sorry - as long as you were on the winning side when the music stopped, which of course the USSR was.

This means certain convenient truths of the period are frozen in time, and that the good people of Estonia begged to be liberated and were delighted to be swallowed up by the "Mother of all nations", going on to enjoy decades of "peaceful co-existence" of the kind other neighbours of the USSR enjoyed/ endured.

Students of political theory may be interested to know that this concept was originally thought up, not by some Kremlin ideologue, but by a humble attendant at Moscow Zoo in the 1920s. Faced with falling attendance figures he introduced a sensational show: a lion and a lamb peacefully co-existing in the same cage.

Everybody wanted to see this wonder, and the zoo became something of a place of pilgrimage. After a while the Central Committee wanted to know the trick. "Business secret", said the animal attendant, drunk on success and forgetting that Communism does not recognise such an idea.

He was duly taken to the cellars of the Lubyanka and after a comradely chat he was ready to explain how peaceful co-existence works. "Just replace the lamb every morning," he said.

Now that the Russian Federation has restored good old Uncle Joe Stalin to his real or virtual pedestals, the Kremlin feels free to whine on about plans to move a certain monument in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, out of the centre of town.