1 Introduction

More than seventy years apart from today, the Second World War is still the past that refuses to pass. This chapter examines a case that illuminates broader mnemonical and legal reverberations of the events of the war as it unfolded in the European periphery in 1944. If law is a medium of collective remembrance, what role is allocated to international legal rulings by states fighting for the wider recognition of their central mnemonic narratives? This chapter delves into the uncharted relations between international adjudication and the ontological security-seeking behaviour of states. Ontological security refers to a sense of a continuous and stable ‘self’, having that sense confirmed by the others and being thus reassured about one's own continuity in, and confidence vis-à-vis the world.Footnote ¹ As the pursuit of ontological security is allegedly central to the human condition,Footnote ² driving by extension also state behaviour, states seek to perform actions in order to underwrite their notions of ‘who they are’.Footnote ³ Besides physical survival as a legal person,Footnote ⁴ continuity as a certain kind of actor is thus essential for states. Retaining a sense of continuous state identity becomes particularly acute in periods of political transformation, such as in transitions from non-democratic to democratic regimes or from the suppression by a foreign power to self-government.Footnote ⁵ Transitional legal rulings therefore entail considerable potential as political tools in the identity-building contestations of states dealing with a repressive period in their overlapping histories in various ways. The invoking of international judicial authorities such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the course of these ontological security-seeking struggles of states allows us to interrogate the function and the weighting role of international court rulings on the contested historical memory in question.Footnote ⁶

My central argument is that as international court rulings enable the legal crystallisation of particular mnemonic narratives, they can reinforce or undermine the international status of competing biographical narratives of states contesting for the affirmation of their respective ‘life-stories’, and the consistency of their ‘selves' thereof.Footnote ⁷ This proposition is illustrated with an analysis of the Kononov v. Latvia case in the ECtHR, offering a microcosm of Russia's and the Baltic states' competing claims on ontological security in pursuing a particular pan-European remembrance of the Second World War.

The Kononov case enables a close-up study of the complex relationship between law and memory against the backdrop of Russia's ‘memory wars' with its former Soviet subjugate states, whereby Russia's hegemonic mnemonic narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the USSR's role in defeating Nazi Germany clashes with the critical accounts of the Soviet crimes in the occupied territories.Footnote ⁸ The debates and proceedings on the Kononov v. Latvia case in the ECtHR in 2008Footnote ⁹ and 2010Footnote ¹⁰ have been examined from the perspectives of international criminal and humanitarian law, human rights law, and transitional justice.Footnote ¹¹ This chapter explores the case through the lens of ontological security, taking the Kononov case to be an emblematic illustration of competing Russian and Baltic claims on the narrative consistency of their state ‘selves' and their conflicting bids on the legitimate remembrance of the Second World War and the Soviet legacy in general.Footnote ¹² This case and the surrounding discussions offer an evocative window into the contested readings of the conduct and consequences of the war in the East European ‘bloodlands’.Footnote ¹³ The political repercussions of the ECtHR's verdict on the case demonstrate how international legal rulings can be invoked as validating or discrediting states' biographical self-narratives (of which mnemonical narratives occupy a central place). By extension, while ontological security as applied in the study of international relations refers to the close nexus between state identity and its sense of security, it can be embedded in, or confirmed by, international legal rulings. Besides underscoring the diverging directions of Latvia's and Russia's politics of transitional justice, the case of Kononov v. Latvia also illustrates their respective appeals on the ECtHR as a political resource in their distinct struggles of coming to terms with the Soviet past.Footnote ¹⁴

Kononov v. Latvia has furthermore a strong transnational resonance for the broader European community. The case highlights how justice established in trials addressing past international wrongdoings and human rights abuses can itself become a new form of remembrance, and the respective legal decision, consequently, a vehicle of collective memory at a pan-European scale.Footnote ¹⁵ Legal processes help to establish and buttress a particular historical account, while records of the trial and judgment remain enduring representations of the newly established ‘regime of truth’.Footnote ¹⁶ The historical accounting of the criminal trial has therefore noteworthy ‘truth effects' besides the production of justice.Footnote ¹⁷ As transitional historical accountings draw a line that redefines a past and reconstructs actors' political identities,Footnote ¹⁸ ‘the jurisprudence serves a fixative role’, as the finality of legal judgment could settle contested understandings of history.Footnote ¹⁹ Trials of transitional historical justice seek not just to adjudicate individual responsibility, but to draw a normative line between a condemnable past and a legitimate present, to publicly instantiate the past wrongdoings in order to establish the truth about the event in controversy vis-à-vis the predecessor regime. As such, they enable the establishment of a historical record at the highest legal standard of certainty, as well as a public airing of the country's past through a particular representation of the past regime.Footnote ²⁰ It is in that sense legal rulings amount to the ‘hardware’ of memory,Footnote ²¹ a highly regarded resource for supporting an actor's sense of a continuous ‘self’ (or its ontological security). Magnifying a particular historical account, international legal proceedings and court decisions likewise entail the potential of becoming sources of interpreting history in spe, for history is ‘memory seen through […] documents’.Footnote ²²

This chapter outlines first the Latvian-Russian mnemonical disagreement over the assessment of the events of the Second World War in the region, as displayed in the Kononov case. It then moves on to argue how a particular interpretation and remembrance of the war and the Soviet legacy more generally sustains the biographical accounts of the states under investigation, bolstering their respective claims on ontological security. The conceptual point of departure for such a take is a narrative understanding of state identity.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, the biographical narrative is of central importance for state identity ‘because it is the locus through which agents “work out” their understanding of social settings and the placement of their Selves in those settings’.Footnote ²⁴ The stories states tell about themselves have behavioural consequences: identities are not only told, they are also enacted. Since states allegedly seek consistency between their self-identity narratives and their behaviour in international politics, to increase their credibility and to defend them from threats to that identity, their international behaviour is expressive of state identity.Footnote ²⁵ A state's biographical narrative constitutes and maintains its ‘self’, giving life to routinised foreign policy actions.Footnote ²⁶ The ability to maintain a consistent and socially recognised story about oneself therefore determines the coherent ‘actorness' of states in world politics. Narratives and practices send signals about state's intentions to its international counterparts. It is thus necessary to analyse both discourse and practice; both what is being said and actually done. The conclusion recapitulates the broader implications of the ECtHR's final judgment on the case of Kononov v. Latvia for the remembrance of the Second World War and the Soviet legacy in Europe at large.

2 Kononov v. Latvia as a Legal Act in the Baltic-Russian ‘Memory War’ on the Second World War

The Russian and Baltic readings of the course, consequences, and ramifications of the Second World War, as well as their general assessment of the Soviet legacy, diverge considerably both at the ‘collected’ (or aggregated individual) and ‘collective’ levels of social remembrance.Footnote ²⁷ Their respective state-led politics of memory have evocatively embodied the antagonistic understandings of the course and results of the war in the region across all five policy domains listed by Thomas U. Berger as the constituents of a country's ‘official historical narrative’ (i.e. rhetoric, commemoration, education, compensation, and punishment).Footnote ²⁸ For the Republic of Latvia, as for the other Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania, the Soviet Union was one of the aggressors in the Second World War, responsible for their loss of independence for the better part of the second half of the twentieth century. Accordingly, the three Baltic states were subjected to military occupation and subsequent annexation by the Soviet Union following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 between the USSR and Germany. Since the incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union in 1940 ensued from the illegal threat of force, military aggression, and occupation, these countries continued to exist as states under international law even though they were de facto annexed by the Soviet Union (following the legal principle of ex injuria non oritur jus, or illegal acts cannot create law).Footnote ²⁹ Along with the other Baltic states and Poland, Latvia has consequently emerged as one of the most vocal advocates of criminal and historical justiceFootnote ³⁰ vis-à-vis former communist regimes, hailing for a pan-European moral, political, and legal condemnation of the totalitarian communist legacy in Europe.Footnote ³¹ In 2010, Latvia was among six East European states calling for the European Commission to criminalise the denial of crimes perpetrated by communist regimes in the same way a number of European Union countries have banned the public condoning, denial and gross trivialisation of the Holocaust.Footnote ³²

For the Russian Federation as the legal continuator of the USSR, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the victory thereof marked the emergence of the Soviet Union as a great power internationally, as well as standing for the Soviet people's selfless defence of Europe from Nazism. According to the official Russian line, the incorporation of the Baltic states to the USSR was voluntary, and in any way legitimate, considering the security situation created by Nazi Germany in the build-up to the war. Many Baltic politicians have been vocally critical of the narrative of the Soviet ‘Great Patriotic War’ as a solely defensive enterprise against Nazi aggression for this narrative invariably ignores or discounts the significance of Nazi-Soviet collaboration under the auspices of the non-aggression treaty of 1939.

The case of Kononov v. Latvia involves a number of vehemently contested issues in the Russian-Baltic memory debates. These include the legal status of Latvia in the Second World War; the problem of how to reckon with the crimes committed in the name of the Soviet regime by Soviet military personnel; the status of persons linked to the military organs of Soviet power in the former Soviet territories that restored their independent statehood in 1991; the question of whether Russia as the ‘state-continuator’ of the Soviet Union in international legal terms has inherited any responsibility for the internationally wrongful acts of the Soviet regime; and last not least, could an individual who fought on the side of the Allies in the Second World War be tried for war crimes.Footnote ³³ Kononov v. Latvia furthermore exemplifies the Baltic-Russian disagreement on the alleged universality of the Nuremberg principles.Footnote ³⁴ While the Baltic states have pushed for holding the standard formulated at Nuremberg to be universal in the context of the Second World War, Russia has essentially spoken for the discriminatory concept of war crimes, arguing that in terms of jus in bello, more was permitted to the warring party whose war could have been considered just in terms of jus ad bellum (i.e. legitimate self-defence against the aggression by Nazi Germany). Consequently, Russia has claimed the Nuremberg precedent not to be practically applicable to the nationals of the victorious Allies.Footnote ³⁵

The case of Kononov was brought before the ECtHR on the issue of the retroactive application of criminal sanctions by a former ‘Red partisan’ commander Vasily Makarovich Kononov, who after having been decorated as a war hero during the Soviet times, was charged with war crimes after Latvia's independence had been restored.Footnote ³⁶ According to the case against Kononov that passed through all three stages of the Latvian court system, Kononov had led a group of Soviet partisans who killed nine inhabitants of the eastern Latvian village of Mazie Bati on 27 May 1944 for their alleged collaboration with the German forces occupying the country at the time. According to Kononov's account, this was planned as an act of retaliation since previously villagers had given away the location of the Soviet Major Chugunov's nearby platoon to the Germans, which was consequently destroyed. Allegedly, the villagers had been hiding weapons provided by the Germans and were collaborating with them. Kononov affirmed that he had not been personally involved in killing any villagers, claiming furthermore that his unit's orders had actually been to capture the ‘traitors' and put them on a trial in a Soviet military court.Footnote ³⁷

The 2008 judgment by the ECtHR's former Third Section found Latvia to be in violation of Art. 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) when convicting Kononov for a war crime by a narrow margin of four votes against three.Footnote ³⁸ Art. 7 para 1 sentence 1 of the ECHR reads as follows:

The crux of the matter, however, was more revealingly stated by Judge Egbert Myjer of the Netherlands in his concurring opinion to the chamber's judgment, which had reached a conclusion that Kononov's actions in 1944 did not amount to a war crime. As Judge Myjer substantiated his siding with the Court's ruling:

Accordingly, Judge Myer's conclusion was to put aside what he called ‘the double occupation viewpoint of the Latvian Government’ (emphasis in the original), maintaining that just like in Netherlands, ‘there was no justification for a pro-Nazi attitude or active collaboration with the Nazis in Latvia either’.Footnote ⁴¹ The discriminatory understanding of war crimes as evocatively aired by Judge Myjer's concurring opinion was later echoed by Pavel Laptev, Russian representative at the Court at the time, who argued in an interview with Kommersant that ‘within the limits of reason’ any means to fight Nazism were essentially justified.Footnote ⁴² This perspective determined the applicability of the rules protecting civilians in war according to their personal political sympathies, thus refuting a foundational principle of international humanitarian law.

Only two years later, however, the Grand Chamber of the ECtHR reversed the previous judgment of the Court's former Third Section. In this final judgment of 17 May 2010 in the case of Kononov v. Latvia, the Grand Chamber found, by fourteen votes to three, that Latvia had not violated Art. 7 of the ECHR, which enshrines the prohibition of retroactive application of criminal law when convicting the former Soviet partisan Vasily Kononov for a war crime committed in Latvia during the Second World War.Footnote ⁴³ Symptomatically to the dividing lines of the debate, the Russian Federation continued to intervene in the process before the Grand Chamber as a third-party state in support of Kononov,Footnote ⁴⁴ while Lithuania stepped in for Latvia.

Hence, contra the discriminatory understanding of war crimes that had informed the original ECtHR ruling in the Kononov case, the Grand Chamber upheld the war crimes conviction of Kononov by the previous rulings of the Latvian courts. The Court thereby established an important precedent in applying the Nuremberg standards also to the winners of the Second World War, recognising these as the universal normative benchmark regardless of the perpetrators' allegiance to the supposedly more rightful jus ad bellum.Footnote ⁴⁵ The successful Latvian appeal at the ECtHR on the Kononov case constituted a significant triumph for the broader Baltic politics of seeking recognition to their distinct experiences with twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and the legal treatment of the internationally wrongful acts committed by the Soviet communist regime on a par with the crimes of the Nazis.Footnote ⁴⁶ Latvian Member of the European Parliament Sandra Kalniete who chairs the informal group Reconciliation of European Histories in the European Parliament welcomed the Grand Chamber's judgment as a step towards historical justice.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in its turn, called the Court's final judgment ‘a very dangerous precedent’ that represented:

The ECtHR's acceptance of the position of Latvia in the case of Kononov was consequently seen as marking ‘a legally baseless and politically detrimental shift in the Court's legal approaches to the assessment of events and outcomes of the Second World War’. Speaking on behalf of the Russian Federation, the statement of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs promised to draw ‘appropriate conclusions' on the ruling, including with regard to the construction of Russia's relations with the Court and the Council of Europe as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Russian State Duma, in its turn, expressed its ‘deep concern’ over delivery of this judgment, which was regarded as:

Accordingly, the Grand Chamber judgment was perceived as ‘justif[ying] the actions of the Latvian authorities pursuing the policy of revanchism and chauvinism’ as well as ‘encourag[ing] those State leaders who call for revision of the results of the International Military Tribunal for Nuremberg’. The Duma maintained that:

The Russian State Duma thus dubbed the final ruling on Kononov v. Latvia as ‘of purely political nature’, as it was allegedly ‘not based on universally accepted principles and norms of the international law’. Moreover, ‘serious negative consequences' were foreseen ‘for the participants in the Second World War, who fought on the side of the Allies, which might be manifested in their criminal prosecution for commission of war crimes’.Footnote ⁵¹ Likewise, President Medvedev suggested that the ‘open reassessment of a verdict previously reached definitely has political motives behind it’, and could ‘undermine the basis of international law’,Footnote ⁵² while Andrei Klimov, the deputy chairman of the Duma's International Affairs Committee, claimed that a ‘continuation of this logic will ultimately lead to whitewashing of Hitler and his accomplices’.Footnote ⁵³

In response, the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced attempts to exercise pressure on the ECtHR, maintaining that:

Yet, the Grand Chamber had, in fact, stood clear of taking an explicit stand on the lawfulness of Latvia's incorporation into the USSR in 1940,Footnote ⁵⁵ effectively refusing to add substantive weight on this major bone of contention between the parties of the debate.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, if Latvia was first illegally occupied by the USSR and only then by Germany, and in case the first Soviet occupation was violent and repressive enough, the villagers of Mazie Bati could have hardly had any legal or moral duty to prefer one occupier to another – quite contrary to the implication made by Judge MyjerFootnote ⁵⁷ and the even more evocative official Russian position on the case.

3 Kononov v. Latvia as a Clash of Competing Claims on Ontological Security

I suggest that the Kononov case challenged fundamentally both Latvia's and Russia's self-narratives as particular kinds of states, although in different ways, drawing on their specific interpretations of the events and consequences of the Second World War and their ensuing self-defined ontological security requirements. Not prosecuting Kononov for crimes committed during the time of the war would have discredited Latvia's efforts at post-communist transitional justice, undermining the country's central biographical narrative which is based on the legal principle of state continuity with the pre-war republic and the remembrance of the Second World War as a sequence of foreign occupations (i.e. first, Soviet; then Nazi; then again Soviet).

For Russia, a Soviet veteran's prosecution of war crimes by its former Soviet subjugate state was clearly disruptive for its central state-endorsed mnemonic narrative as the critical and heroic contributor in defeating Nazi Germany. Latvia's pursuance of historical justice threatened to dilute the moral supremacy of the Soviet human sacrifice among the anti-Hitler Allied coalition. Russia's support of Kononov thus appeared almost imperative for its defence of the country's memory and sense of honour in relation to the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Latvia's charges against Kononov were thus interpreted as if constituting a normative threatFootnote ⁵⁸ to Russia's identity as a great and victorious European power. It appears that for the current Russian leadership, a sense of ontological anxiety was generated by the ECtHR's final proceedings on the case rather than by Kononov's actual deeds in the Latvian village of Mazie Bati in 1944. It was not Kononov's responsibility for the killing of Latvian villagers per se, including burning alive a woman in the final stages of pregnancy, that produced a radical disconnection with the hegemonic mnemonic narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the role of the Soviet Union in fighting Nazism, but rather the European Court's eventual siding with Latvia in its charge against the Soviet veteran. ECtHR's ruling on the Kononov case threatened Russia with an imperative to fundamentally reassess its official account of the war as a selflessly defensive and indeed self-sacrificing enterprise. This was regarded as highly problematic in Russia for the victorious ‘Great Patriotic War’ has emerged as a major resource for the positive sense of the Russian post-Soviet ‘self’ during the Putin era, forming the backbone of the country's contemporary state-sanctioned biographical narrative. The ontological significance of the war for the modern Russian construction of its state identity is evocatively reflected in the recent amendment to the country's Criminal Code, whereby the ‘dissemination of false information on the activities of the Soviet Union during World War II’ and the ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’ are explicitly criminalised.Footnote ⁵⁹

While accepting the role of the continuator state of the Soviet Union in international legal terms, the Russian Federation has persistently refused to assume legal responsibility for the internationally wrongful acts of the Soviet regime, both within its current borders and beyond. Russia's lack of political penitence towards the other Eastern European nations and states affected by the Soviet repressive policies has made it an antipode of a ‘sorry state’, unwilling to publicly express contrition for past human rights abuses in order to promote reconciliation between the former repressor state and the repressed.Footnote ⁶⁰ Meanwhile, the Putin regime has cunningly appropriated the discourses of human rights and genocide prevention for its own identity-political projects. Russia's own record in criminal-judicial measures adopted vis-à-vis the perpetrators of the human rights violations of its antecedent regime remains notoriously absent.Footnote ⁶¹ Russia's chosen transitional justice model has been aimed at impunity rather than accountability. In the meantime, the Kremlin's rhetorical stance on various kinds of ‘Nazis’, past and present, is strongly punitive, in a curious contradiction to the Putin regime's support to far-right parties in Europe.

To be sure, fundamental transitions (be they political, economic, ideological, or all at once, as has been the case with Russia's emergence from the USSR) present fundamental challenges for maintaining the consistency of the self-concept of a state. ‘Coming to terms with the past’ calls for the revision of the state's mnemonic vision of itself, thus destabilising its identity and potentially endangering its continuous agency in international politics.Footnote ⁶² The status-related costs entailed with a critical revision of a past ‘self’ are not just emotionally charged, but have concrete political consequences. In Russia's case, the unqualified renouncing of the communist regime after the collapse of the USSR would have made it difficult to concurrently ‘inherit’ the desirable legacy of the Soviet Union in the international system as its ‘state continuator’ (i.e. Russia's privileged position in the international system through the permanent membership of the UN Security Council, or its great power status in general). Against that backdrop, Russia's notorious strategic silenceFootnote ⁶³ about certain problematic chapters in the life of this antecedent ‘self’ is not actually inconsistent with the basic premises of the ontological security theory. The political handling of its communist past has been further complicated for Russia by the additional challenges the collapse of the antecedent regime has presented for its spatial continuity. Losing a considerable chunk of the formerly inhabited space, as well as millions of Russian compatriots to the newly independent states at Russia's borders has forced the country to fundamentally reconsider (and thus far not particularly successfully) its historical self-definition as an empire rather than a nation-state.

In sum, both Latvia's and Russia's discourses and actions regarding the Kononov case stemmed from and sought to guard their central state-endorsed ontological security narratives, highlighting the countries' mutual importance for the constitution of their identities as certain kinds of states. Taking Kononov to court on charges of war crimes in the Second World War was logically consistent with the grand narrative of the Latvian state identity based on legal continuity with the pre-Second World War republic.Footnote ⁶⁴ This case was part of the country's endeavour to come to terms with its Soviet legacy while constructing a continuous state identity after restoring sovereign statehood in the throes of the collapsing Soviet Union. Latvia's appeal on the original ruling on Kononov by the ECtHR moreover highlights the significance allocated to the European affirmation of Latvia's central mnemonic narrative ordering its contemporary sense of ‘self’. Likewise, the Kononov case evidently challenged Russia's state identity for it threatened to disrupt its state-endorsed biographical narrative as a selfless liberator of Europe from Nazism, inducing thus a sense of disconnection with the exclusively heroic self-image in the context of the war. For Russia, the Kononov case thus emerged as an event that ‘refuse[s] to be readily incorporated in the national myth of glory and sacrifice’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The final ruling of the ECtHR on the case thus created a radical disjuncture for the hegemonic state-sponsored Russian mnemonic narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War’. It is noteworthy that ‘Europe’ has been a significant point of reference for both Russia and Latvia in the search for wider recognition of their respective biographical narratives and remembrances of the Second World War. As the Baltic states continue to call for broadening the spectrum of an official pan-European remembrance of this war as the clash of two totalitarian ‘evils’, Russia's emphasis remains on the USSR's contribution to the Allied victory as part of the already well-established Western narrative of the Second World War as the ‘good war’ of fighting against a single tyranny.Footnote ⁶⁶

4 Implications for European Remembrance of the Second World War

The proceedings in the case of Kononov show evocatively how transitional historical justice, as pursued by Latvia and Russia in their distinct ways, is connected to the preservation of the respective state identities over time. Kononov v. Latvia is an emblematic example of the legal process that Latvia resorted to during its post-Soviet transition in order to preserve its ontological consistency as a continuous state with the pre-war republic. For Russia, this case encapsulates multiple, and yet to be successfully surmounted tensions in its hegemonic mnemonic narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the Soviet legacy more generally. While for Latvia this case has enabled a public airing of the Baltic states' difficult predicament between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the context of the Second World War, Kononov induced fundamental ontological insecurity in Russia, undermining its state-sanctioned mnemonic account of the war as a noble and selfless struggle for the freedom of the whole of Europe. Paraphrasing Lawrence R. Douglas, while the ECtHR's ruling enabled to ‘clarify or elucidate the historical record’ for Latvia, it failed ‘to police a history that ha[d] already been adequately clarified’ for Russia.Footnote ⁶⁷

The case of Kononov v. Latvia has thus wider repercussions for the so-called ‘Western front’ of the East European ‘memory wars' over the Second World War.Footnote ⁶⁸ ECtHR's 2008 ruling on Kononov demonstrated how the mental line drawn under the war in Nuremberg had essentially been a necessary compromise for Western Europe in order to move on with life in the immediate aftermath of war horrors. It is hardly surprising that the compromise which had turned a blind eye towards assessing the role of the Soviet Union in the war and measuring the Soviet conduct by the same normative yardstick that had been applied to the crimes of the Nazis, began to unravel as the former ‘captive nations' of the Soviet bloc had a chance to start sorting out their own records of the war and the ensuing Soviet suppression. ‘We have to understand the Western Europeans’, Estonian historian Toomas Hiio wrote after the first ECtHR's ruling on the Kononov case.Footnote ⁶⁹ ‘But this understanding is not a one-way street, nor an obligation of Eastern Europeans’, he added, for ‘there can be no justification for the selective application of international law’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the resonating words of Valters Nollendorfs, Chairman of the Board at the Occupation Museum Association of Latvia, ‘crimes have to be prosecuted and justice has to be brought’ for ‘justice not carried out is just as bad as the injustice that has taken place’.Footnote ⁷¹

The European Court's final ruling on the Kononov case sits in the broader backdrop of the emerging pan-European re-assessment of the legacies of the two totalitarian regimes of twentieth-century Europe, with various mnemonic/historiographical and legal-political implications.Footnote ⁷² International judgments, such as the ECtHR Grand Chamber's ruling in the Kononov v. Latvia case are transformative opportunities for shaping the historical accounts of the (Allied) war crimes in the Second World War in general. As the Kononov v. Latvia turned out to be the first case concerning the Second World War in which an Allied soldier was convicted for a war crime by another government's court, the final ruling of the ECtHR in this case established an important precedent in applying the pertinent standards of international law also to the winners of the war.Footnote ⁷³ The Kononov judgment points at the gradual transformation of the wider European assessment of the complex legacies of the Second World War in Eastern Europe. The verdict which came out in favour of Latvia and against the plaintiff Vasily Kononov could accordingly be read as promoting a particular kind of memory at the European level.Footnote ⁷⁴

Nonetheless, the contestation over the legitimate and proper remembrance of the Second World War goes on. Vindicated by the European Court's decision on the Kononov case, Latvian Minister of Justice has announced its preparation to claim occupation damages from Russia along with its two Baltic counterparts.Footnote ⁷⁵ Meanwhile, Russia has taken concrete steps to detach itself from the jurisdiction of the Court. Resonating with the warning to draw ‘appropriate conclusions' on the ECtHR's Kononov ruling, the State Duma recently adopted a law enabling Russia not to implement judgments of the European Court if ‘in conflict with constitution’.Footnote ⁷⁶ While the final ruling of the Court is drawn upon and evoked as a resource of national identity and memory-building in the former Soviet space, the Kononov case highlights the significance allocated to international legal rulings by states seeking to reinforce their mutually contested biographical narratives.

The final ECtHR ruling in the Kononov case has not eliminated the mnemonical dividing lines between Russia and the Baltic states in regard to the Second World War and the Soviet legacy in general. The case has only underscored various normative lines of contestation still prevalent among distinct European communities of memory. The decisiveness of the Kononov ruling for shaping public discourse about the Soviet criminal legacy across Europe needs to be further contextualised in the ECtHR's rulings on a variety of post-communist justice measures and their complex interactions with other forces seeking to make their imprint on historical remembrance of the Second World War and the role of the USSR in it.