Almost 25 years after reunification, a contingent of Russian politicians is considering condemning West Germany’s “annexation” of East Germany as the Russian Federation's official response to the EU’s denunciation of the seizure of Crimea.
Yesterday, Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, ordered the federation’s legislators to examine a Communist Party application to denounce the reunification of Germany as an unlawful land grab of East Germany by the western state.
The collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a socialist regime, started with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and marked a turning point leading towards the end of the Cold War.
Universally celebrated in the west, the two German economies first merged in May 1990, before officially being signed into law as a single nation later that year on October 3rd.
Now Nikolai Ivanov, the Communist lawmaker sponsoring the motion, is arguing that since the GDR was a Soviet Union satellite following the end of WWII, its absorption into a reunified Germany was illegal.
"Unlike Crimea, a referendum was not conducted in the German Democratic Republic," Mr Ivanov states in his appeal made before the Russian parliament's lower house, the State Duma.
Russian reaction
The move comes as Moscow scrambles to act in response to the widespread criticism and condemnation the country has come under following its deployment of troops in Ukraine and seizure of the coastal Crimean peninsula last March.
German chancellor Angel Merkel has taken a hard line approach to reproaching Russian policy over Crimea, repeatedly calling for a democratic approach to the escalating conflict in Ukraine.
"We understand that Western hypocrisy knows no limits," Mr Ivanov told AFP in response to Dr Merkel’s actions.
The Russian annexation of Crimea was spearheaded by Russian president Vladimir Putin, just weeks after the Winter Olympic Games were hosted in the Russian resort of Sochi. Mr Putin had been a KGB officer in Berlin in November 1989, and shows no sign of backing down to international pressure.
Mr Ivanov’s appeal will now be examined by the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, but the politician has said that he expects fellow lawmakers to give it their “moral support”, regardless of whether it is carried or not.
But the motion has already been damningly criticised by one key Soviet figure associated with the end of the Cold War – Mikhail Gorbachev.
The former president of the Soviet Union, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, has called Mr Ivanov’s bill as “utter rubbish.”
Speaking to the Interfax news agency, the 83-year-old politician said: “You cannot evaluate the events that took place in a different epoch, in different times from today’s positions.”
“What referendum could they launch in the German Democratic Republic when in both states, in the East and in the West, they held rallies with hundreds of thousands of participants under just one slogan, ‘We are one nation!’,” Mr Gorbachev added.
