Black Ribbon Day

Naming and adoption

The day is known in Russian as Den chyornoy lenty ("Black Ribbon Day"), while the official name used by the European Union is the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. The European Parliament's resolution had originally been planned under a title memorialising the victims of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, but the word "authoritarian" was removed from the final version. The OSCE's Vilnius Declaration of July 2009, by contrast, stated explicitly that Europe had experienced two major totalitarian regimes, the Nazi and the Stalinist.

The European Parliament resolution was drafted in February 2008 and passed in April 2008, adopting 23 August as a Europe-wide remembrance day. In July 2009 the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly adopted the Vilnius Declaration, supporting 23 August as the international remembrance day for the victims of totalitarianism and urging member states to raise awareness of totalitarian crimes. In Canada the day is an official remembrance day under the name Black Ribbon Day, and within the European Union it is one of only two official remembrance days, alongside Europe Day. EU institutions have observed the date every year since 2009.

Origins and spread

The date emerged from Western protests against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In 1985 Markus Hess proposed the name Black Ribbon Day and the black-ribbon protest form, and in February 1986 the International Black Ribbon Day Committee accepted David Somerville's idea of using the pact's signing date, fixing 23 August. The first commemoration took place in the summer of 1986: in Toronto the ceremony included raising the flags of nations under Soviet rule and carrying barbed wire to symbolise captivity, while in Australia gatherings in Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide released black balloons bearing victims' names and organised a boycott of Soviet artistic ensembles and imported goods.

On 23 August 1986 the International Black Ribbon Day Committee, based in Toronto, coordinated demonstrations in 21 Western cities, among them New York City, Ottawa, London, Stockholm, Seattle, Los Angeles, Perth and Washington DC, with Hess as president and Somerville as vice president. The movement grew year by year, reaching 56 cities by 1991. In 1987 the protests spread to the Baltic countries, and in 1989 they culminated in the Baltic Way: on 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the pact, the peoples of the three states formed a human chain; sources give its length as roughly 600 kilometres, 675 kilometres or nearly 700 kilometres, and its size as about one million to two million participants.

Distinctions and disputes

The day is distinct from, but closely related to, the Baltic Way of 1989: the Black Ribbon Day protest tradition in Western cities was the movement from which the human chain grew, and both share the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as their date.

From the outset the day was attacked by the Soviet government, which denied the secret protocol of 23 August 1939, and under Putin's government Russia has continued to attack it; the Russian delegation walked out when the OSCE adopted the Vilnius Declaration in support of the remembrance day. Russia holds that the commemoration is an attempt to use the country's own victims for political ends.