Sept. 1, 2009, marked the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. In the eyes of most Westerners, the Axis Powers, and the Third Reich in particular, are the primary evildoers during the darkest of moments in human history. However, one may argue that Soviet war crimes are equally heinous as Nazi terrors. Unfortunately, the West has forgotten or willfully ignored this fact. This is unlikely to change, but the victims deserve to be remembered.

Until Operation Barbarossa, when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, the two empires were allies. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, named after the respective foreign affairs ministers of each country, declared their mutual non-aggression and partitioned Poland between the two superpowers.

After dividing up its western neighbor with the Nazis, the Soviet Union proceeded to invade and brutally occupy Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Bessarabia region of Romania. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and military of these occupied states were deported and killed. Some were immediately executed, while others died of starvation or overwork in exile.

While scores of films and popular books about Hitler’s genocide of the Jews are released each year, few Westerners are aware of Soviet war atrocities. Although most American and Western European teenagers raised in the post-Cold War era recognize the swastika, many have trouble identifying the hammer and sickle. In fact, clothing with Soviet symbolism offends nobody and is ubiquitous.

There are several reasons for this unjust ignoring of the victims of Soviet aggression. Above all, many among the intellectual and political elites are reticent about discussing the great loss to human life Soviet Communism caused. Since the rise to power of Vladimir Putin, Russian politicians have glorified a regime that has killed, depending on the estimates of historians, between 20 and 50 million people. Russian historians and journalists critical of this historical revisionism are ignored at best and harassed at worst.

Meanwhile, many Western intellectuals continue to espouse a romanticized view of Communism. Jean-Paul Sartre and Angela Davis championed Stalin, while student protestors at the Sorbonne and at Berkeley carried flags with images of Mao in the 1960s. Although more than four decades have passed since the height of campus radicalism, Marxist sympathies continue to dominate academia and intellectual culture.

Finally, the Soviet Union played a key role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and had the third largest Allied army after the United States and Great Britain. Churchill and Roosevelt regarded Stalin with high esteem and made questionable concessions to him at the Yalta Conference at the expense of nations occupied by Soviet troops. To the many who revere Churchill and Roosevelt as the primary architects of peace in Europe, this thought is deeply disturbing, yet even history’s most noble figures are capable of moral weakness.

The current intellectual and political environment is not favorable to the commemoration of the Soviet Union’s victims. The simplistic, dualistic view of the battle between the noble allies and unmatched-in-cruelty Nazis is likely to persist for years. However, human decency requires that all massacres be remembered, even politically inconvenient ones.