As troops march past and planes streak overhead, President Bush will assume his place in the reviewing stand on Red Square in front of Lenin's tomb, marking the 60th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany -- an event that also ushered in decades of totalitarianism for half of Europe.
For a president who has made it his mission to champion democracy around the world, Bush's trip to Europe starting Friday presents one of the trickiest diplomatic challenges of his young second term, an uncomfortable balancing act of honoring the enormous Russian sacrifice during World War II without condoning the repression that followed.
In a complex choreography to avoid sending the wrong signal, Bush will bracket his visit to Moscow with stops in two former Soviet republics that still resist Kremlin influence, Latvia and Georgia. Yet his attempt to prod Russian President Vladimir Putin into owning up to the dark side of the Soviet past evidently has failed. The Bush administration, U.S. sources said, privately tried to persuade Putin to use the occasion to renounce Stalin's agreement with Hitler dividing up Poland and permitting the Soviet Union to swallow up Latvia and its Baltic neighbors.
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A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Bush's team designed the trip "not to fall into the Russian trap about the past" and "go to a World War II commemoration on Red Square in front of Lenin's tomb celebrating something that was not liberation for a lot of Europe. A lot of people, not just the Balts, see it as trading one dictatorship for another." So "we tried to refine the trip to talk about important matters for the 21st century."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050402158.html
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