Remembering History: A Winter Walk to the WWII Monument

Here you can see Bratislava’s Slavín memorial, a site that has become increasingly controversial in the context of Putin’s war and contemporary Russian efforts to monopolise the legacy of the Allied victory in the Second World War. In reality, Bratislava was liberated on 4 April 1945 during the Bratislava–Brno offensive by the Soviet 2nd Ukrainian Front, a multinational formation that included soldiers of various Soviet nationalities as well as Czechs and Slovaks. Romanian army units fought in the same campaign as allied forces alongside the Soviet formations, and individual Italian anti-fascist partisans and volunteers are also known to have joined the broader anti-Nazi struggle in Central Europe, even if they are much less visible in official commemorations.