by STEPHEN EVANS
At the end of the Second World War, a soldier of the liberating Russian army balancing precariously on the turret of the old Reichstag building and raising the hammer and sickle banner, the smouldering ruins of Berlin in the background.
European leaders have debated how to punish Russian for its actions in Crimea. But for many Germans, the key is not to ruffle Russian feathers.
On the wall of the office of the left-wing MP, Jan van Aken, is a very big, framed black-and-white picture.
It is the classic image of a Red Army soldier balancing precariously on the turret of the old Reichstag building and raising the hammer and sickle banner, the smouldering ruins of Berlin in the background.
I asked him why he had it on his wall in the German parliament and he replied with a laugh that it was taken on his birthday, 1 May, and then he added more seriously that it tells a story.
The Russians were liberators, he said. They rescued Berlin and Germany from the Nazis.
He doesn’t diminish the contribution of others like the British, but he makes much of the Red Army’s role.
The picture – and he’s the first to admit it – tells a more complicated story, too.
It is a tale of propaganda.
He said it was taken on 1 May but the actual event – the raising of the red banner on the Reichstag – happened on 30 April, the same day Hitler committed suicide in his bunker about half a mile away.
The picture had to be re-staged because the soldier raising the flag had an arm full of wrist-watches looted from the terrified population.
In the days before Photoshop, the soldiers had to climb back up with the flag, their arms now clean of the spoils of war.
The population in East Germany was liberated only to be then subjugated for more than a half a century.
But the picture shows why many Germans today are ambivalent about what’s happening in Ukraine.
Van Aken is an MP for Die Linke, the party descended from the old communist party in East Germany.
He says many of his fellow party members remain grateful to the Soviet Union.
In the west of the country, anti-communism was rife but in the east of the country, Russia was not only the oppressor but also the liberator.
The signs of that liberation are there for all to see, even in the Bundestag building itself where graffiti scrawled by Russian soldiers, in the Cyrillic script has not been scrubbed away.
It is there for MPs to see as they enter the chamber, the names of soldiers with dates in May, 1945.
The soldiers who raised the flag came down and did what soldiers do – they wrote their names on the walls they’d breached. One of the soldiers who raised the flag was Ukrainian, from Kiev.
BBC for more