Warum Deutschland in Bezug auf Russland immer noch gespalten ist

The persistence of pro-Russian sentiment in the former East Germany is less paradoxical than it first appears. Even after the repression, surveillance, and political subjugation that came with Soviet domination, many East Germans retain a kind of inherited familiarity with Russia — a sense that Moscow, for all its obvious sins, is not an alien force but part of a shared historical landscape. That attachment survives not because people have forgotten the wounds of the past, but because reunification never fully delivered on its promise. Three and a half decades later, the East still lags behind the West in income, employment, and opportunity, leaving a residue of grievance and a readiness to view Western institutions with skepticism. Against that backdrop, Russia — or at least the idea of Russia — becomes something like an old acquaintance: flawed, but understood.

This sentiment has political consequences. While West Germans overwhelmingly reject Putin’s war and support arming Ukraine, many in the East take a more ambivalent posture, questioning sanctions, expressing doubts about NATO, and entertaining the notion that Kyiv should trade land for peace. These attitudes have opened space for the far-right Alternative for Germany, which repackages pro-Russian instincts as “peace” politics and finds willing audiences in the disaffected East. What emerges is a cultural logic rather than a geopolitical one — what historian Jörg Morré calls a “post-Socialist community of shared destiny.” It is not nostalgia for Soviet rule so much as a lingering sense that the East’s story, and the loyalties shaped by it, never fully merged with the West’s.