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The Russian V-Day Story (Or the History of World War II Not Often Heard in the West)

by Michael Jabara Carley, via Strategic Culture

Every May 9th the Russian Federation celebrates its most important national holiday, Victory Day, den’ pobedy. During the early hours of that day in 1945 Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, which had stormed Berlin, received the German unconditional surrender. The Great Patriotic War had gone on for 1418 days of unimaginable violence, brutality and destruction. From Stalingrad and the northern Caucasus and from the northwestern outskirts of Moscow to the western frontiers of the Soviet Union to Sevastopol in the south and Leningrad and the borders with Finland, in the north, the country had been laid waste. An estimated 17 million civilians, men, women and children, had perished, although no one will ever know the exact figure. Villages and towns were destroyed; families were wiped out without anyone to remember them or mourn their deaths.

DMITRI BALTERMANTS
Road of War, 1941
Most Soviet citizens lost family members during the war. No one was left unaffected.

Ten million or more Soviet soldiers died in the struggle to expel the monstrous Nazi invader and finally to occupy Berlin at the end of April 1945. Red Army dead were left unburied in a thousand places along the routes to the west or in unmarked mass graves, there having been no time for proper identification and burial. Most Soviet citizens lost family members during the war. No one was left unaffected.
The Great Patriotic War began at 3:30am on 22 June 1941, when the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas with 3.2 million German soldiers, organised in 150 divisions, supported by 3,350 tanks, 7,184 artillery pieces, 600,000 trucks, 2,000 warplanes. Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Spanish, Slovakian forces, amongst others, eventually joined the attack. The German high command reckoned that Operation Barbarossa would take only 4 to 6 weeks to finish off the Soviet Union. In the west, US and British military intelligence agreed. Besides, what force had ever beaten the Wehrmacht? Nazi Germany was the invincible colossus. Poland had been crushed in a few days. The Anglo-French attempt to defend Norway was a fiasco. When the Wehrmacht attacked in the west, Belgium hurried to quit the fight. France collapsed in a few weeks. The British army was driven out of Dunkirk, naked, without guns or Lorries. In the spring of 1941, Yugoslavia and Greece disappeared in a matter of weeks at little cost to German invaders.

Soviet soldier.jpg
The Red Army’s losses were unimaginable, two million soldiers lost in the first three and a half months of the war.

Wherever the Wehrmacht advanced in Europe, it was a walkover… until that day German soldiers stepped across Soviet frontiers. The Red Army was caught flatfooted, in halfway measures of mobilisation, because Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did not believe his own intelligence reports warning of danger, or want to provoke Hitlerite Germany. The result was a catastrophe. But unlike Poland and unlike France, the USSR did not quit the fight after the expected 4 to 6 weeks. The Red Army’s losses were unimaginable, two million soldiers lost in the first three and a half months of the war. The Baltic provinces were lost. Smolensk fell and then Kiev, in the worst defeat of the war. Leningrad was encircled. An old man asked some soldiers, “Where are you retreating from?” There were calamities everywhere too numerous to mention. But at places like the fortress of Brest and in hundreds of unnamed fields and woods, road junctions and villages and towns, Red Army units fought on often to the last soldier. They fought out of encirclements to rejoin their own lines or to disappear into the forests and swamps of Belorussia and the northwestern Ukraine to organise the first partisan units to attack the German rear. By the end of 1941, three million Soviet soldiers were lost (the largest number being POWs who died at German hands); 177 divisions were struck from the Soviet order of battle. Still, the Red Army fought on, even forcing back the Germans at Yelnya, east southeast of Smolensk, at the end of August. The Wehrmacht felt the bite of the battered but not beaten Red Army. German forces were taking 7,000 casualties a day, a new experience for them.

Carved messages by Soviet soldiers.jpg
At places like the fortress of Brest, Red Army units fought on often to the last soldier.

As the Wehrmacht advanced, Einsatzgruppen, SS death squads, followed, killing Jews, Gypsies, communists, Soviet POWs, or anyone who got in their way. Baltic and Ukrainian Nazi collaborators assisted in the mass murders. Soviet women and children were stripped naked and forced to queue, waiting for execution. When winter came freezing German soldiers shot villagers or forced them out of their homes, dressed in rags like beggars, robbing them of hearth, winter clothing and food.
In the west those who predicted a speedy Soviet collapse, the usual western Sovietophobes, looked stupid and had to eat their forecasts. Public opinion understood that Hitlerite Germany had walked into a quagmire, not another campaign in France. While the British everyman cheered on Soviet resistance, the British government did relatively little to help. Some Cabinet ministers were even reluctant to call the Soviet Union an ally. Churchill refused to let BBC play the Soviet national anthem, the Internationale, on Sunday evenings along with those of other allies.

Russian quagmire cartoon.jpg
Western public opinion understood that Hitlerite Germany had walked into a quagmire, not another campaign in France.

The Red Army still retreated, but kept fighting desperately. This was no ordinary war, but a struggle of unparalleled violence against a murderous invader for home, family, country, for life itself. In November the Red Army dropped a pamphlet on German lines, quoting Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist: “It’s impossible either to hold or conquer Russia” That was real bravado in the circumstances, but also true. Finally, in front of Moscow, in December 1941, the Red Army, under Zhukov’s command, threw back the spent forces of the Wehrmacht, in the south by as much as three hundred kilometres. The image of Nazi invincibility was shattered. Barbarossa was too ambitious, the blitzkrieg had failed, and the Wehrmacht suffered its first strategic defeat. In London Churchill agreed, grudgingly, to let BBC play the Soviet national anthem.

Nazis hit headlong into a tree cartoon
The image of Nazi invincibility was shattered.

In 1942 the Red Army continued to suffer defeats and heavy losses, as it fought on nearly alone. In November of that year at Stalingrad on the Volga, however, the Red Army launched a counteroffensive, which led to a remarkable victory and the retreat of the Wehrmacht back to its start lines in the spring of 1942… except for the German Sixth Army, caught in the Stalingrad kotel or cauldron. There, 22 German divisions, some of Hitler’s best, were destroyed. Stalingrad was the Verdun of the Second World War. “It’s hell,” a soldier said. “No… this is ten times worse than hell,” someone else corrected. At the end of the winter fighting in 1943, Axis losses were staggering: 100 German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian divisions were destroyed, or mauled. The president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, reckoned that the tide of battle had turned: Hitlerite Germany was doomed.

Women soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad
Women soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad.

It was February 1943. In that month there was not a single British, American, or Canadian division fighting in Europe against the Wehrmacht. Not one. It was sixteen months before the Normandy landings. The British and Americans were then fighting two or three German divisions in North Africa, a sideshow compared to the Soviet front. Western public opinion knew who was carrying the burden of the war against the Wehrmacht. In 1942, 80% of Axis divisions were arrayed against the Red Army. At the beginning of 1943 there were 207 German divisions on the Eastern Front. The Germans tried one last hurrah, one last offensive against the Kursk bulge in July 1943. That operation failed. The Red Army then launched a counteroffensive across the Ukraine which led to liberation of Kiev in November. Further north, Smolensk had been freed the month before.
The spirit of the Soviet people and their Red Army was formidable. War correspondant Vasilii Semenovich Grossman captured its essence in his personal journals. “Night, Snowstorm,” he wrote in early 1942, “Vehicles, Artillery. They are moving in silence. Suddenly a hoarse voice is heard. ‘Hey, which is the road to Berlin?’ A roar of laughter.”

American attitude to Soviet war effort cartoon
Western public opinion knew who was carrying the burden of the war against the Wehrmacht

Soldiers were not always brave. Sometimes they fled. “A battalion commissar armed with two revolvers began shouting, ‘Where are you running you sons of whores, where? Go forward, for our Motherland, for Jesus Christ, motherfuckers! For Stalin, you whores!’…” They went back to their positions. Those fellows were lucky; the commissar could have shot them all. Sometimes he did. A soldier volunteered to execute a deserter. “Did you feel any pity for him?” Grossman asked. “How can one speak of pity,” the soldier replied. At Stalingrad seven Uzbeks were found guilty of self-inflicted wounds. They were all shot. Grossman read a letter found in the pocket of a dead Soviet soldier. “I miss you very much. Please come and visit… I am writing this, and tears are pouring. Daddy, please come home and visit.”
Women fought along side the men as snipers, gunners, tankists, pilots, nurses partisans. They also kept the home front going. “Villages have become the kingdom of women,” wrote Grossman, “They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables… Women are carrying on their shoulders the great burden of work. They dominate… send bread, aircraft, weapons and ammunition to the front.” When the war was being fought on the Volga, they did not reproach their men for having given up so much ground. “Women look and say nothing,” wrote Grossman, “… not a bitter word.” But in the villages near the front, sometimes they did.

Nazi House of Cards cartoon
It was just a matter of time before the destruction of Nazi Germany

In the meantime, the western allies attacked Italy. Stalin had long demanded a second front in France, which Churchill resisted. He wanted to attack the Axis “soft underbelly”, not to help the Red Army, but to hinder its advance into the Balkans. The idea was to advance quickly north up the Italian boot, then wheel eastward into the Balkans to keep out the Red Army. The way to Berlin however was north northeast. Churchill’s plan was a failure; the western allies did not get to Rome until June 1944. There were approximately 20 German divisions in Italy fighting against larger allied forces. In the East, there were still more than two hundred Axis divisions, or ten times those in Italy. On 6 June 1944 when Operation Overlord began in Normandy, the Red Army stood on Polish and Romanian frontiers. A fortnight after the Normandy landings, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, a huge offensive which stove in the centre of the German eastern front and led to an advance of 500 kilometres to the west, while the western allies were still held up on the Normandy Cotentin peninsula. The Red Army had become an unstoppable juggernaut. It was just a matter of time before the destruction of Nazi Germany. When the war was over in May 1945, the Red Army had accounted for 80% of the losses of the Wehrmacht, and that percentage would have been far higher before the Normandy invasion. “Those who never experienced all the bitterness of the summer of 1941,” wrote Vasily Grossman, “will never be able fully to appreciate the joy of our victory.” There were many war hymns sung by the troops and the people to keep up morale. Sviashchennaia voina, “Sacred War” was one of the most popular. Russians still stand when they hear it.
Historians often debate about when the decisive turn of battle came in the European theatre. Some propose 22 June 1941, the day that the Wehrmacht crossed Soviet frontiers. Others point to the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, or Kursk. During the war western public opinion seemed more supportive of the Red Army than some western leaders, Winston Churchill, for example. Roosevelt was better, a more pragmatic political leader, who easily recognised the preponderant Soviet role in the war against Nazi Germany. The Red Army, he said to one doubtful general in 1942, was killing more German soldiers and smashing more German tanks than all the other allies put together. Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was the linchpin of the great coalition against Nazi Germany. I call FDR the godfather of the “grand alliance”. Nevertheless, in the shadows lurked the usual haters of the Soviet Union, who were only biding their time before emerging again. The greater the certainty of victory over Nazi Germany, the more vocal and strident became the naysayers of the grand alliance.
Americans can be touchy about the memory of the Red Army playing the lead role in the destruction of the Wehrmacht. “What about Lend-Lease,” they say, “without our supplies, the Soviet Union could not have beaten the Germans.” In fact, most Lend-Lease supplies did not arrive in the USSR until after Stalingrad. Red Army soldiers facetiously called the Lend-Lease food tins the “second front” since the real one was late in coming. In 1942 Soviet industry was already out-producing Nazi Germany in major categories of armaments. Was the T-34 an American, or a Soviet tank? A polite Stalin always remembered to thank the US government for the jeeps and Studebaker trucks. They increased Red Army mobility. You contributed the aluminum, Russians famously replied, we contributed the blood… the rivers of blood.

Soviet soldier 2
The public in Europe and the United States knew very well who had carried the load against the Wehrmacht.

No sooner was the war over than Britain and the United States started to think about another war, this time against the Soviet Union. In May 1945 the British high command produced Operation “Unthinkable”, a top secret plan for an offensive, reinforced by German POWs, against the Red Army. What bastards, what ingrates. In September 1945, the Americans contemplated use of 204 atomic bombs to destroy the Soviet Union. The godfather, President Roosevelt, had died in April, and within weeks American Sovietophobes were reversing his policy. The grand alliance was only a truce in a Cold War which had begun after the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917, and which resumed in 1945.
In that year the US and British governments still had to contend with public opinion. The everyman in Europe and the United States knew very well who had carried the load against the Wehrmacht. You could not resume the old policy of hatred against the Soviet Union just like that without blotting out the memory of the Red Army’s role in thecommon victory over Hitlerite Germany. So memories of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression in August 1939 were brought out of the closet, although the memories of prior Anglo-French opposition to Soviet proposals for collective security against Nazi Germany and especially of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia were omitted from the new western narrative. Like thieves in the night, Britain and the United States burgled the true account of the destruction of Nazi Germany.
Already in December 1939, the British planned to publish a white paper blaming Moscow for the failure of Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance negotiations during the previous spring and summer. The French objected because the white paper was more likely to persuade public opinion that the Soviet side had been serious about resistance to Nazi Germany while the British and French were not. The white paper was shelved. In 1948 the US State Department issued a collection of documents attributing the blame for World War II to Hitler and Stalin. Moscow fired back with its own publication demonstrating western affinities with Nazism. The fight was on in the west to remember the Soviet Union for the non-aggression pact and to forget the Red Army’s preponderant role in smashing the Wehrmacht.

Hitler Stalin cartoon
By the end of the war, memories of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression in August 1939 were brought out of the closet.

How many of you have not seen some Hollywood film in which the Normandy landings are the great turning point of the war? “What if the landings had failed,” one often hears? “Oh…, nothing much,” is the appropriate reply. The war would have gone on longer, and the Red Army would have planted its flags on the Normandy beaches coming from the east. Then there are the movies about the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, the “decisive” factor in winning the war. In Hollywood films about World War II, the Red Army is invisible. It is as if the Americans (and British) were claiming laurels they didn’t earn.
I like to ask students in my university course on the Second World War, who has heard of operation Overlord? Everyone raises a hand. Then I ask who has heard of Operation Bagration? Hardly anyone raises a hand. I ask facetiously who “won” the war against Nazi Germany and the answer is “America” of course. Only a few students—normally those who have had other courses with me—will answer the Soviet Union.
The truth is uphill work in a western world where “fake news” is the norm. The OSCE and European Parliament put the blame for World War II on the Soviet Union, read Russia and President Vladimir Putin, as the subliminal message. Hitler is almost forgotten in this tohu-bohu of evidence-free accusations. Behind the bogus historical narrative are the Baltic states, Poland, and the Ukraine, spewing out hatred of Russia. The Baltics and the Ukraine now remember Nazi collaborators as national heroes and celebrate their deeds. In Poland, for some people, this is hard to swallow; they remember the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who murdered tens of thousands of Poles in Volhynia. Unfortunately, such memories have not stopped Polish hooligans from vandalising monuments to Red Army war dead or desecrating Soviet war cemeteries. Polish “nationalists” cannot bear the memory of the Red Army freeing Poland from the Nazi invader.

Soviet veterans
The veterans, fewer each year, come out wearing uniforms that often do not fit quite right or threadbare jackets covered with war medals and orders.

In Russia, however, the west’s mendacious propaganda has no effect. The Soviet Union produced its own films, and the Russian Federation also, about World War II, most recently about the defence of the Brest fortress and of Sevastopol, and the battle of Stalingrad. On 9 May every year Russians remember the millions of soldiers who fought and died, and the millions of civilians who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazi invader. The veterans, fewer each year, come out wearing uniforms that often do not fit quite right or threadbare jackets covered with war medals and orders. “Treat them with tact and respect,” Zhukov wrote in his memoirs: “It is a small price after what they did for you in 1941-1945.” How did you manage, I wondered to myself observing them on Victory Day some years go, how did you cope, living constantly with death and so much sorrow and hardship?

Immortal Regiment March in MoscowAn Immortal Regiment march in Moscow

Now, each year on Victory Day the “immortal regiment”, the bessmertnyi polk, marches; Russians in cities and towns across the country and abroad, march together carrying large photographs of family members, men and women, who fought in the war. “We remember,” they want to say: “and we will never forget you.”
 

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Patrick Armstrong
Patrick Armstrong
Oct 25, 2021 12:14 AM

Don’t go too far the other way and underestimate the difficulty of D Day. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/06/26/d-day-more-difficult-than-you-think/

alaffcreator
alaffcreator
May 11, 2018 2:22 PM

Thanks to Michael Jabara Carley for this article (and thanks to Vaska for posting it here).
Thanks for remembering the truth.

tomiejones
tomiejones
May 11, 2018 12:40 PM

Reblogged this on circusbuoy.

falcemartello
falcemartello
May 11, 2018 3:08 AM

Just like more false tails of history might as well add the HOLO HOAX
But hell Uncle sam and Rabbinnic any one they know hasbra when they tell it.
Another fallacy with WW2 . The Chinese lost over 30 miilion during the Japanese occupation untill its full liberation from Mao and Co but hell little details like that tend to allude most western academicians .

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 11, 2018 11:53 AM
Reply to  falcemartello

The Holocaust lie is one of the biggest deceptions in history, along with 9/11.
How odd that both lies centre on the same people group.

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 5:02 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

There was a holocaust. Its victims were largely the poor, of all races, religions and nationalities, who were blameless, but for having been born at the wrong time in the wrong place. I doubt there were homicidal gas-chambers outside of experiments during the early thirties euthaniasia of the hospital populations of the severly mentally and physically handicapped, lethal injection was far more common, practical if not any the less inhumane, the United States had been doing this since the early 1900s. This aspect was allied propaganda which by means of blowback became a self-perpetuating myth, which the allies should have ‘fessed up to immediately after the war, but there was an over-arching agenda at play, stealing Palestine. The figure of six-million of one racial-religious group is preposterous and unsustainable, even adding in those killed in combat in arms for Russia, by allied bombing of cities, or the ‘Commisar’ order, and behind the lines actions of the Einsatzgruppen, estimate of their efficiency probably exaggerated by a factor of 10. Logistically and practically impossible, they’d still be cremating the bodies today if it were so. Concentration camp populations in Poland were probably 60% or more non-Jewish Poles. Hypothermia, poor nutrition, typhoid, dysentery, fatigue, and over-work were killers, death of the sprit, the will to on living in those condtions, often preceded mortal death, but the single-most lethal factor was typhus, spread by lice which was endemic in the region and amongst the populations, and within the camps. It was particularly hard on the old, the sick and the constitutionally weak, and those by habit or health more suited to sedentary occupations, but even perfectly healthy, clean willing workers would have succumbed in those conditions particularly those that existed both in the camps and amongst general population as the supply situation worsened in the final months of the war. No-one category of victims owns the holocaust exclusively it was a time of human suffering unequalled in history. The blame game serves no useful purpose, nor did the retribution every bit as horrific that followed, all of humanity was grieving.

Redbaron07
Redbaron07
Mar 2, 2020 1:30 PM
Reply to  Tony M

The Holocaust was a big business for the Jewish Israelis after the war….it’s a cash cow that still keeps on giving!

Anandamide
Anandamide
May 11, 2018 12:30 AM

Thanks
That wasn’t taught in history at my school, that’s for sure…

Willem
Willem
May 10, 2018 6:42 PM

“I ask facetiously who “won” the war against Nazi Germany and the answer is “America” of course.”
Can’t find the exact quote from, I think, Martha Gellhorn who said something similar, yet quite different:
WWII was a war between Germany and the allied forces, and the Facists won.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 10, 2018 11:24 PM
Reply to  Willem

The USA began ‘reaching out’ to the Nazis from 1943, when their defeat was certain, to take over their intelligence networks in eastern Europe, support Ukronazi guerillas (until 1952)inside the Soviet, facilitate the flight of tens of thousands of fascists to the West (in league with other Western ‘democracies’ and the Vatican), where they were often employed in Rightwing terror operations in the Third World, and grab the cream of Nazi technology in operations like ‘Paperclip’. The emigre’ fascist infestations were made welcome in Canada, the UK, the USA, Australia etc, until the opportunity for them to return arose with the Gorbachev catastrophe, and now the fascists are triumphant, re-installed in power in Kiev thanks to Thanatopolis DC, and murdering ‘Moskali Coloradoes (beetles)’ with the old enthusiasm.

Paul X
Paul X
May 10, 2018 11:59 PM

Enter Allen Dulles I think? He apparently regarded 1942 as the time when ‘they’ realised America would have to take up the Nazi baton against Russia. He dropped anti Semetism for obvious reasons but otherwise carried on the assault on the Soviet Union. As head of the Secret Service in Switerzland he cut deals with top Nazis and employed many old SS Intelligence Agents. As Director of the CIA for so many years he adopted Nazi solutions, such as assassinations of foreign opponents, coup d’etats and a strangle hold over America that allowed him to get away with internal assassinations in the 1960’s. They are still in control of course!

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 11, 2018 9:44 PM
Reply to  Paul X

Yes, Allen Dulles, organised the JFK hit (after Kennedy promised to smash the CIA) then served on the Warren Commission!! Bertrand Russell saw the fraudulence of the lone gun-man laugh right away, so set up his own tribunal, with members like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Michael Foot, Compton Mackenzie, J. B. Priestley etc . His ‘Sixteen Questions on the Assassination’ from September 1964, is quite a read.

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 10, 2018 2:58 PM

The truth of course is very different.
Only with the advent of the internet can we discover who did what.
There is much dishonesty held as truth regarding WW2 as the victors write the history books and they neve paint themselves as the offenders.
For instance it is clear to us now that Stalin had been amasing a huge military force that he was preparing to use to atttack Germany only Hitler learned of it and launched barbarossa, a classic pre emptive strike.
The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II
Viktor Suvorov
Ironically Hitler saved Europe from the misery of Bolshevism.

FS
FS
May 10, 2018 5:24 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

“Ironically Hitler saved Europe from the misery of Bolshevism.”
The greater irony is that a simple piece of stretchy rubber could so easily have saved both Europe and these comment boards from the misery of you.

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 10, 2018 7:16 PM
Reply to  FS

Are you upset because you are a fan of Bolshevism or is there some other reason?
Do you think it would have been nice if Comrade Stalin had been able to conquer all of Europe?

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 8:20 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

I’m afraid whataboutery is unlikely to get us anywhere with this.

bevin
bevin
May 11, 2018 12:36 AM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

There is no evidence that Stalin ever wanted to invade Europe. (Even less that the Red Army had any idea of doing so.)
That was a a lie employed to justify the Cold War in which millions were killed to prevent something which was never a possibility.
Perpetuating these Cold war lies serves no purpose except top obfuscate reality and, of course, to trot out Goebbels’Greatest hits.

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 11, 2018 11:57 AM
Reply to  bevin

Of course there is no evidence to support the claim that Stalin was preparing to invade Europe.
All you need to do is to refuse to look at the evidence and then you will be right.

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 2:35 PM
Reply to  FS

Stalin who I’ll admit was not his own man, grasped this dimly in 1938, when he began to increase actual loyal Slav representation in the military and government and more fully in 1948, which ended the honeymoon with the west. He could have foregone the full Bagration and made a dash for the channel coast, to which there would have been little opposition, before d-day and thus been in possession of all of all Europe, in days if not weeks, if he so desired, leaving just the festering sore of a cut-off isolated Germany in the rear with little of raw material or manpower resources left to resist. The course of the war would have changed entirely, D-Day may still have launched against a Soviet occupied channel coast, which contingency cannot have been unimaginable.
It is likely as it certainly was the case in first world war that desire of ‘the west’ was for Germany and Russia to fight each other out to the death, to extinction to which end prolonging the war was their game. The flawed ruthless bombing of working-class housing, the greatest war-crime of the conflict without exception, was ineffectual in much hampering German military/munitions output, infact it actually rose, the whole concept was simply flawed, it was calculated industrial scale mass-murder, old-testament revenge. Large critical works such as the Ford works in Cologne, Opel factories too, pouring out trucks and every other weapon of war, anything in which there was American investment, so much of German industry remained studiously unscathed. They never at any time targeted the electricity generation and distribution network, were told time and time again by well informed sources that doing so would cripple German industry in a heartbeat, and came to the same conclusion after the war was over. Hence also the suicidal Arctic convoys to prop up the Soviets. They played both sides against each other.
The British and American, the western-European governments, establishments and deep-states did cosy up to the murderous Soviet government completely from the 1917 revolution right up until around 1938, Churchill was probably a lone voice exception denouncing them consistently throughout this time, until certain bankers and media moguls bailed him out of total bankruptcy, when he switched completely and just as vociferously to fulminating loudly against Germany instead thereafter.
Between the revolution and 1937-38, under Lenin, then Stalin, Russia was like it was under Yeltsin open and ripe for exploitation and economic rape by the west, in the latter years of this period German soft-power and influence, investment and near-obsolete technical assistance was considerable, in ultimately unconstructive arms production capability mainly. Already since the revolution the Soviet regime had already killed possibly ten million native Slavs in purges, concentration-camp gulags, massacres of those arbitrarily labelled bourgeouis or who grew understandably hostile to the regime, and in engineered famines, in Ukraine alone probably four-million were starved to extinction. Both Germany and still just newly-reborn after centuries of non-existence, but already over-reachingly militarily expansionist French-puppet Poland, had competing imperialist intentions towards Ukraine and ‘the east’ generally which powers were certain to collide with each other in their designs.
When Stalin himself seen where his interests actually lay, in majority rule or at least in redistribution of the a little of the perks to a new different more representative and more nationalistic elite, he cherry picked the nebulous writings of Marx and the French revolutionary, quite admirable notion of equality, as the regime until then had also done, of which selective interpretation was the key, rather like the big magic holy books of the world’s longer established seedy, sick cults: religion, and finally got round to turning on the upper hierarchy, particularly the now universally despised security and terror apparatus which had run amok for the past two decades.
From 1938, the purely Russian and Slavic majority began for the first time to take an active and more proportionately almost a fair role in the state and its higher offices, which had previously been under the heel and total domination of a minority group making up less than two percent of the population bent on exacting a genocidal revenge on the mass of the population for mostly imagined slights having occurred many generations before, which quickly soured the early revolutionary optimism of the masses of the people and turned their charmed genuine dreams of a socialist egalitarian utopia to tears and to ashes. Though this minority remained disproportionately represented, possessing still vast unwarranted power, and relatively privileged still in the middling echelons of the state. War intervened and afterwards the Soviet Union stood a superpower colossus, having taken everything the western proxy Nazi-Germany could throw at it.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 6:45 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

And if only for the matter of facts, you would have a point.
Stalin did, of course, amass a sufficient force to attack Germany – and he used it in 1945 for the final Red Army assault on Berlin.
Or do you seriously suggest that Stalin had possessed the military resources to attack Germany before 1945 – but held off on the grounds of ‘sportsmanship’, or to make it a more interesting struggle for the Germans?
[[ the misery of Bolshevism ]]
Whereas of course Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau and Sobibor were idealistic living conditions under your Third Reich?

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 10, 2018 7:14 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

It wasn’t my third Reich, neither do I advocate for Hiltlerian forms of socialism.
It is a fact of history that Stalin had built up and was amassing a huge military force in preparation to attack Germany. But he caught Stalin with his pants down, the comrade wasn’t ready yet.
Why do you think the Germans captured millions of Soviet soldiers in the first few days of the war? What were those soldiers doing there, were they on their holidays?
Why do you think the Germans captured thousands upon thousands of tank, artillery pieces and all the other tools of war in the first few days of the invasion, why had Comrade Stalin put them there?

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 8:04 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

Then provide us with a link to this ‘fact of history’, please. Mere mortals fail to understand why Stalin would have kept such a resource in hiding, while the USSR was being invaded by the Wehrmacht.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 11:23 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

And I somehow knew no link to this ‘fact of history’ would ever be posted….

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 11, 2018 12:02 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

The best book I have seen on the topic is –
The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II
Viktor Suvorov
You can look up Suvorov on youtube but the book is vastly superior to the online presentations that I have seen.
I know you won’t look, your ideolgical conditioning won’t allow your position to be challenged.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 11, 2018 12:10 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

What would be the point of wasting my time on piffle? Another American who’s never been to Russia, can’t speak Russian, knows nothing about Russia – but mysteriously ‘knows better’ than those who live in Russia.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 11, 2018 12:27 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

You mistook me for someone who cares a damn what an American thinks.

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 11, 2018 12:33 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

How strange you give all the appearence of caring.
You are someone that has repeatedly asked me questions, offered challenges and then refused to look at the evidence I offered to those challenges.
Looks to me like your position can’t stand any scrutiny hence your refusal to scrutinise it.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 11, 2018 1:02 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

So, Stalin was amassing arms to attack Germany? The Holocaust was all a big lie?
Strange how both your obsessions focus on apologising for the Nazis. isn’t it? You’ll soon be telling us Bandera was a saint, too, won’t you, John Wayne?
Like a typical ignorant American, you know NOTHING about Russia, and prefer to believe a pile of fascist lies.

bevin
bevin
May 11, 2018 12:41 AM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

“…Why do you think the Germans captured millions of Soviet soldiers in the first few days of the war? What were those soldiers doing there, were they on their holidays?
“Why do you think the Germans captured thousands upon thousands of tank, artillery pieces and all the other tools of war in the first few days of the invasion, why had Comrade Stalin put them there?”
I take it that this is your evidence ; that these are your historical facts. Incidentally Naziism is not a form of socialism as any German capitalist living in the Third Reich could have told you: it began with the imprisonment of every known socialist in the country, most of whom later died in a Holocaust in which millions of Soviet POWs also died.

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 11, 2018 12:06 PM
Reply to  bevin

Well the Nazi Germans were getting rid of the Bolsheviks that wanted to intall their bloodthirsty regime in Germany.
And the ranks of Bolsheviks were packed with Jews.
That much is accurte, and who can blame them, the Bolsheviks were some of the most evil people this world has ever suffered.

Admin
Admin
May 11, 2018 12:07 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

That is certainly a POV Churchill and other elites would have shared. You apparently celebrate the fact the Nazis killed Jews and Slavs (please don’t pretend they were only killed for being Bolsheviks). That is depraved. If you continue to promulgate race-hate this site isn’t for you.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 11, 2018 9:16 AM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

One of my least favourite types of Rightist is that which claims the Nazis were ‘socialists’.

Mr.Tea
Mr.Tea
May 11, 2018 12:14 PM

Of course Nazism was socialist in nature.
They didn’t tolerate political decent.
They didn’t tolerate free speech.
They didn’t allow free markets to operate.
They had large statist governemt that managed the economy, creating work programmes and other state directed enterprises.
The main differences between the Nazis and the USSR were that the Nazis allowed private ownership of domestic property and businesses but that ownership was tolerated only as long as the needs of the state were served first.

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 3:47 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

You are mistaking totalitarianism exemplified by Nazi Germany, and by Communist Russia for Socialism. The US-dominated sphere has now gone totalitarian and is trying to expand this to a global scale, picking off resistance one-by-one, which makes Lenin, Stalin and Hitler look like rank amateurs.
The common element in each of these is Zionism, or reaction to it, which precipitated all of the above rogue forms and evil manifestations of government. A virulent form of racial-quasi-religious supremacism exercised through oligopolistic monopoly control of the world’s financial system, and ultimate escape from justice for its criminal-elite to a nuclear-armed rogue-state boltholes holding the whole world to ransom and in slavish servitude.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 11, 2018 9:53 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

‘Free Markets’??!! Add in the rank, and real, Judeophobia and the other infelicities, and you’re a pretty vile Rightwinger. Are you an anthropogenic climate destabilisation denier, too? And what do you think of the Chinese? Love Ukraine, do you?

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 3:22 PM

The ‘socialist’ component was really just one man, the brother of Gregor Strasser, Otto Strasser, who played a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the Nazis, before entering lifelong enforced exile in Canada.

vierotchka
vierotchka
May 11, 2018 5:30 PM

Ditto.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 10, 2018 11:25 PM
Reply to  Mr.Tea

Sieg Heil, baby!

vierotchka
vierotchka
May 10, 2018 1:32 PM

Remembrance. Rewriting history: Red Army’s role in liberating Europe censored in the West
Published on 8 May 2018
When the Red Army approached Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, the survivors met their liberators with shouts of “the Russians have come.” The first words of Major Anatoly Shapiro, who was in command of the unit that entered the death camp, were: “The Red Army came to set you free.”
Surprisingly, nowadays, on a tour of the notorious extermination camp, you would never hear Polish guides mention that Russians liberated Auschwitz. Instead, you would be told that World War II was started by Stalin, jointly with Hitler.
Today, the whole story of how the Red Army saved Europe from the Nazis is being wiped from Western history books, with Russian soldiers increasingly being portrayed as oppressors and occupiers rather than saviours. Poland’s lower house of parliament even approved a bill to demolish Soviet-era statues, including monuments to Red Army soldiers. The law was proposed by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, whose professor has said: “I can say with confidence that here the Red Army is seen as invaders that occupied our lands.”
However, the people in the middle of the conflict were perfectly aware of the sacrifices the Red Army made to beat the Nazis. During August 1942, President Roosevelt wrote to Stalin “The United States understands that the Soviet Union is bearing the brunt of the war.”
Today’s generation is widely under the impression it was the US that won World War II, as that’s what their textbooks generally tell them. Very few Westerners know that, while United States military deaths in the European theatre amounted to some 300,000, the Soviet Union suffered well over 25 times that number. Moreover, the Red Army fighting in the east killed more than four times as many German soldiers as the US and its allies did on the Western Front. In fact, the famous D-Day invasion, which opened the second front in Europe, was only launched in June of 1944, after it was already clear the Red Army could achieve complete victory over the Nazis on its own.
However, not everyone has forgotten the heroism of the Red Army soldiers that stopped Hitler’s war machine in Stalingrad and then pushed it back to Berlin. Some Europeans and members of memorial societies still actively document and maintain the graves of Soviet soldiers and preserve monuments to them. Often, they are elderly survivors of the war or descendants of those who were shown kindness by the liberating Soviet soldiers. One such activist is Polish Army Reserve Colonel Tadeusz Kowalczyk, who said “in fifty years Polish kids will think that it wasn’t the Red Army that liberated Poland… but the American one. But we won’t allow it!”

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 6:56 PM
Reply to  vierotchka

Thank you for this, VIerotchka.comment image
It’s a pity such a reminder is even necessary. But as we see from this map (source: Wikipedia) of the fronts as they were in April 1945. the American forces were still pitifully far from Berlin at the time when the last assault began. One could quite fairly suggest that the Americans left the Red Army to do the heavy fighting for Berlin – while they themselves dallied in the suburbs of Strasbourg. No amount of Clint Eastwood & Telly Savalas movies can alter this historical truth – Berlin was taken unaided, by the Red Army.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 7:34 PM
Reply to  vierotchka

[[ One such activist is Polish Army Reserve Colonel Tadeusz Kowalczyk, who said “in fifty years Polish kids will think that it wasn’t the Red Army that liberated Poland… but the American one. But we won’t allow it! ]]
I was recently on vacation in Poland, and on a spare day in Warsaw, we went to the Stare Miasto square for coffee and cakes (it was a national holiday, everything else was closed). I was astonished to see huge triangular metal poster-hoardings along the whole length of the square, reading (in Polish) “Thank you, USA, for delivering us from fascism!”. Each hoarding had photographs and biographical details of various American politicians of the 1930s and 40s, who were alleged to have played a part in this process! :-((

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 10, 2018 11:29 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

Poland is returning to its inter-war state of degenerate clerico-fascism. Pity, really. At least they hate their fascist neighbours in Banderastan, too. Perhaps as much as they hate Russians.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 11:53 PM

Poles will hate anyone Uncle Sam tells them to. It’s how they came to host American torture prison sites.

Paul X
Paul X
May 10, 2018 10:40 AM

Alongside Grossman Alexander Werth’s ‘Russia at War’ gives a fascinating commentary from the front line. Born in Leningrad but brought up in the UK he wrote for the Observer and was partly responsible for the ready acceptance of Russia as an ally. As well as reporting on the trials of ordinary soldiers and citizens he met the Leaders and Generals and is particularly adept at spotting political policy by analysing media reports. As all media was controlled across the World this became a useful way of determining what was going on – as it still is of course, the media having remained under government’s control.

kevin morris
kevin morris
May 10, 2018 10:21 AM

I am a Russophile but the Soviet Union’s virtual military collapse following Germany and its allies’ launching of Barbarossa wasn’t simply because Stalin refused to believe that Germany would invade. In the Stalinist purges of the mid to late 1930s, the Red Army command structure had been all but destroyed. It is certainly arguable that had Stalin not purged almost all of his military top brass, losses might well have been much lower that the over 27 million Soviets who died as a consequence of German aggression.
Of course, none of the above in any way minimises the achievements of the Red Army, supported by the herculean efforts of the Russian people, particularly following the German 6th Army’s capitulation at Stalingrad, and the German defeat at Kursk. Russian people will never forget their forebears’ sacrifices. For the first time though they are able to learn not only of those great sacrifices and achievements, but also of the follies of the Soviet system that saw huge tracts from the war account of Marshall Zhukov’s cut by censors.

Interested Observer
Interested Observer
May 10, 2018 11:28 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

Chapter 2 of Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis …… states that Hitler had plans to exterminate the majority of Slav people once he had finished with the Jews. Stalin like Chamberlain probably thought the peace agreement signed would hold! Having said that- virtually no German woman in Berlin escaped being raped when Berlin was ‘liberated’ by the Russians- war is a terrible thing.

Pembury12
Pembury12
May 10, 2018 11:42 AM

“Virtually no women in Berlin escaped rape” is a gross exaggeration as you must know and a slur on the Red Army. It has long been a propaganda narrative that prefers to contemplate Berlin 1945 rather than unprecendated mass murder by the Nazis in Russia in the previous 4 years. It was one of the first shots in the Cold War.

vexarb
vexarb
May 10, 2018 12:36 PM
Reply to  Pembury12

@Pembury: “first shots in the Cold War”. As a schoolboy I read my first such story in a postWar Readers Digest. Then 20-30 years later, on the BBC, the one below.

Interested Observer
Interested Observer
May 10, 2018 2:31 PM
Reply to  Pembury12

‘The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour. “Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them,” he noted. “One girl said to me in tears: ‘He was an old man, older than my father’.”
The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin’s associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. “On the night of 24 February,” General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, “a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women’s dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them.”
Also:
‘Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,” she recounted later. “It was an army of rapists.”
Not so glorious eh? My point being that war is a bad thing to be avoided at all costs.

Interested Observer
Interested Observer
May 10, 2018 2:39 PM

‘If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. ‘

vexarb
vexarb
May 10, 2018 12:28 PM

@Interested. FYI not only were they raped but even worse, one German woman said, “he was a Mongol”.

Peter
Peter
May 10, 2018 2:01 PM

During Operation Barbarossa, the German army pillaged, burnt, bombed and massacred its way across the western Soviet Union. Thousands of villages were razed to the ground and their inhabitants – mostly women, children and old people – murdered. Behind the lines, the notorious Einsatzgruppen butchered hundreds of thousands of Jews, under the protection of the same German army.
In German POW camps, over a million Soviet prisoners were starved to death, died of disease or were murdered in ‘experiments’ to develop new ways of massacring large numbers of people when the Einsatzgruppen started running out of puff.
The men who committed all these crimes were supported by their families back home, to whom they sent letters and even photos proudly describing and showing their atrocities.
What did German women expect from the Red Army when they finally conquered the barbarity they had so enthusiastically supported – flowers?

Peter
Peter
May 10, 2018 2:08 PM
Reply to  Peter

The last sentence is probably clearer as follows:
What did German women expect from the Red Army when it finally conquered the barbarity these women had so enthusiastically supported – flowers?

Interested Observer
Interested Observer
May 10, 2018 2:48 PM
Reply to  Peter

I don’t think the majority of German women ‘enthusiastically supported’ the barbarity – they probably didn’t have much choice. The Red Army sounded out of control at that point and there can be no justification for crimes against humanity:
‘In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.’

vexarb
vexarb
May 10, 2018 4:51 PM

Some pity is highly selective.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right is a copout”.
But you are right: the majority of us sheeple do not enthusiastically support the barbarity of the wolves who lead us. Of course we bleat piteously when we find they have led us to the slaughter, but God alone knows whether we had no choice.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 11, 2018 9:24 AM

This sort of crap propaganda is why the median estimate, made by US ‘college’ students in one survey of Soviet casualties in WW2, was 100,000 not the actual 25-30 million.

Constantine
Constantine
May 14, 2018 12:07 AM

These are the results of taking an incorrigible Russophobe and anti-Communist like Beevor seriously. A cretin who, as a German historian openly stated, used the then German rational to explain Soviet heroism in Stalingrad. That, of course, without counting numerous other assertions of his that have been debunked.
That is not to say that rapes didn’t take place. After the ordeal of a genocidal war unleashed against them on the basis of their supposed racial inferiority per Nazi claims, the Soviets would obviously exact vengeance upon their enemies and raping the self-described racially superior enemy’s womenfolk is a form of this.
The issue with Beevor and his ilk isn’t just their exaggerations, but their implication that essentially it wasn’t a form of revenge by brutalized Soviets, but an element of their behavior and culture, similar to the ”eastern atavism” explanation for their ferocious defense in battles like Stalingrad. In short, this a racist approach to put it mildly, by the Russophobes who promote this narrative and you, apparently, go along with it.

kevin morris
kevin morris
May 10, 2018 6:26 PM
Reply to  Peter

But nor should we forget that the populations of the Baltic states rose in rebellion against Soviet rule as Barbarossa was launched, and many there and in Ukraine welcomed the Nazis as liberators. Many in the Ukraine and in Lithuania collaborated with the Nazis’ racial policies and worked with SS Einsatzgruppen either as gendamerie rounding up Jews or as recruits to the SS.

bevin
bevin
May 11, 2018 12:54 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

This is wrong. The Baltic states were ‘freed’ in 1918.
After the end of the Civil War/Foreign intervention the USSR, guided by Lenin, a lifelong opponent of Great Russian chauvinism and imperial tendencies in Russian culture called off the robust attempts of Estonian etc Bolsheviks bring them into the Soviet Union.

Kevin morris
Kevin morris
May 11, 2018 9:07 AM
Reply to  bevin

Bevin- check your history again. Stalin had taken the Baltic states under Soviet control in 1940 and had fought the Russo Finnish War and seized Finnish territories around the Gulf of Finland. In fact it was the deplorably poor performance of the Red Army fighting against much smaller and lesser equipped Finnish forces that led Hitler to believe that Barbarossa would be a pushover.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 11, 2018 9:31 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

The Baltic fascists rose up as their Nazi friends invaded. Then they exceeded even the Nazis in their butchery of Jews, communists, Roma etc. Then they escaped to bolt-holes in the West, where they celebrated their wartime ‘exploits’ for 40 years, much admired by Western Rightists. Then they returned to the Baltic states, still true-blue fascists, whereupon they proceeded to treat the large non-Balt populations in their countries as second-class, and, in Lithuania, actually prosecuted an elderly Jewish woman for murder, for killing Nazis and Lithuanian fascists as a communist partisan during WW2.

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 4:09 PM

True, after butchering their own jewish population the Balts turned heartily to butchering those the Nazis sent them. Soon though the Nazis would relieve them of the task, after relieving the victims of their goods and baggage.

Constantine
Constantine
May 14, 2018 12:10 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

You refer to Galicia, modern west Ukraine. The Soviet Ukrainians didn’t welcome the Nazis except with resistance, especially since the Germans considered them in any case Russian untermenschen led by evil Jews and treated them according to their racist rationalization.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 6:57 PM

A cheap jibe which cannot be supported with facts.

vexarb
vexarb
May 10, 2018 11:37 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

@kevin. It is not for us Angloes to criticise Stalin until our academia have acknowledged the infamous part Great Britain played in giving support to Fascism in Europe — financial, political and military — because Fascism “State power + Capitalist power” was “our bulwark against communism”. Re Stalin’s alleged failings you might be able to find a tape record of Hitler whining that he could not have been expected to foresee — nobody could have foreseen — that any one country — let alone backward, barbarous Russia — could possibly have produced so many tanks!
That tape is on the White Russian website, Vineyard of the Saker. They and other non-communist truthers will sort out the fact from the fiction, in this pivotal event of world history.

kevin morris
kevin morris
May 10, 2018 7:23 PM
Reply to  vexarb

Vexarb- I’m sorry but I don’t buy your view. My position is that I have a great regard fort he Russian people, both during WW2 but also since. I recognise the strengths of the Soviet system in mobilising industry and the people during WW2 but I also recognise the system’s weaknesses. It was Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Soviet war leader, who acknowledged Stalin’s failings and it is simply true that Stalin’s purges left the Soviet Union ill prepared for war. The great majority of military top brass was killed during the great purges, and this included Mikhail Tukhachevsky, regarded by many as one of the greatest military tactical thinkers of the twentieth century. This led to the position where during the early days of Barbarossa, many military commanders had limited experience and were often easily defeated by the Wermacht. Likewise, the Soviet fliers pressed into action were easily picked off by Luftwaffe pilots because they usually had only a few hours’ flying experience.Thousands of Soviet aircraft never saw action because they were destroyed on the ground.
It mustn’t be forgotten that the Nazis almost reached Moscow before there was any sign of a change of fortune. Rokossovsky, a great Soviet military commander who predicted that blocking the Nazis’ conquest of Moscow would see the Soviets in Berlin, resumed his career straight from a gulag, where many of the bones in his body had been broken. On release, he had to be fitted with steel teeth to replace those kicked out during his captivity.
It is simply a fact that Zhukov’s war memoirs were censored wherever they criticised Soviet wartime failings, resulting in whole swathes being removed. Thankfully, those excised passages are now restored. As for our failings, well of course you have a point and the difference is very telling. Moscow has been very generous in opening its archives to historians, including foreign ones. I am told that nowadays Russians freely criticise the weaknesses of the Soviet System, even if some older citizens express nostalgia for the days of Stalin. . I would argue that the increasing closing down of debate in the west bodes very badly for us as it did for the Soviet Union in 1941.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 7:59 PM
Reply to  kevin morris

The point is well-made that Zhukov clearly criticised Stalin’s conduct of the war, as soon as the hostiilies had ceased, and rebuilding the Red Army was due to begin. Stalin was very aware that his record, in retrospect, looked poor. Of course, it is always easy to be wise after the event – but certainly, Stalin gave little indication of wisdom before the events. His paranoid psyche saw rivals and plotters around every corner, and even if Zhukov wasn’t a plotter himself, he would have made a marvellous and popular rallying-point for those disatisfied with Stalin. Thus Zhukov was whisked out of public view, and demoted. Zhukov also made mistakes – he was probably guilty of at least low-level pillage and theft (of antiquities and valuables from Germany, which he brought back to the USSR as his personal war spoils. His personal life also dragged him into a moral mire. He’d split from his wife, to have an affair with the female military doctor who had nursed him at the front, Semyonovka. She eventually married him, and even cared for his daughters from his former marriage. But the real scandal surrounded his long-term affair with a famous soviet chanteuse and film star, When she was arrested, and sent to the camps as an Enemy of the People, Zhukov failed to intervene.

bevin
bevin
May 11, 2018 1:08 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

In point of fact the debate in Russia in the forties was wide ranging and robust. Russian people predicted a Thaw after the war.
After winning the war and making so many sacrifices the Soviet people suffered an appalling betrayal, by their ungrateful former allies in the west, in the form of a Cold War designed to take advantage of the exhaustion of the Soviets by attacking them.
It was this act of betrayal of treachery that led to the re-isolation of the USSR and the nipping in the bud of a democratic movement that the rulers on the West feared because it would have been not only socialist-building on the foundations of the 1917 revolution- but enthuiastically joined by the great mass of Europeans.
And that would include the many southern Italians who had seen ‘their’ women raped by the invaders.

Kevin morris
Kevin morris
May 11, 2018 9:12 AM
Reply to  bevin

Agreed!

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 11, 2018 9:40 AM
Reply to  bevin

The West immediately began planning for nuclear war against the Soviet with expected casualties in the tens of millions, but what else would you expect from the greatest mass murderers in history?

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 13, 2018 1:30 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

Yeah, the bad old Soviet Union, where work was guaranteed, people did not live for greed and to exploit others, where housing, health, transport, high quality education and high culture, were all virtually free, not the means for mass impoverishment and social sadism, and where the Soviet subsidised its ‘satellites’ instead of ruthlessly exploiting them, as the USA has done in Latin America for 200 years. The Soviet Union where the material damage of the most devastating war in history, from which war the USA benefitted gigantically, was repaired in five years. And some Soviet citizens have the gall to remember all that fondly. They learned the true benefits of the Free World under Yeltsin, and were, naturally, united in joy at dying prematurely and being impoverished to benefit a tiny cabal of blood-sucking leeches.

vierotchka
vierotchka
May 13, 2018 10:34 AM

And also where absenteeism was rife and people spent many of their working hours in the banya! Not to forget, either, the huge over-production of goods so as to meet and surpass the five-year plans, goods that surpassed by tens of thousands or more units of the demand, a total waste. 😀

JudyJ
JudyJ
May 13, 2018 11:38 AM

“Russia’s early survival was a miracle: her youth a torment; her adolescence merely dangerous; her maturity a series of challenges. If now she has been called to a shared pre-eminence, her recognition of the folly and horror of war is a measure of her responsibility, not a mask for her desire to conquer the world.”
“Fascism is invariably simple-minded, based on the premise that discipline is the freedom of the ignorant. It is…the friend and ally of large financial interests, who have as much to gain from discipline as the military leader with an eye for patterns on the parade grounds. It inspires confidence in the status quo because it ‘works’, and its aggressions stimulate the economy.”
“Communism is far more complicated, a religion for intellectuals. It is founded on universal, as opposed to particular, ideals. It is obsessed with morality. [Under] The Constitution of the Soviet Union… the fundamental rights of the individual are related to duty towards the state and not as a protection from the state. In the US Constitution, the state is, by implication, a necessary evil: in the Soviet Constitution it is a necessary good……It is understandable that there was always enough on the face of Communism to attract the intellectual during those exasperating pre-war years, and it was then, in the universities, that the young men who eventually became spies were recruited. Today they are attacked in the media as men who betrayed their country to an enemy. This is, of course, an injustice of reprehensible facility.”
“[Russia] has been invaded far more often than she invaded, and lost far more sons and daughters on her own soil than she has lost sons on foreign fields”.
These are the words of Peter Ustinov, taken from his book “My Russia” published in 1983. I lifted the above quotes because they are pertinent today in understanding Russia’s position, and also beg interesting comparison of Ustinov’s description of ‘fascism’ and anti-Communism with today’s psyche of supposed ‘democratic’ Western Governments.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 10, 2018 11:33 PM
Reply to  kevin morris

If the Nazis had landed a force like that mobilised in Barbarossa in the UK, they’d have been at John O’Groats by a week or so. With an enthusiastic Quisling regime in Westminster organising the Einsatzgruppen in killing communists, Roma and Jews.

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 4:04 PM
Reply to  kevin morris

Not if those he purged at that time were pro-German fifth-columnists or members of the chosen tribe in titular vanity positions only with no actual military experience. And if he hadn’t occupied the half of thirties Poland that was actually once Polish (the other half of re-created post Versailles Poland, which country hadn’t existed since the 1790s -being long ago already occupied by Tsarist Russia, was taken from Germany after ww1, Prussia, etc.), giving a 250-mile or so buffer, Moscow to the North-West would have been over-run by Germany weeks after the launch of Barbarossa.

Tony M
Tony M
May 11, 2018 4:13 PM
Reply to  Tony M

I can’t even find the comment I was replying to here, but it touched on Stalin’s purges of the military in ’38, and whether this weakened the Red Army as much as is supposed.

Grafter
Grafter
May 10, 2018 8:19 AM

Great respect to Russia and their citizens showing pride and gratitude for their countrymen and women who gave their lives and saved us all from the fascist disease. Have nothing but disgust and shame how we in the West continue with American russophobia with our sham democracies led by luminaries such as Macron and the devious T. May. Fascism is alive and well in Ukraine and those western European leaders involved in supporting their regime need to be removed. Psycopathic Americans delivering advanced weaponry to the region are now the new disease and should be fought on all fronts.

vexarb
vexarb
May 10, 2018 7:49 AM

Russia is here once again to save Western Europe from itself — in Syria this time.
But to return to the Great Patriotic War. I owe my dear wife to Stalin, because the Red Army and the Polish Communist Partisans liberated Poland before the Gestapo could close in on her and the remaining Jews in hiding. She told me that the Russians never surrendered because they were more afraid of Stalin than they were of Hitler. And Russians were very backward: their soldiers didn’t have watches; and Russia had a really nice holiday resort in Crimea but Russians would wear pyjamas at the seaside because they didn’t have proper beach pyjamas. So her mother chose the West. And that was all I knew about the Great Patriotic War until 2003. Which brings us back to the Middle East.
Why were Bush and B.Liar invading Iraq when the secular socialist Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria were the sworn enemies of the fanatically Wahabist Saudi terrorists of 911? And why was the Guardian cheering all these obviously false pretexts, WMD and all? Well, the Bush regime was an oil-company regime so that explained the conflict of interests — but what about the Guardian? Who finances the Guardian — a Trust; who had a permanent representative on the board — Rothschild, who own BP. Why BP? Dig and you find the British capitalists such as Dear Lord Rothschild in ME oil from 1900 till today. Dig and you find the British and French and US Capitalists supporting Hitler ‘our bulwark against Communism’ against Russia. A communist friend gave me a book, The Chamberlain-Hitler Conspiracy, which showed how Britain and France and Poland were giving Hitler a free hand to dismember CzeckoSlovakia on the understanding he would invade communist Russia. And I found a letter on the web from Rothschild’s company JP Morgan to their agent in Berlin: ‘find out how much Hitler wants and ask if he will accept less’ – a true canny businessman’s question. So that explains the Guardian and Molotov-Ribbentrop and the Great Patriotic War which chewed up 80% of ‘our bulwark against communism’ ie, Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
And it brings us back to the ME and my first sentence. Russia is no longer communist but the Anglo Zio Capitalists are still the AZC. Like the Bourbons, the Anglo Zio Capitalists have learnt nothing from ‘A Century of War’ (Engdahl’s book), and forgotten nothing. Have we — the people of the West — learned anything? I hope so.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 12:06 PM
Reply to  vexarb

NATO is the modern Wehtmacht – poised in the cowsheds of Latvia and Estonia, ready to play soldiers once again in another conflict primed and paid for by scum like Mike Pompeo and John McCain.
The tone of yesterday’s parade had changed, and the content too. In addition to marking the victory of 1945. it became a warning to that dumbshit Norwegian arsehole Stoltenberg – that if he tries to mess with Russia,. we will leave a 5-mile deep chasm where Norway used to be. The gloves are off, and Russia won’t tolerate provocation any longer. The first American plane across the Russian frontier will have the honour of being shot down without warning by the latest Russian fighters – and the pilot’s charred remains mailed home to John Arsewipe Bolton in 57 different parcels.
I live in Moscow along Leningradsky Prospekt – two miles along the direct highway that leads to Red Square. Yesterday morning we had a brunch party on our balcony, to watch the air squadrons flying overhead as the aviation part of the Victory Parade. Russia is ready for you, Mr Stoltenberg. We will shoot you down, and cheer as you burn.
http://files.vm.ru/photo/vecherka/2017/11/doc6xd818hndbo84zee40q_800_480.jpg

vexarb
vexarb
May 10, 2018 5:00 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

@reiner. Well said, but I hope this time fratricide will be averted by common sense and common humanity. Wasn’t Rus a Northman himself?

vierotchka
vierotchka
May 10, 2018 5:16 PM
Reply to  vexarb
vexarb
vexarb
May 11, 2018 10:42 AM
Reply to  vierotchka

@Vierotchka. I meant the Legendary Rus the Red, as in your Link (thanks). From which I take comfort for my notion that Rus was as much a Northman as the Norwegians are, among other Germanic phenotypes:
“Germo is a type of vehicle in which two oxen are yoked together to draw a plough or pull a cart, and so the Germans and the Slavs, having common borders, pull together; there is no people in the world so familiar and friendly to one another as the Slavs and the Germans. [in:] Chronica Poloniae Maioris. Kronika Wielkopolska. ed. and commentary by Brygida Kürbis. Warszawa 1970”

vierotchka
vierotchka
May 11, 2018 5:32 PM
Reply to  vexarb

He is just a legend, but not in Russia where he is ignored.

vierotchka
vierotchka
May 11, 2018 5:43 PM
Reply to  vexarb

On the other hand, Rurik was a Varangian, i.e. from either Sweden or Norway.
From Rus’ to Russia. In modern English historiography, Kievan Rus’ is the most common name for the ancient East Slavic state (usually retaining the apostrophe in Rus’, a transliteration of the soft sign, ь) followed by “Kievan Rus'”, “Kievan Russia”, “ancient Russian state”, and, extremely rarely, “Kievan Ruthenia”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_(name)
The name Russia is derived from Rus’, a medieval state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this proper name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants “Русская Земля” (russkaja zemlja), which can be translated as “Russian Land” or “Land of Rus'”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia#Kievan_Rus
The term Rus is a Finnish term for the Swedes, when the Vikings would come down the Dnieper from the Dvina. The Viking by the name of Rurik, thought to be Rurik of Jutland, set himself up at Novgorod. Vladimir Prince of Kiev is descended from him.
Here is the passage from A history of the Vikings (page 247 footnotes):
Rus comes from the Finnish name for Sweden, Ruotsi….. The name Ruosti, it is argued, arose from roosmenn, men of the rowing-way, the people of today’s Roslagen, the Rowing-Law, the coastal area of Swedish Uppland. Those were the people known to the Finnish, whether the Vikings came from Denmark, Sweden or Norway.
https://community.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/origirus.html
Incidentally, I am a fully documented descendant of Rurik via a number of Rurikid families among my direct ancestors.

reinertorheit
reinertorheit
May 10, 2018 6:36 PM
Reply to  vexarb

Well, vex, in reality it is being stopped by Russia already. Russia is intercepting all attempts by NATO aircraft to enter Russian airspace illegally – but with the use of warning maneoevres. Some of the (American) pilots interpret this as a game, and continue their attempts – in which case they are faced with hostile fly-pasts, which have been as close as 22 feet. But the number of these incidents continues to rise – clearly on the instructions of American and Norwegian commanders. There could come a moment in which a miscalculation will lead to a fatality.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
May 10, 2018 11:37 PM
Reply to  reinertorheit

Americans watch too many Transformers movies, and think that they are documentaries.

Andrew Petherbridge
Andrew Petherbridge
May 10, 2018 6:01 AM

Thank you from Down Under for a great article.

axisofoil
axisofoil
May 10, 2018 2:34 AM

excellent.