The celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war are likely to be the most verbose, the least reflective and the last. In Moscow, politicians will be lining up to extract their pound of kudos from the main victory celebrations on offer.
The host, President Putin, will say Soviet forces played the prime role in defeating Nazi Germany. This will be one of the few tenable claims to be made. The British and the Americans will talk as usual about “the common struggle against evil” and “the triumph of freedom, justice and democracy”. But nobody is going to present a reasonably accurate account of what actually happened.
First, when the British talk of “how we won the war”, they forget that the “we” of then is no longer the “we” of now. In 1939-45, Britain was still the centre of a worldwide empire: Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Indians made huge sacrifices for us. And there were also the allies — France in 1939-40, Poland throughout the war, the USSR and the US from 1941. The war was not a simple forerunner of the 1966 World Cup final between England and West Germany.
Similar care has to be taken defining the other side. For Britain, the enemy of 1939-45 was above all “the Germans”. Yet by 1939 the Third Reich had expanded into Austria and Bohemia and one-third of the panzers that launched the blitzkrieg against France had been built at the Skoda works.
The Axis powers included fascist Italy and imperial Japan and in the years Britain was under most threat, they were supported by the Soviet Union. At the height of its power in 1942-3, the Reich controlled the human and economic resources of the greater part of Europe: 2m French prisoners, and more than 10m forced labourers from the east toiled on German farms and in German factories.
The Waffen SS raised dozens of volunteer divisions from almost every occupied country, even a skeleton Legion of St George from British prisoners.
But the Soviet Union was the largest combatant state of all. It was widely called “Russia” but Russia during the war was only one of 15 Soviet republics, and formed only about 55% of the population. And it was ruled by a Georgian tyrant who entered the war against the Reich only when attacked himself.
An elementary knowledge of Soviet geography, therefore, is essential. In September 1939, when Hitler and Stalin joined forces to destroy Poland, the eastern half of Poland was annexed by the USSR and renamed Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. All inhabitants — Poles, Jews, Byelorussians and Ukrainians — were turned into involuntary Soviet citizens, and supplied an enormous cohort of Soviet casualties.
In June 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, it was not Russia that the Wehrmacht invaded, but Soviet-occupied Poland. The German armies overran the Baltic states, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, but only the fringes of Russia. They approached the outskirts of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad but never secured a main Russian city. As a result, by far the heaviest civilian casualties were incurred in the western, non-Russian borders.
These are not territories over which President Putin presides today but westerners rarely notice such niceties. For western attitudes to the second world war crystallised in the immediate post-war years and have never budged. They were moulded by the accounts of western commentators such as Winston Churchill, which concentrated on western aspects of the war. The political framework was provided by the popular ideology of anti-fascism. And the moral arguments were supplied by the Nuremberg tribunal, whose shortcomings attracted little attention.
So the horrific realities of the war in eastern Europe remained half-hidden for years. The world heard the first official hints about Stalin’s misdeeds from Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956. But the extraordinary scale of wartime mortality in the USSR — now estimated at 27m — did not begin to emerge until the first post-war Soviet census in 1959. It was the 1960s before Solzhenitsyn revealed the true nature of the Gulag, the philosopher Hannah Arendt provoked the debate on totalitarianism, and Robert Conquest published pioneering studies in The Great Terror and The Nation Killers.
The collapse of communism in the 1990s had to precede President Gorbachev’s admission of Soviet guilt in the Katyn massacre or ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and Galicia. Antony Beevor’s superb studies of Stalingrad and Berlin in 1945, which described such things as the Red Army’s brutal contempt for its own men and systematic gang rapes of German women, were treated as revelatory when published in the past 10 years.
What seems to have happened is that western opinion was only gradually informed about the war in eastern Europe over 40 to 50 years, and that the drip-feeding was insufficient to inspire radical adjustments to the overall conceptual framework. It was significant that we learnt about Stalin after his death and in the context of the cold war when we no longer identified with the Soviet Union as a common partner.
