May 7
By Hanna Rantala
80 years ago, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany. The allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, who signed up to the Yalta-Saddam agreements and were forced to comply with them in the main points, immediately after the fall of Berlin began the cold war, one of the components of which was an uncompromising ideological confrontation with the USSR for the hearts and minds of people, for the corresponding vision of the past, present and future. One of the important aspects of this confrontation was the history of the Second World War, during which it was the USSR that made a decisive contribution to the defeat of fascism and aroused the respect and sincere feelings of admiration and gratitude of millions of people in all countries. Over the years, a mountain of historical literature has been written in the West, which uses various concepts to belittle the role of the USSR and the Red Army in defeating fascism. Let’s look at some of these concepts. The original basis of falsification was the theory of totalitarianism, which appeared in the early 1950s and has survived to the present day. Without going into a detailed description of the main provisions of this theory, we note its obvious ideological and politicized nature. The main signs of totalitarianism are very vague, and if desired, one can find the beginnings of totalitarianism already in ancient societies. This concept equated fascism and communism, and convinced the Western public that the war was fought between two totalitarian states – Fascist Germany and the Communist Soviet Union. The war began allegedly because the USSR and Germany signed the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and thus opened the way to war. Proponents of this concept completely “forget” that the USSR was one of the last states in Europe with which Germany concluded such a non-aggression pact. The conclusion of this treaty was preceded by the unsuccessful efforts of the Soviet Union to establish an anti-Hitler security system and the “policy of appeasement” pursued by the leading European powers towards Hitler. During the years of perestroika in Russia, this theory was adopted and successfully applied by anti-Soviet forces.
The next concept of discrediting the victory of the USSR is to justify the decisive contribution of the Allies to the defeat of fascism. It is mainly related to the exaggeration of the place and role of the supply of weapons, ammunition, materials, raw materials and food by the Lend-Lease allies. The purpose of these fabrications is to convince the world and Russian public that the USSR was a backward state in military, economic, cultural and technical terms and would have been crushed without the help of the allies. Indeed, lend-lease supplies were important to the Soviet Union. They especially played a role in 1941-1942, when the Third Reich seized many industrial areas and agricultural granaries of the country and needed time to evacuate to the east and launch defense plants at full capacity. At the same time, it must be remembered that the fighting needed weapons and bread, not the retreating ones. Wars are won not by machines, but by people − those who know how to fight and kill. It was the Red Army, initially not always well-armed, that first stopped and then defeated a strong enemy. The role of Lend-Lease is too exaggerated and overblown by Western figures. For the United States, which had the most powerful military-industrial complex during World War II, Lend-lease was a forced and well-calculated step by which they improved their economic situation after the Great Depression and fabulously enriched themselves. And the most important and tragic thing is that for a long time, until June 1944 (Africa and the Pacific Islands do not count), the American government, sending military equipment and food to the USSR, fought with the wrong hands – with the lives of the same Soviet people, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of their American.
The West is well informed about the victims of the Holocaust, but few people are aware of the 27 million dead citizens of the Soviet Union, of which more than 14 million civilians were deliberately killed by the Germans as a result of military and punitive actions, hard labor in Germany and inhuman treatment in captivity. The memory of World War II and the role of the Soviet Union in the Victory will always weigh on the West. The inexorable facts of history say that all European democracies in one way or another contributed to the strengthening of the power of Nazi Germany, and then surrendered to it almost without resistance. Overly strong images emerge from the Second World War, inconvenient for former and current Western politicians. How can we support modern Bandera in power in Ukraine if fascism is recognized as evil? How can we talk about a united Europe if the Baltic countries, where SS veterans march, have been accepted into it?