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Sadly, few in the U.S. and Europe know the complicated history of the Kremlin’s actions in the years leading up to Hitler’s Invasion of the USSR. This is partially a result of Moscow’s emphasis on some facts, twisting other facts and effort to ignore it to suppress critical facts that threaten and undermine the Kremlin’s propaganda and cognitive warfare narratives. Just a few reminders:
Putin’s “historians” often forget to mention the fact that in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviets not only did NOT join the UK and France in standing up to that aggression, but participated in the unjustified occupation - with Moscow and Berlin dividing Poland amongst themselves. You can find photos of Soviet NKVD and German Gestappo officers meeting in occupied Poland, where they were working to target Polish officers and citizens. As Russian historian Nikita Sokolov notes in his article “Victory Instead of the Truth: Myths and Blank Spots Related to the Topic of the Great Patriotic War”, prior to Germany’s invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941, the Soviet leadership not only refused to aid the United Kingdom and France when they went to war with Hitler’s Germany and Italy in 1939, but Soviet censors prohibited writers from writing negatively about Nazi Germany and between 1939 and 1941, the Kremlin banned 4,000 publications that were critical of Berlin from being published.
There is also the matter of the “Winter War” waged by Moscow against Finland between November 1939 and March 1940. An aggression conducted against one of the Soviet Union’s neighbors that was justified by the false claim that the Finns were threatening to invade Soviet territory and occupy Leningrad and preceded by a classic provocation – when the Soviets conducted a false flag operation and opened fire on their own troops along the Soviet – Finnish border, then claimed that the attack was perpetrated by the Finnish Armed Forces, justifying Stalin’s invasion of Finland.
When France signed an armistice with Berlin in June 1940, the United Kingdom stood alone facing the full might of German and Italian forces. Moscow did not support London during this period, but instead, was busy seizing Polish and Romanian territory, occupying the Baltic States and providing its German allies with raw materials used to fuel the German war machine.
While the Germans were bombing London and other British cities, Stalin was helping them. In a sign of just how absurd Russian propaganda about the Second World War can be, one Russian news program I recently watched made the claim that London was, in fact, never bombed n by the Germans but instead, was bombed by the British themselves as part of a false flag operation conducted by London against its own population. (NOTE: This kind of lie might be hard for many to understand, but not Russians who are well aware of the fact that their own government has conducted false flags and provocations against the Russian population to justify various government decisions going back to Tsarist times.)
Putin’s propaganda machine likes to promote the image of Ukrainian and Baltic peoples siding with the Nazis against the USSR to justify Russian aggression against its neighbors. Historically, it is a fact that many in Ukraine and the Baltic States initially welcomed the Germans - because they were seen as a relief from Stalin and his regime, that had terrorized the Soviet Union for years, including arresting and sending millions of Soviet citizens to their deaths via purges, mass arrests, forced labor projects and forced starvation programs. But the same historians also tend to remain silent about the shame that, during the Second World War, large numbers of Russians also went over to the side of the Germans. Few in the West are familiar with the story of Stalin’s “Favorite” General, Andrii Vlasov, who after being captured by the Germans in 1941, volunteered to lead thousands of Russian troops who had been captured by the Germans against the Red Army. Vlasov Army consisted of a large number of ethnic Russians who choose to fight against the Soviet Union and was augmented by many other ethnic Russians from the USSR’s “First Wave” of emigration living in Europe at the time – former officers of the “White Movement” who fled Russia during and after the Russian Civil War and volunteered to help Fascist Germany in its fight against Moscow.
The Kremlin’s scribes often falsely claim that Moscow “single handedly" defeated the Nazis and won the war while the UK and U.S. sat on the sidelines. The argument is repeated that London and Washington delayed the opening of second front in Europe to relieve pressure from the Soviets. Of course, Putin’s “historians” often fail to recall that while the American, Australian and British troops were fighting a bloody and brutal war against Imperial Japan in the Far East, Comrade Stalin refused to declare war on Tokyo until after it was clear that the allies had knocked Japan out of the war in 1945, opening the way for the Soviets to grab territory from an already defeated country.
Not only did the Soviets fail to support the allies in the Pacific, but Stalin actually worked clandestinely to spark a war between the U.S. and Imperial via operation “Snow” in 1941.
British and U.S. operations in North Africa and the Mediterranean were not enough for Stalin, who insisted that London and Washington expand their efforts in Western Europe to save him from the same Fascist regime that Stalin signed the Molotov Ribberntrop pact with only a few years earlier.
While the U.S. was funneling assistance to the Soviet Union via the “Lend Lease” program, Mosow was conducting aggressive and extensive espionage activities against its “allies”, recruiting and running large agent networks tasked with stealing just about any secret that they could get their hands on. Of course, Putin remembers this part of the “alliance” and loves to gloat and glorify the Soviet Intelligence officers who were behind operations like “Snow” and “Enormous”.
The same “historians” that love to boast about how the “Russians” defeated Hitler’s Germany, rarely mention the direct impact the allied strategic bombing campaign had on the Hitler’s ability to wage war. This air campaign, which cost the lives of large number of U.S. and Allied Airmen, was a key element in the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, with sorties significantly disrupting German defense production and energy supplies needed to equip and power the German military.
There is no doubt that the people of the Soviet Union suffered greatly during the Second World War, or as it was referred to by the Soviets as “The Great Patriotic War”. But it was not only the Russians of the former Soviet Union that paid a terrible price for the failure of diplomacy and common sense that led to the worldwide conflict. Millions of Soviet citizens died during that horrible period. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Kyrgyz. Each former Soviet Republic sacrificed to defeat the Nazis and those tremendous sacrifices should be remembered and respected. But why does the Kremlin today try to present Russia alone as the sole victor in the battle against Facism?
Why? During the Cold War, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR tried to cover up its own failures and mistakes by promoting false narratives about the war. Among other things, the goal was to present the U.S. and “West” as aggressors, downplay their roles in defeating fascism and aiding the Soviet Union survive Hitler’s onslaught, which as Sokolov notes, could not have survived German aggression without help from the U.S. and other allies. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the new Russian Federation (RF) attempted to build better ties with its former Cold War enemies, there was a recognition of the role played by Washington, London, Ottawa, Canberra and other allied nations in defeating the Nazis. But with Vladimir Putin’s ascendency to power in the early 2000s, Russian history once again saw a re-introduction of the Cold War era theme designed to denigrate the contributions of others in defeating Hitler and promote Russia as a great power.
Putin’s own behavior towards his neighbors since his invasion of Georgia in 2008, and assault on Ukraine starting in 2014, has made Putin synonymous with Hitler. Today, those subjected to the war crimes and atrocities inflicted upon them by the Russian Military see the Russians who condone Putin’s war of aggression as being synonymous with those Germans who either played a direct role in promoting Hitler’s policies or who passively went along with those policies.
I can say from my past experiences traveling in both the Soviet Union and Russia over the past 40 years that while official propaganda often tried to deny the roles played by the U.S., UK and others in defeating Nazi Germany in the 2nd World War, many Russians remembered with fondness the sacrifices made by their allies to help the against the Third Reich. The Russians themselves remembered the lifeline they received via Lend Lease; the incredibly treacherous journey allied merchant ships took delivering supplies to the USSR. They would often recall the photo of U.S. and Soviet troops meeting on the Elba River, recognizing this event as a symbol of cooperation and mutual sacrifice. And these same Russians would often tell me how horrific the war was and how much they wanted to avoid living through the horrors of another conflict.
Unfortunately, Russia’s current autocratic leader has ordered his historians and propagandists to re-write history with the goal of denigrating the role all of the allied powers played in destroying Fascist Germany and ignore the fact that the USSR failed to join the war effort against Imperial Japan until the war in the Pacific was almost over. We should never allow him to get away with giving credit to those who earned it and as with all of Putin’s disinformation, call it out whenever and wherever encountered and counter his distortions with historic facts.
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