Soviet role in WWII
Rashed Rahman
Rising coronavirus infections forced Russia on May 9, 2020 to curtail its celebrations marking the 75thanniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. Russia usually holds grand military parades to commemorate the event. This year’s 75thanniversary was planned on an even grander scale. Alas, the commemoration had to be limited to a fly-past by Russian aircraft over Moscow’s Red Square. The only other signs on the deserted streets of the capital because of the lockdown were copies of the red banner that was raised above the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945. Ironically, Facebook in its infinite wisdom took down or deleted posts showing the iconic photograph of that event, both original black and white and coloured versions.
But Facebook is not the only culprit guilty of attempting to deny or downplay the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in WWII. Russia on May 10, 2020, accused the US of the same, asking for a “serious conversation” on the matter with its US counterparts. Russia’s foreign ministry voiced extreme indignation at the attempt to distort the effect of the country’s decisive contribution to victory in WWII at great human and material cost. A White House statement on Facebook last week to mark the 75thanniversary of VE Day only mentioned the US and Britain. In response, the Russian statement said US officials had neither the courage nor the will to pay homage to the undeniable role and huge death toll suffered by the Red Army and the Soviet people in the name of all humanity. Denigrating the US statement as “particularly petty”, Moscow urged Washington not to make the memory of 1945 a new problem for already difficult bilateral relations.
The history of WWII is particularly sensitive in post-Soviet Russia because of the devastating loss of 27 million people killed during the war (the highest toll of all countries). It is also a source of immense pride because arguably, it was the Soviet Union that prevailed over Hitler’s cruel hordes on its own territory first, later in eastern Europe all the way to Berlin. In the post-Cold War world, the US-led west has been resorting to all sorts of tricks to downplay this glorious chapter in the Soviet Union’s history in an attempt to sabotage or hinder Russia’s rebuilding of its prestige and power under President Vladimir Putin.
Enormous as the contribution of the Soviet Union to the victory over fascism was, it was presaged by the necessity to make huge sacrifices and suffer immense pain even before WWII. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the almost inevitable result of the almost total breakdown of faith and trust in an absolutist Tsarist monarchy exposed for its inept conduct of WWI. The February 1917 democratic revolution was followed by the socialist takeover in October, led by V I Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. The crisis of Tsarist Russia compounded by WWI led to the ‘breach’ of the imperialist countries’ front in one of the most backward countries of Europe (in fact spanning Euro-Asia). Hopes for similar revolutions in Germany (relatively advanced) and Hungary (less so) having been drowned in blood in 1918 and 1919 respectively, the Soviet Union stood alone ringed by hostile capitalist states. These states (22 of them) intervened in the civil war that followed the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks on the side of the monarchists. After a life-and-death struggle at great cost, the revolution defeated its internal and external enemies and proceeded to construct socialism for the very first time in extremely difficult circumstances, isolation and the backwardness of Russian society being the main obstacles. Nevertheless, as fascism rose in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s respectively, the Soviet Union felt it had no choice but to industrialise on a war footing (which exacted a toll in the shape of forced collectivisation of agriculture) or else the fascist hordes gathering strength in Germany and Italy would wipe out the revolution. Along with war footing-industrialisation, the Soviet Union first attempted diplomatic outreach to the western bourgeois democratic powers for a joint front against fascism. This was rebuffed, with appeasement of Hitler in the hope he would turn his guns against the Soviet Union and destroy it proving the great illusion of western European statesmen, particularly Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. To protect itself, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact to try and stave off a German invasion.
Taking advantage of western appeasement, Hitler invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia in the first of a rolling series of assaults on western Europe, ending in the occupation of France. In the process, the allies led by Britain had to beat an ignominious retreat from Dunkirk. The air war known as the Battle of Britain followed and although Hitler’s ambition to invade Britain was thwarted, he now turned his attention to the Soviet Union to crush communism once and for all.
To this end, Hitler unleashed his huge forces on the Soviet union in July 1941 under the rubric “Operation Barbarossa”. Germany’s surprise attack with a superior sophisticated military force and blitzkrieg (total war) tactics initially inflicted heavy defeats on the relatively poorly equipped Soviet forces, capturing wide swathes of territory, arriving within striking distance of Moscow and laying siege to Leningrad and Stalingrad. Much to Hitler’s surprise though, the Soviet resistance was so fierce despite the death and destruction visited on the Soviet people that eventually the tide turned at Stalingrad by 1943, followed by a massive rollback of Nazi Germany’s forces all the way to Berlin in 1945.
In the same year that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union after conquering western Europe, Imperial Japan surprise-attacked the US at Pearl Harbour in December 1941, destroying a major part of the US naval fleet stationed there and thereby dragging the hitherto neutral US into the world war. Apart from Britain’s dogged air defence in the Battle of Britain and the incremental entry of the US into the theatres of war in the Pacific (anti-Japan), north Africa, Italy and the main European theatre through the D-Day landings in 1944, it was the Soviet Union that through its resilient struggle against Hitler’s fascist hordes turned the tide of WWII by 1943 and followed it up by liberating its own and occupied eastern European territory through an utter and devastating defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies.
The sacrifices in the war changed the Soviet Union in ways that would only reveal themselves over time. The desire for peace became paramount, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, the world having already entered into the Cold War, the Soviet leadership under Khrushchev in 1956 denounced Stalin’s excesses, declared the Soviet Union a ‘state of the people’ (implicitly abandoning any notion of continuing the class struggle) and sued the US-led west for ‘peaceful coexistence’ under the shadow of mutually assured destruction through nuclear weapons. The Soviets also signalled their resolve to keep the socialist community in Eastern Europe intact through military invasions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). They continued to support national liberation struggles in the Third World (notably Vietnam) but their revolutionary credentials had by now been dented by the image of a grey, bureaucratic, geriatric leadership. It took Gorbachev’s quixotic attempt to reform the Soviet Union from 1985 onwards to unleash the anti-communist forces nestling in the bosom of the original revolutionary socialist state. The rest, as they say, is history.
Whatever may have been the final outcome of the Russian Revolution, there is no gainsaying the central and critical role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascism in WWII. Let us not attempt to distort or rewrite history in favour of other participants in this global conflict. Let the Soviet Union and all others be honoured as they deserve for the great sacrifices that contributed to the defeat of fascism. In that victory, let us be large-hearted and truthful enough to acknowledge the role of the Soviet Union as central and critical.
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