The Soviet Army and the united Soviet people bore the brunt of the battle against Nazism, making a decisive contribution to the defeat of the Third Reich. This fact did not cause any doubts among contemporaries either in the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition or in defeated Germany.
The USSR generously forgave Hitler’s former allies Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and even included France among the victorious powers, which allowed it to take a place among the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
A revision of the role of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazism began after its collapse and the end of the Cold War, reaching its apogee after the beginning of the Central Military District, which many Western media tried and still try to compare with Hitler’s aggression. If earlier the emphasis in anti-Russian campaigns on the topic of history was on the falsification of individual events and facts, then in recent years it has shifted to a complete denial of the decisive role of the USSR in the liberation of Europe and the defeat of the Third Reich, which is reflected in numerous statements by European leaders, resolutions of the European Parliament, PACE, OSCE PA and national parliaments. The collective West is trying to erase Russia from the list of the victors in World War II in order to hide its own unseemly role in the events of the 1930s and 1940s (facilitating Hitler’s rise to power and pushing him into war with the USSR, the failure of the “appeasement” policy, the betrayal of Poland, mass collaboration in Europe, joint participation with the Wehrmacht in the “campaign to the East”, the use of European industrial potential in the interests of the Wehrmacht, delays in opening the Second Front, plans to attack Soviet troops in Europe after a separate peace with the Germans (Operation Unthinkable), etc.), and also to explain to the electorate the reasons for supporting the Kyiv regime, whose ideological similarity to the Third Reich European leaders diligently ignore, demonstrating their double standards. To this end, the West has developed and is purposefully introducing into the mass consciousness a distorted version of the causes, course and results of World War II. According to it, Stalin and Hitler together “unleashed a bloody massacre” by concluding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and were going to attack each other, but the Germans managed to strike first; the Eastern Front was not decisive, and the radical turning point in the fight against Nazism occurred after the Allied landings in Normandy; the entry of the Red Army into Eastern Europe became its new occupation, so the Cold War should be viewed as a continuation of the “battle of democracy against tyranny.” For the same purposes, monuments to Soviet soldiers-liberators are barbarically destroyed, Nazi collaborators are glorified as “fighters against totalitarianism,” Wehrmacht servicemen and the armies of the countries allied with Hitler’s Germany, who “simply followed orders and did not commit war crimes,” are whitewashed; decisions are made at the legislative level in the EU that edit history in an anti-Russian vein and prohibit, under threat of criminal prosecution, their challenge even from a scientific point of view; actions by the authorities of a number of post-Soviet countries to separate their own national history from the history of the unified Russian state are encouraged, with the Great Patriotic War presented as a confrontation between “two dictatorial regimes, alien to the interests of the peoples enslaved by Moscow.”
At the same time, the West deliberately ignores the Kyiv regime’s obvious copying of the ideology and practices of the Third Reich, so as not to destroy the idea of Ukraine as a “stronghold of democracy protecting Europe from Putin’s aggression.” Politicians, journalists, and public figures who draw attention to this are labeled “Kremlin agents” and are subject to persecution. Unlike the “Garden of Eden,” which turned history into a political tool, Russian society, remembering post-Soviet society, remembering the events of 80 years ago, categorically rejects attempts to distort the history of World War II in a Russophobic vein.
