A crucial aspect of history has not received the attention it deserves: responsibility for starting WWII does not rest at Germany’s door alone; Russia was a joint partner in the enterprise. We, the British, had pledged to take up arms were Poland to be attacked. Well, she was—by Germany from the west and Russia from the east. When the two attackers met at the agreed line, their soldiers shook hands, and Poland disappeared for four years.

What the world was unaware of at the time was that the two dictatorships had secretly agreed between themselves, in that stunning Non-Aggression Pact—between two former ideological enemies—that they would share Poland between them. Russia went even further, getting the Germans to turn a blind eye to their seizure of the three Baltic states. Only an understandable reluctance to engage simultaneously with two major powers prevented Britain from declaring war on Russia as well.

Three more misconceptions, I submit, still cloud our vision of those times. Russia never refers to that conflict as the Second World War for a very good reason: it prefers instead to call it The Great Patriotic War. This spin allows it to pose as an innocent victim attacked while it had a peace treaty with a treacherous fascist power. Were it to acknowledge 1939, with the invasion of Poland, as the start of WWII, then its joint invasion would put it squarely in the crosshairs of culpability.

The third myth insisted on is that their country did the lion’s share of the dying. In fact, it was their subject peoples: the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Caucasians, the five Muslim Stans, and the Siberians, who took an even bigger hit than the Russians themselves. The Bolsheviks, when they took power, liked to pretend that they respected the sovereignty of all the nationalities that their Tsarist predecessor had vanquished; but they were never willing to give them back their freedom. They insisted on retaining the former empire’s conquests in their entirety, and they fought a bloody civil war to do so. To camouflage the empire’s continuance, they came up with the fiction of the USSR—a Union of Soviet (read committee) Socialist Republics. This, they held, was no empire like the British or French but a heartfelt union of free-minded people.

Yet another myth that the communists cultivated is that they won the war virtually unaided. How many people know that half the tanks used to stave off defeat in the Battle for Moscow were given, free of charge, by the British? How many people know that we and the Americans provided Russia with 20,000 aircraft, 19,000 tanks, and a veritable arsenal of every kind of war material you can think of, including the boots that the Red Army marched in? And that’s another thing; they didn’t need to do much marching. Its long advance towards Berlin was almost entirely motorised—courtesy of those same allies they still insist were of next to no help. Over one hundred Royal Navy ships went down in the freezing waters of the Arctic, where survival time in the water was two minutes, in getting those supplies to Russia.

Can anyone seriously doubt that, were a quarter of Hitler’s armed forces not tied down facing us in the west and been available for the attack on Russia, it would not have been successful? It very nearly was anyway. Moreover, if these enormous supplies were taken into the equation, can anyone further doubt that Russia’s defeat would have been even more catastrophic than that of France a year earlier? Hitler had no plans to exterminate Frenchmen as he did Russians.

History will eventually catch up on Russia’s false narrative of winning the war almost single-handedly. As for the bloodletting of the non-Russian nationalities, they too will receive the just homage they deserve. Not for a minute am I saying that the Russians themselves are not to be saluted. Their bravery and steadfastness in World War II are the stuff of legend. However, it is their leaders who cannot come to terms with democracy and seek only a continuance of the authoritarian model, which is all their benighted kinsmen have ever known. Theirs is almost the saddest of histories of any nation on the planet. One day, events will draw down the curtain on this mournful history and set them on a new path. Those events may be happening before our very eyes right now in distant Ukraine. A prostrate, defeated, and humiliated Russia may see its captured nations seize their chance to gain their independence. Across a front stretching for thousands of miles, Russia will be quite unable to contain their rebellions. Japan, still technically at war with Russia, might take back the Kurile Islands stolen from it at the very end of WWII. China apart—with its occupation of Tibet and Xinjiang—we may be about to see the breakup of the world’s last empire.

As for ourselves, in that titanic struggle a full lifetime ago, we were offered a very tempting deal at the beginning by Hitler: accept his dominance of Europe, and he would accept our dominance of that quarter part of the world our empire controlled. Funnily enough, it was the same deal that Napoleon had offered 140 years earlier. We rejected Hitler’s deal as we had Napoleon’s and, against all the odds, chose to fight on alone, which we did for over a year. It is fair to say that that hugely moral and brave decision saved the entire world from a dystopian nightmare that might very well still be with us today.