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Unmasking Russia’s WWII Narrative
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.
Putin is no a fool
A great opportunity was thrown away by the West when Putin first came to power.
What are we to make of developments in Eastern Europe? It is one thing to have a squabbling clutch of Balkan countries at each others’ throats, as we saw in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, but quite another to have the Russian bear stomping around with what looks like a very sore head. Europe, historically, never expected anything sensible coming out of the powder keg of the Balkans. After all – at its worst – it gave us the First World War, but since then Europe has never had to worry too much about that region disturbing the peace of the continent as a whole – only its own.
The chief reason for its instability were those many hundreds of years that it lay under the yoke of the Turkish sultan who did his best to turn as many of them as he could into Muslims. So in that corner of Europe you have not just a religious divide, such as we still have between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Sunni and Shia in Syria, but a divide of Faiths itself: Islam and Christianity.
But none of this exists where the bear is concerned. He belongs to the Christian community of the West. His trouble is that, unlike us, he has not yet come to terms with the loss of empire. It is, after all, only twenty years since the Soviet republics – there were thirteen of them – gained their independence. Russia still believes, deep down, that those countries rightfully should belong to it or at the very least should be under its sway.
Putin, the Russian leader, knows that the warm water ports of the three Baltic republics will never be his again; they are too close to the West and with long historical ties to it. But, more to the point, they now enjoy the protection of NATO – the best life insurance policy they could have taken out. Even now NATO planes, including our own, are sweeping Baltic skies daily. The message there is ‘thus far and no further’.
A great opportunity was thrown away when Putin first came to power. He wanted desperately to gain acceptance from the West, but foolishly his overtures were spurned. Even as late as his second presidency he offered to open up his vast country into a free trade area which would extend from Lisbon in the extreme west to Vladivostok in the far east. Instead of looking seriously at this, what did the West do? It pooh, poohed the notion and even provocatively poked the bear by offering deals to Russia’s former vassal states, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia – the latter two far from Europe’s heartland.
Undoubtedly, down the ages, Russia has been Europe’s perennial headache – and I’m not just talking about the seventy years of the Communist era. For almost all of its history it has been a delinquent state and now resembles something of a corrupt gangster state. But it needn’t have been this way. An understanding tutelage by the West after the failed experiment of Communism would almost certainly have worked wonders.
When Russia lost the Crimean war in the middle of the 19th century and the Russo/Japanese war in 1905 it came to a full appreciation of how backward it was, politically and economically. It set about changing this at a fast and furious pace and, by the outbreak, a hundred years ago, of the First World War, it had very largely succeeded. Only the curtailing of the Tzar’s autocratic powers remained.
It was the foolish mobilisation by Tzar Nicholas II of his army – much like what Putin is doing today on Ukraine’s border – which brought the whole process of modernisation to a halt. It gave Germany the excuse she sought to smash her militarily before she became too powerful for even the Prussian-led German army to defeat easily. But for the Tzar’s crazy action in plunging Russia into WWI and losing it there would never have been a Bolshevik revolution and no wasted seventy years pursuing the fantasy of a workers’ paradise under Communism.
The Duma – Russia’s parliament – would have long since clipped the Tzar’s powers and turned him into a constitutional monarch, much like our own. She would by now have genuine democratic institutions and, probably, with all her vast natural resources, be the world’s leading economic power instead of running an economy smaller than Italy’s.
Putin, although a bully, is not a fool. He is in fact an intelligent man. He knows that in the long-term his 145 million people cannot hope to get the better of the European Union’s 485 million. He also knows that his armed forces are miniscule compared to NATO’s.
It must be made plain to him that the postwar borders of Europe are sacrosanct and if he insists on challenging them there will be consequences – damaging and unpleasant ones. Chancellor Merkel of Germany is the one best placed to talk turkey to him. He learned fluent German during his years as a KGB operative (a colonel) in East Germany.
Then, when he quietens down, she must tell him that his gifted people – great in the sciences, literature, sport and music – will not be spurned and belittled anymore but will be embraced by the West and led into the comity of nations, so completing the mission which Peter the Great began all those years ago.
The Last Foundling 