1 September, 1939, comes before 22 June, 1941

The bloodiest war in history started on this day 78 years ago, didn’t it? Well, not as far as most Russians are concerned. According to them, the war began on 22 June, 1941, when Hitler’s preemptive strike beat Stalin to the punch by a week or two.

This one date says all you need to know about Soviet and post-Soviet propaganda, compared to which Goebbels’s efforts look like amateur hour. It’s because of this falsification of history hammered into their minds round the clock that most Russians fail to see an obvious paradox.

Before Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets had fought two wars within those that are collectively known as the Second World War. On 17 September, 1939, they attacked Poland from the east just as their Nazi allies were attacking it from the West. On 30 November, the Soviets launched another unprovoked attack, this one against Finland.

In the first war, the Soviets lost 3,000 KIA. In the second, somewhere between 100,000 and a million (they were rather lackadaisical in counting corpses – what’s a hundred thousand here or there among friends?). Yet, while all the Polish and Finnish soldiers killed by the Russians perished in the world war, none of the Russians did. The war didn’t start until 1941, remember?

Such playing fast and loose with history is hard to forgive but easy to understand. The entire post-war Soviet mythology rotates around the hub of what they call the Great Patriotic War. The peaceful Soviet Union was treacherously attacked by the Nazis, having to lose tens of millions to repel the aggression under the wise leadership of Comrade Stalin. To this day one can hear criticism of Stalin rebuked with “Yes, but thanks to him we won the war”.

The twentieth century witnessed many lies, but none so brazen as this one. The whole purpose of it is to absolve the USSR of any guilt in starting the Second World War, portraying it as an innocent victim.

In fact, but for what today would be called the ‘peace process’ between Hitler and Stalin, Hitler might not have started the war at all or, if he had, it certainly wouldn’t have been as protracted and bloody.

The pact signed on 27 August, 1939, wasn’t the sum total of that alliance but only its culmination. The cooperation between German and Russian extremists started in 1917, when the German General Staff transported what Churchill accurately described as the ‘bacillus’ of Lenin’s gang into Russia.

The contagion worked – Lenin usurped power and promptly took Russia out of the war. Germany’s defeat in 1918 turned both countries into pariahs and they fell into each other’s embrace by signing the 1922 Rapallo Treaty.

Several years later the Soviets helped Germany cheat on the terms of the Versailles Treaty. They set up several training facilities for German officers in Russia, the most prominent of them being the Kama tank school at Kazan.

There Soviet and German tank commanders worked out the tactics of pincer manoeuvres at depth. Later, such alumni of that school as Model, Manstein and Guderian put the tuition to good use, first in the West and then against Russia herself.

When Hitler came to power, the schools closed but the cooperation continued in secret. The NKVD and Gestapo even formed a Friendship Society, with the Soviets teaching the start-up organisation the mechanics of mass terror, and the Nazis supplying the latest in torture technology. The Society, incidentally, remained active, if on a limited scale, throughout the war.

Stalin was acting in accordance with the Lenin canon, according to which Germany was to become “the icebreaker of the revolution”. Lenin knew that sooner or later the Germans would light a pan-European fire, out of which the Russians would then pull all the tasty chestnuts.

In preparation, Stalin turned his whole country into a combination of prison, munition plant and boot camp. The mass murders of the industrialisation and collectivisation served that purpose, turning Russia into a single-minded military monster operated by slaves.

At the time Hitler was ready to pounce on Europe, Stalin had at his disposal the largest and best-equipped army in the world. His 21,000-odd tanks outnumbered the tank forces not only of Germany (just over 3,000) but the rest of the world combined, and the top models, the T-34 and KV, remained unparalleled until late 1942.

It was time to push the button, and it was pushed by what’s known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that caught the West unawares. (This despite numerous reports by Soviet defectors, such as Walter Krivitsky, that the Pact was imminent. The West chose to believe not those reports but Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda.)

Stalin’s plan was to have Hitler bogged down in a war of attrition with the West and, when the two sides were near complete exhaustion, to strike from the rear. Meanwhile, it was Hitler’s task to get the ball rolling. However, Germany was short of essential raw materials, and this is where Stalin’s help was invaluable.

Even though the Germans didn’t keep their end of the bargain by never achieving the stipulated level of technological supplies to Russia, the Soviets overshot the quota by a large margin. Thousands of railcars full of cereals and every essential raw material were pouring fresh blood into the body of the Nazi monster, building up its muscle.

Without those supplies Hitler wouldn’t have been able to wage his war – and probably  wouldn’t even have been able to defeat Poland. The Nazis were so overconfident that they didn’t even prepare for the war properly. When the shooting started, they were rapidly running out of supplies, especially aircraft bombs.

Stalin helpfully obliged, later repeating the trick during the Battle of Britain, when most of the bombs raining on London were of Soviet manufacture. But in the autumn of 1939 the Poles were resisting bravely, having managed to regroup after the original setbacks.

Army Group Poznan got entrenched on the eastern bank of the Vistula, and the German offensive began to run out of steam. That’s when the Soviets struck, claiming the part of Poland to which they felt entitled according to the terms of the Pact. Poland quickly collapsed, and the German predator was ready to turn west.

Stalin’s gigantic army was poised to fulfil its historic mission, as outlined by Lenin and Trotsky, and refined by Stalin. But, being by nature a cautious man, Stalin dithered. His plan was to strike only after the Germans landed in England, where they were bound to be tied up in knots.

Yet the Germans had no technical means to launch their much-vaunted Operation Sea Lion. Their transport fleet was woefully inadequate for such a mission, especially considering the dominance of the Royal Navy.

And even their ability to secure a beachhead with paratroops was compromised by their conquest of Crete, which was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for Sea Lion. But that was a Pyrrhic victory because in the process the Nazis lost practically all their airborne forces.

Yet the Germans managed to convince Stalin that the invasion of England was forthcoming, and the Soviet juggernaut poised at their border didn’t roll. But a fully mobilised army can’t stay in a state of readiness indefinitely. It had to go into action, and Hitler realised that.

He, along with every German, was aware of the perils of a two-front war. But he also knew that, once the Stalin juggernaut rolled, it would be unstoppable. Hitler’s only chance was to launch a lightning strike in the hope of destroying the Soviet army within a couple of months.

The plan almost succeeded. And this is where another Russian lie is shown for what it is. For the war didn’t become ‘Patriotic’ until later. At the beginning, the Soviet people didn’t want to fight for their slave masters.

They fled, leaving all that state-of-the-art hardware behind in heaps of useless iron. They deserted en masse. And they surrendered in their millions, often still fully armed. Whole regiments would march into Nazi captivity to the sound of their brass bands; up to 1.5 million happily put on German uniforms.

By December that year the Germans had taken 4.5 million POWs, in a rout never before seen in history. Had Hitler not been poisoned by his racist ideology, he could have won at a canter by proclaiming a war of liberation against bolshevism.

Had he done so, he would have had not 1.5 but 15 million Russians ready to fight against the most satanic regime in history. But Hitler ran a satanic regime of his own. “We are not liberating Russia,” he rebuked Gen. Halder. “We are conquering her.”

The Germans began to commit well-documented atrocities, encouraged by Soviet saboteurs whose main task was to turn the Nazis against the occupied people. Those people initially greeted the Nazis with flowers, food and drink. When the Nazis began to act in character, the mood changed.

At the same time, Stalin started a terrorist campaign of his own, trying to whip up a fighting spirit among his reluctant populace. Retreating soldiers and those who managed to escape German captivity were shot or formed into suicide ‘penalty battalions’.

Altogether the Soviets shot 154,000 of their own soldiers following tribunal verdicts – and at least twice as many even without such travesty of justice. They therefore hold the distinction of inflicting heavier losses on their own army than the Germans and the Japanese managed to inflict on the US forces. It was also explained to the fighting men that their families would be held responsible for their insufficient valour.

Eventually, the Soviets ended up in Berlin, having lost anywhere between 20 and 40 million (it’s that account keeping again). When Churchill commiserated with Stalin over such devastating losses, Stalin shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “We lost more during the collectivisation,” he said.

Amazingly, the echoes of Russian propaganda reaching the West aren’t sufficiently attenuated. If asked, most Westerners would still say that the Second World War was started by Germany, with Russia as one of her victims.

Yet the war that started 78 years ago today featured not one aggressor but two: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The latter finished the war as our ally, but then so did fascist Italy.

History doesn’t lie, even though some people do. Let’s listen to history, shall we?