Pride that came after the fall

Every year, come the second week of May, I marvel at the difference between the 8^th of that month in the West and the 9^th in Russia.

A visitor from another planet to London would have missed the significance of the former date altogether. That was the day when the Allies accepted the capitulation of Nazi Germany in 1945, and yet the anniversary passed unnoticed this year, as it always does unless there’s a zero on the end.

Victory Day in Russia is celebrated a day later because the Nazis surrendered to the Red troops on the 9^th. And there, though my hypothetical alien might wonder about the reason for the festivities, there’s no way he’d miss them.

For the 9^th of May has always been treated there as an occasion to celebrate, rather than a tragedy to mourn. Moreover, it’s an occasion for reaffirming Russia’s towering superiority over the decadent West. Last Thursday that ascendancy was encapsulated in the deafening roar of “We can do it again!”

Exactly what? Few Russians ask that question because the big war is the lynchpin of the most massive and successful propaganda effort in history. Thus even those Russians who oppose Putin and detest his wars have to repeat by parrot-like rote that they are proud of their fathers/grandfathers/great-grandfathers who did Stalin’s bidding in the Second World War.

They are especially proud of the Soviets, the best part of 30 million of them, who gave their lives so that red fascism triumphed over the brown variety. Moreover, such horrendous losses are used to deliver a contortionist slap on their own back.

Look, Soviet and Russian propagandists have been shouting since 1945. The British and the Americans barely lost a million between them. This proves they practically didn’t fight and, if they did, they did so in a cowardly fashion. The Soviet Union won that war on its own and, if need be, “We can do it again!”.

Translating from propaganda into English, they can again die in their millions to impose their brand of fascism on Europe. Except this time around they’ll be imposing it not on other fascists but on free people desperate to stay that way.

Let’s cast a quick retrospective glance at what it is the Russians are proud of, stripping the chaff of lies from the wheat of the truth.

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 as a Bolshevik reincarnation of the Russian Empire, one dedicated to world conquest. It’s not for nothing that the Soviet escutcheon showed hammer and sickle superimposed on the globe.

Early setbacks in Poland, Hungary, Finland and Germany persuaded the new leader, Stalin, that such a worthy goal could only be achieved by military means. If undefeated in a world war, foreigners couldn’t be expected to see the light.

At that moment the country was put on a war footing, just as demob-happy Europe was rejoicing in peace. Step by step, the Soviet Union was turned into a sinister combination of war factory and boot camp.

Peasants were enslaved first de facto, then de jure, which went by the name of ‘Collectivisation’. In effect, the state confiscated all the food produced in the villages to keep factory workers half-fed. In the countryside, nothing was done by halves: the peasants starved and died in their millions. Cannibalism was rife in the midst of the world’s most bountiful agricultural regions.

Factories worked in three eight-hour shifts, cranking out killing machines of ever description. (By contrast, factories in Nazi Germany continued to work single-shift days even a year after the war started.)

Politically, the Soviets identified Hitler as what Lenin called ‘the icebreaker of the revolution’, someone who could smash the old European order, laying it open for a Soviet thrust. To that end, Stalin prohibited his puppet German Communist Party from forming a block with the Socialists, which effectively brought Hitler to power in 1933.

The two rogue states formed a friendly alliance, building up each other’s military muscle. The Soviets were supplying the Nazis with raw materials, including grain (at the time Soviet peasants were starving to death), while the Germans paid back in technologies and equipment the Soviets couldn’t produce on their own.

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was the culmination of that process, rather than its beginning. The Second World War started a week after that aggressive pact was signed, with the Nazis and the Soviets going into the war as allies dividing Europe into zones of subjugation.

Thus the Soviets attacked Poland 17 days after the Nazis did, with the two predators holding joint victory parades. The Soviets then claimed the Baltics, eastern Poland, parts of Romania and went after Finland that was supposed to be theirs under the Pact’s terms. But the Finns fought heroically against Stalin’s hordes, managing to hold on to their sovereignty and most of their territory.

The Soviets started as they meant to go on. That was the first half a million Red soldiers dying in human-wave attacks on fortified positions – and the first source of pride for their descendants. Imperial madness leaves few Russians unscathed. Even Victor Suvorov, who first exposed Russia’s role as one of the two warmongers, writes he is proud of the Red soldiers happily freezing to death in Arctic conditions or perishing in the hail of Finnish bullets.

While all that was going on, Stalin was continuing his preparations for conquest. Hitler was smashing one European country after another, while Stalin was amassing millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of tanks on the new German border. He was waiting for the propitious moment to strike, and eventually that intent became impossible to hide.

Having failed to take Britain out of the war, Hitler now had to launch a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union, thus getting what every German schoolboy knew would be catastrophic: a war on two fronts. But Hitler knew he no longer had a choice. His only hope was to stop Stalin’s juggernaut before it started to roll.

What ensued was four years of blood gushing at a rate never seen before. The Soviets fought with total disregard for human lives, a traditional aspect of Russian military doctrine blown out of proportion by communist cannibals.

Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs how stunned he was when Marshal Zhukov casually mentioned that his favourite way of clearing a mine field was to march some infantry over it, thereby protecting valuable armour with valueless lives.

Soviet commanders only began to acquire some basic professional skills after many months of action, which partly explains why the Nazis captured over four million POWs (my father among them) by the time they reached Moscow in December, after less than six months of action.

As Stalin later admitted, the Soviets would never have won that war without Allied help. Without American and British supplies, they would have had nothing to win that war with. But win it they did – in the east, while the Allies won their victory in the west, Far East and North Africa.

As a result, red fascism enslaved Eastern Europe directly it was liberated from the brown variety, and with the same totalitarian brutality. Ask Eastern Europeans how happy they were from 1945 to 1991, when they were oppressed by the victorious Soviets. They’ll tell you.

And now descendants of the horde that rolled over Europe, murdering, looting and raping every step of the way (not just in Germany but also in ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe), go hoarse screaming “We can do it again!”

They are as good as their word. They haven’t lost their knack at murdering, looting and raping – usually at tremendous cost to their own lives. They’ve proved that in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, ‘hybrid’ war in the Ukraine, Syria – and now a full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.

They are proud of the victory their red fascism won over Nazism, the victory of Magadan over Majdanek, of Kolyma over Chelmno, of the Gulag over the Gestapo.

The day that should be reserved for tears and silent prayers for the millions who died in the war in which Russia was equally complicit is used instead as an occasion for pathetic triumphalism and thunderous threats to “do it again”.

The obligatory parade in Red Square was only attended by guests from Russia’s satellites: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau and Laos. The rest of the world showed by its absence what it really thinks of Putin and his attempts to impose fascism on Europe again.

There’s much to weep about and pray for on 9th of May – and nothing to be proud of. Especially when such pride inspires Russians to “do it again”.