VE Day vs. Victory Day

Watching Her Majesty’s inspiring, dignified speech yesterday, I realised there’s something we have to thank coronavirus for.

Because of it, the world has been spared yet another emetic show of aggressive militarism, pagan worship and hatred for the West. That spectacle is otherwise known as the military parade in Red Square, cancelled this year for obvious reasons.

In Britain VE Day celebrations feature prayers of thanks, memorial services, survivors’ recollections, photo retrospectives and reprints of old newspaper articles. The Victory Day in Russia is only the culmination of incessant, all year round hysteria with distinct pagan overtones.

The victorious war seems to be the only ideological adhesive today’s heirs to Stalin have identified as a means of keeping the nation together. They also insist that, by having played the leading role in the defeat of Nazism, and having suffered greater casualties than all the other combatants put together, Russia is entitled to a leading status in the post-war.

Such claims are impossible to sustain without presenting a lying version of the events, and here the Russians can indeed claim primacy. Their politicians and ‘historians’ travel a well-trodden path: all the same lies were packaged and served by Stalin’s clique.

It’s partly for that reason that Stalin is again being extolled as a great leader who saved the world from Hitler. Amazingly, most Western historians lap up and regurgitate the same lies.

Falling by the wayside is the food and drink of history: facts. The most obvious of them is that, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union entered the war as Hitler’s ally.

The two predators agreed to divide Europe between them, and Stalin effectively untied Hitler’s hands. Germany, whose economy was only kept afloat by the printing press, had no option but to go to war. The Pact gave her a temporary guarantee of a secure rear, allowing her to concentrate all her efforts on the Western campaign.

Stalin gave Hitler invaluable help with raw materials, especially oil. (In 1939 Germany had barely a million tonnes of oil in its reserve. By contrast, Britain had 30 million, and the US 275 million.) Then the Soviet Union also attacked Poland, described by Molotov as an “ugly child of the Versailles Treaty”, enabling the Nazis to end the campaign before winter.

Stalin’s plan was simple: let Germany get bogged down in the western carnage, similar to the First World War. Then, when both sides got exhausted, the Red Army would roll over Europe.

Stalin, that ‘leader of genius’, badly miscalculated. He didn’t think that the Wehrmacht, whose build-up only started in 1935, would be able to take over the continent so quickly.

Stalin’s other mistake was in believing that Hitler would never dare attack the Soviet Union. The ‘great leader’ compared the two forces and found that the Soviets enjoyed an overwhelming superiority in both personnel and armaments.

In tanks, for example, the Soviets outnumbered the Nazis six to one – and that’s just the machine deployed in the western military districts. And the new generation of Soviet tanks, the KV and the T-34, didn’t have even approximate German analogues.

Every strategic plan revealed in the Russian archives provides for an in-depth offensive operation, with map arrows pointing at Krakow, Warsaw, Prague and so on. No other plans ever existed.

Alas, the Germans knew what was going on, as they were bound to: it was impossible to conceal millions of Soviet troops and thousands of trainloads of armaments moving westwards. As Hitler explained in a letter to Mussolini, “I have decided to cut the Soviet noose tightening around my neck.”

In what he described as the toughest decision of his life, Hitler ordered an attack because he felt, rightly, that he had no other choice.

What followed was the greatest military catastrophe in the history of warfare. In just eight days, the German army advanced over 300 km into the Soviet Union. In the next couple of months, the Soviet regular army ceased to exist – by December the Germans had taken over four million POWs (one of them my father).

How was that possible? How could an army greatly outnumbered in every category advance at marching speeds? How could the greatest casualties suffered by the Soviet army be in the POW and deserter categories, not wounded and killed?

That was another gross mistake by Putin’s favourite leader: he thought wars were fought by tanks, cannon and planes. They aren’t. They are fought by people, and the Soviet people didn’t want to fight for bolshevism.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. In 1917, Lenin identified his goal as “transforming the imperialist war into a civil one”, thereby gaining power.

That he did, and the world is still reeling from the result. Yet the observation that escapes even many historians is that Russia’s three wars described as ‘Patriotic’ were all civil wars at the same time.

The relationship between the Russian state and its people is traditionally that of masters and slaves, not government and citizenry. And, when the state is otherwise occupied, the people rebel.

Afterwards, professional liars (or simply misinformed patriots, like Tolstoy) paint the picture in the rosy colours of patriotic heroism, and the image is implanted into the collective psyche by mass propaganda.

Thus, Tolstoy’s version of 1812, expounded in War and Peace, has become the official history, taught to this day. The writer talks about the Russians “picking up the cudgel of people’s war and smiting the French with it.”

Said cudgel was indeed picked up, but it came down on the heads of local administrators and land owners. Several dozen popular revolts broke out all over Russia, and the army had to dispatch a whole corps to quell the unrest at the critical moment of the war, after the Russians had abandoned Moscow.

What happened in the first months after the Nazi attack was a version of the same thing: Soviet peasants, dispossessed, humiliated, starved, enslaved and murdered en masse refused to fight. They threw away their weapons, abandoned their tanks and artillery, and either ran away or marched into German captivity.

That rebellion was suppressed by the same methods as all others: with unrestricted violence. Military tribunals were passing verdicts, 2.5 million of them during the war. Of those convicted, 157,000 were shot – and easily as many without even that travesty of justice.

The Soviets thus inflicted heavier casualties on their own army than the Nazis managed to score on the Allies in their Western Front. At the same time, Stalin ordered his air force to strafe Soviet POW camps – and of course the soldiers were informed that their families were hostages to their bravery (the infamous Order 270).

Those measures, assisted by the Nazis’ brutality, worked, and the Red Army began to fight. Yet only in the second half of 1943 did the ratio of killed, wounded, taken prisoner and deserting reach the level traditionally expected in a fighting force.

The skill of the Soviet generals increased as the war went on, but their regard for soldiers’ lives didn’t. The Red Army didn’t win a single battle in which it didn’t enjoy an overwhelming numerical superiority, and even those victories came at an awful cost.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million in the war, but it would be wrong to say that the survivors won. And here we come to the real difference between VE Day and Victory Day.

Yesterday, the British people, led by the Queen, celebrated the heroic defence of the country’s freedom that ended in the defeat of one of history’s two most satanic regimes. Today, the ex-Soviet people celebrate the victory of their enslavers over those who wished to assume that role.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing to celebrate. The defeat of Hitler undoubtedly reduced the amount of evil in the world – after all, one satanic regime lording it over the continent is better than two.

And the memory of those 27 million deserves remembrance and a mournful glass or two. However, having played their role in liberating Europe from Nazism, the Soviet people didn’t gain one iota of their own liberty.

Popular revolts against the Soviets were raging throughout the war, and in West Ukraine and the Baltics they continued till the late ‘50s. And let’s not forget that some 1.5 million Soviet citizens fought with the Nazis during the war – in the vain hope that Hitler would bring freedom from Stalin.

Soviet soldiers had high hopes too, and those were similarly frustrated. Having replaced the old ‘proletarian’ slogans with imperial ones (those still going strong today), the Soviets celebrated the victory with mass executions, the GULAG – and yet another artificial famine, this one killing some two million victors in 1946-1948.

Eastern Europe, occupied by Stalin, replaced one brutal regime with another. Yesterday, the foreign ministers of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia joined the US Secretary of State in issuing a joint statement to that effect:

“While May 1945 brought the end of the Second World War in Europe, it did not bring freedom to all of Europe. The central and eastern part of the continent remained under the rule of communist regimes for almost 50 years. The Baltic States were illegally occupied and annexed and the iron grip over the other captive nations was enforced by the Soviet Union using overwhelming military force, repression, and ideological control…”

So yes, thanks to coronavirus for making the contrived enthusiasm in Russia more muted and less nauseating. At least, we haven’t been treated to another Red Square show of strength, accompanied by brainwashed patriots screaming “On to Berlin!” and “We can do it again!”