Vlad parades his friends

“Russia,” said Alexander III, “has only two allies: her army and navy”.

That hermeticism was very much on display yesterday in Red Square, where the Russians were celebrating their single-handed victory over Hitler.

As columns of soldiers and tanks marched by, standing next to my friend Vlad were heads of other states and governments. How many? Well, in round numbers… one. The president of Moldova, a country wholly on Vlad’s payroll.

(The planned fly-past by the air force was cancelled due to bad weather. At least back in the good old days the Soviets knew how to disperse clouds to make sure it never rained on their parades.)

Demonstrably missing were leaders of Soviet allies in the war Russia won single-handedly. And if you wish to contest this take on recent history, you obviously haven’t been following the Russian press.

The papers and TV stations explain to the Russians in simple words even they can understand that neither Britain nor other Commonwealth countries nor the USA nor, well, anybody, had the tiniest hand in the victory. It was all Russia – not even the Soviet Union, as yesterday’s irrefutable truth went.

Londoners dying in 1940 under Luftwaffe bombs made in the USSR had nothing to do with the war. Neither did the British and US troops fighting in Africa, Asia and later in Europe.

Neither did the French, mocked by the Russians over their collapse in 40 days – even though the French downed more Nazi planes than did the Soviets in the first 40 days of their war. The Nazis also advanced through France at a much slower pace than they did through Russia in June-July, 1941.

Ask almost any Russian when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, and he’ll tell you she didn’t. Russia took part in a different war, the Great Patriotic one that began on 22 June, 1941, and ended on 9 May, 1945 – a day after the Second World War ended.

This is the sort of malodorous fare the Soviets were fed before the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’, when there was no Internet and when listening to Western radio stations was a crime punishable by concentration camps. It’s astounding that even today, when anyone with a computer on his desk can find out the truth, the Russians still eagerly gobble up the same slops.

It’s good to know that even young Westerners refuse to choke on that fodder. Yesterday an RT reporter was assailing people in Paris streets, asking if they’re thankful to Russia for defeating Hitler and thereby liberating France.

“France,” replied one youngster, “was liberated by US troops with the help of the French Resistance. The fight between Hitler and Stalin was one between two fascists.”

While quibbling about the exact political nomenclature, one has to congratulate the French student: he knows history much better than most Russians.

The Second World War began on 1 September, 1939, eight days after the Nazis and the Soviets signed a criminal pact dividing Europe between them. The Nazis attacked Poland from the west, and 17 days later the Soviets attacked her from the east.

Without that alliance Germany wouldn’t have been able to conquer Europe, nor conceivably even Poland. Having caught their breath after the original shock, the Polish Army Group Poznan, still possessing 1,000 tanks, regrouped to the east of the Vistula, and the Nazi offensive was running out of steam.

The Germans were short of essential ordnance, such as aircraft bombs and heavy artillery shells. The outcome of the war was far from certain – until the Soviets stuck a knife into Poland’s back.

Yet according to Soviet and Putin’s propaganda only the German and Polish soldiers who died during those three weeks were killed in the Second World War. The 3,000 Soviet casualties weren’t. The USSR didn’t start fighting until 22 June, 1941, remember?

The Soviets then proceeded to occupy, bloodlessly, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and parts of Romania, including one that hadn’t been mentioned in the Soviet-Nazi Pact. Their attempted conquest of Finland in the winter of 1940-1941 was far from bloodless: half a million Soviet soldiers died fighting against a tiny country that had just a few outdated tanks, and practically no navy or air force.

Yet they didn’t die in the war – the war, as you recall, hadn’t yet begun. An exchange of prisoners followed that non-war, with the Finns delivering 10,000 emaciated, frost-bitten Russians to the Soviets. They were immediately taken to a polar concentration camp and shot to a man – but the war hadn’t yet started.

It started on 22 June, 1941, when Hitler delivered his preemptive strike, realising that was his only chance to beat Stalin to the punch. Modern historians show that Hitler acted in the nick of time: Stalin’s military juggernaut was ready to roll a week later, no more than two.

Even that wasn’t a Great Patriotic War, at least not just that. For unfolding in parallel was a civil war waged by Soviet slaves against their slave master. Before the end of 1941 the Germans took 4.5 million Soviet POWs, of whom about a third took up arms against the Soviet Union – a pandemic outbreak of treason without parallels not only in Russian but in world history.

Also, Ukrainians, Balts, Caucasians and other denizens of the non-Russian parts of the USSR were eagerly joining Waffen SS and other Nazi formations, showing little gratitude for all the Russians had done for them. (For details, Google Holodomor, Russian genocide by famine in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.)

The obscene rite in Red Square celebrated a calamity for which the USSR was as responsible as Nazi Germany – a calamity above all for the Russians themselves. According to recently declassified archives, the country lost 41 million souls in that war, a demographic catastrophe from which she still hasn’t recovered.

Almost half of them were civilian losses, while the military casualties included at least half a million Soviet soldiers executed by their own side. Over 157,000 were condemned by military tribunals – probably twice as many were just shot without even that travesty of justice.

Russia wasn’t an innocent victim in that murderous war: she was one of the murderers, as culpable as the Nazis but much more successful. Largely thanks to the help of those countries who, according to Russian mythology, took no part in the war, the Soviets got to rule almost half of the world.

They no longer do so, having lost thereby their raison d’être. Hence the war and Russia’s ‘single-handed victory’ have been turned into a religion, or rather a gruesome pagan Walpurgisnacht.

 BMWs and Mercedes sporting incendiary bumper stickers saying “We’ll do it again if we have to” and “To Berlin!” are inundating Moscow streets. Starbuck outlets are doling out replicas of the side caps worn by the Soviets during their triumph of 70-odd years ago.

And Vlad, haltingly reading from a crib, is bragging that “there is no, there was no, and there will be no force that can conquer our people… the armed forces of Russia are capable of warding off any potential aggression.”

I’ve got news for Vlad: no one wants to attack Russia. I realise that mouthing that paranoid gibberish is something he has to do to assuage the possible unrest among his half-starving people, which is why he also has to talk about learning “the lessons of the war”.

There’s only one lesson: Russia herself is to blame for the unparalleled losses she suffered in that war. Rather than being proud about losing 41 million in a war Stalin started together with Hitler, the Russians ought to remind themselves what happens when they pounce like rabid dogs on anyone within reach of their fangs.

Or perhaps the Russians can look forward to another successful conquest. After all, they have a powerful ally in their corner: Moldova.