Every year, in May, the world celebrates the Day of Victory. It glorifies the victory over fascism, the deadliest enemy of humanity ever. However, over the last years we have been witnessing that the Soviet Union’s key role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and its satellites is being revised.
Regrettably, our opponents are trying to belittle our country’s role in World War II. The Red Army’s liberation mission is now cynically placed on the same footing with the Nazi occupation and the war crimes of the Nazi collaborators, which claimed millions of lives. The monuments to Soviet liberators of Europe are even being desecrated and destroyed.
It is a common knowledge that fascism was defeated by the combined efforts of the anti-Hitler coalition states and the resistance forces in the countries controlled by the Nazis. Each and every one has contributed to our victory by fighting their part in this deadliest war. Malta was no exception.
The Maltese islands were among the most intensively bombed territories in the world and suffered countless air raids by the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica. The Allies on other theatres of World War II also made a significant contribution to the victory and suffered huge losses (China, the US, the UK, etc).
The war in Europe began with an attack by the Nazi Germany on Poland on September 1, 1939, but a number of events led to it.
The main one was the Munich agreement signed in 1938 by Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy. As a result, Czechoslovakia was made to ‘voluntarily’ transfer part of its territory to Germany. Just a few months later, in March 1939, it was occupied. Nonetheless, soon after the ‘Munich peacemakers’ realised that they had made a gross miscalculation and their illusory hope to divert the war threat from their borders has miserably failed.
Until the very last moment, the USSR used every opportunity to build up an anti-Hitler coalition. After the negotiations with France and Great Britain failed, the Soviet Union had to sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in August 1939. It is noteworthy that this agreement was the last in line in a series of similar pacts with Germany signed by other European states (Poland, 1934; Great Britain, 1935; France, 1938; Lithuania and Latvia, 1939).
The Soviet Union had to sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in August 1939
By the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany, having absorbed most of the European countries, was one step away from the Soviet borders. The war against the Soviet Union started on June 22, 1941 and ended on May 9, 1945 in Berlin with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.
I would like to draw attention to a rather controversial interpretation of the historical events that changed the entire course of World War II. Nowadays some Western historians claim that the Battle of El Alamein (1942) could be considered as one of such key points, because it resulted in the British victory over the German-Italian troops.
The North African war theatre – not Stalingrad, was the bloodiest battle in world history, where the Soviet Union lost a million people – more than the British and Americans during the whole war.
If one compares the Stalingrad and El Alamein losses (50,000 soldiers and 1,500,000 elite Wehrmacht troopers respectively), the picture will be crystal clear. The words of Sir Winston Churchill: “It is the Russian Army that tore the guts out of the German military machine”, are relevant here.
The war was coming to an end. The Soviet soldiers defended Moscow, lifted the Siege of Leningrad, fought the Battle of Stalingrad – the turning point of the entire World War II, heroically won the Battle of Kursk and many others. After that, the Red Army moved West for the liberation of Europe.
Furthermore, in August 1945, the Soviet Union, being an ally of the Western powers, fulfilled its obligations and entered into the Soviet-Japanese war. Imperial Japan’s forces continued to fight even after American atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. The Soviet Manchurian operation defeated the 1.5-million Kwantung army in a mere 10 days. The Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945 brought an end to World War II.
While recognising the great contribution of other countries, one cannot doubt that the heaviest burden of war was borne by the Soviet Union. Between 1941 and 1942, the USSR alone had to counter fight over three-quarters of all German troops. After the opening of the second front in 1944, the Eastern front, which was four times longer than the North African, Italian and Western European fronts combined together, remained the main war theatre for Germany.
The Red Army defeated 507 Nazi and 100 Nazi satellites’ divisions, which was almost 3.5 times more than what the Allied forces have achieved in all the World War II fronts.
The total losses of the Wehrmacht in the war reached 13.4 million people, among them 10 million people on the Eastern front (over 73 per cent).
The victory came at a very high price for the Soviet Union. Total human losses of the USSR during World War II amounted to 26.6 million people (or 14 per cent of the total pre-war population) against 427,000 casualties in the US (0.3 per cent) and 412,000 casualties in the UK (0.6 per cent).
Many world leaders have emphasised the key role the Red Army played in achieving the victory. In his personal message to Joseph Stalin dated February 23, 1945, Churchill maintained that: “Future generations will acknowledge their debt to the Red Army as unreservedly as do we who have lived to witness these proud achievements.”
Likewise said Franklin Roosevelt, stating that “Russian forces have destroyed more armed power of our enemies than all the other United Nations put together”.
With regret we witness nowadays how a number of historians, supported by some European governments, attempt to present Nazi collaborators as independence fighters and desecrate and denigrate the memory of the true liberators. Such actions should be denounced as they go against the resolutions of the Nuremberg trials, which condemned fascist regimes and their accomplices and officially ended World War II.
Vladimir Malygin is Russian Ambassador to Malta.