By Patrick Armstrong, Website, 5/8/25
A couple of days ago I read a rather distressing discussion on X about US lend-lease to the USSR. Distressing because of the combination of impenetrable ignorance and unshakeable conviction. One side yelling that US lend-lease made no difference at all and you’re an idiot; the other yelling that it made all the difference and you’re the idiot. Like a bunch of drunks arguing about something in the Star Wars movies.
More ignorance on the Western side than on the Russian? Not sure actually in what I read although we have to agree that Trump just set the American bar pretty high. And it soon degenerated into who Hitler’s best friends were. Each was certain that he had all the facts and the other side had none.
Would the Soviets have beaten the nazis without US (and British and Canadian) aid? I’m inclined to think so although certainly at a greater cost and more years of struggle. Did the aid make a difference? Of course it did; in food and trucks especially. But you can make the argument that the Germans had lost their best chance after the Battle of Moscow in 1941 and after Stalingrad there was no chance. David Glantz has put it quite neatly I think: the Germans won the summers of 1941 and 1942 but the Soviets won the other summers and all the winters. Lend-lease took some time to build up and didn’t really peak until 1943 so less of an effect in those vital years of 1941 and 1942. (Years ago I was surprised to see a Canadian-made Valentine tank in a Berlin battle film. Apparently the Soviets liked the tank because it was well-armoured and easy to maintain, but I can’t think the 2-pounder gun was much use in 1945.)
Who won the war? The Allies did. But you can’t forget the 80/20 division. Who suffered the most? The Soviets undeniably. Where were the most important Axis defeats? On the Eastern Front, no question. (Except for the Battle of Britain.)
Who started the war? Well we all had a responsibility: Stalin spent six years trying to organise an anti-Hitler coalition but failed for various reasons and then became the last man to do a deal with Hitler. (It was infuriating in those X rants and counter-rants when some ignoramus threw out the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement as if that were the final word. The certainty of facts without context.)
Probably the most noticeable thing on the Western side was the incomprehension of the gigantic scale of the fighting on the Eastern Front. I remember remarking when I first read Liddell-Hart’s history 40-50 years ago on the disproportionate space given to the North African fighting versus the Eastern Front. I have some sympathy for him because the Soviets weren’t telling us much then but still. And that disproportion persists in the West although there’s no excuse any more. And so does the view that the Soviets had no skill: on the contrary, once they got going, they beat the Germans strategically and operationally and surprised them almost every time. These people should be required to read at least one book by Glantz before they’re allowed to open their mouths again. And listen to the lecture by Jonathan House about the three German alibis.
And from the Russian side the tiresome conviction that D-Day only happened because the Western allies saw that the Soviets were winning and felt they’d better jump in. No, D-Day happened as soon as it could. I don’t think the Soviets had any idea of how difficult a seaborne invasion is against a defended coast. And how would they? Have the Russians or Soviets ever done one?
The Europeans secretly supported Hitler. Yes, many did, but they lost that argument in 1939.
Or Allen Dulles fooling around in Switzerland. He did but it was a personal initiative by a guy whose whole career was based on the assumption that the rules were whatever he said they were. Unconditional surrender was primarily Roosevelt’s initiative and he and Churchill agreed to it in January 1943. That, not Dulles’ fantasies, was and remained official policy.
Operation Unthinkable. Well, maybe the name gives you a clue.
But over the years much has been forgotten. The clearest example is that opinion poll record that shows the French in 1945 knowing the Soviets had played the biggest part (80/20) but these days believing the USA had.
As for Trump’s recent assertion, I have a horrible feeling that most of my neighbours, few of whom have ever heard of Canada’s Hundred Days, would agree with him.
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I was there for the 50th. A different time. The Western Allies showed up to do honour. In those far-off days we knew the difference between Stepan Bandera and Lyudmilla Pavlichenko and which side which was on. Today the Canadian Parliament and British VE-Day ceremony organisers have forgotten.
Which, of course, feeds into the conviction many Russians already have that Marshal Zhukov got it right when he (reportedly) said “We have saved Europe from fascism and they will never forgive us for it”. (Did he actually say that? Certainly lots of Russians seem to think he did.)
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World War II, the Ukraine Conflict, and the Bitter Truths of History
By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 5/8/25
A group called ‘Historians for Ukraine’ has published an ‘open letter to the people of the USA’ that denounces Russian disinformation about the Second World War. [https://historiansforukraine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20250406-EN-LETTER-historians-for-ukraine.pdf]
While such missives have become increasingly common since the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, among this one’s signatories are reputable historians, whose names lend credibility to the letter’s strident denunciation of Putin’s ‘weaponization’ of World War Two history.
The letter is timed and designed to put a negative spin on Russia’s celebration and commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
Eighty percent of all World War II combat took place on the Soviet-German front. During four years of war the Red Army destroyed 600 enemy divisions and inflicted ten million casualties on the Wehrmacht (75% of its total wartime losses), including three million dead. Red Army casualties totalled sixteen million, including eight million dead (three million in German POW camps). Adding to the attrition was the death of sixteen million Soviet civilians. Among them were a million Soviet Jews, executed by the Germans in 1941–2 at the beginning of the Holocaust.
The Soviet Union’s material losses were equally staggering: six million houses, 98,000 farms, 32,000 factories, 82,000 schools, 43,000 libraries, 6,000 hospitals, and thousands of miles of roads and railways. In total, the Soviet Union lost 25% of its national wealth and 14% of its population as a direct result of the war.
‘Historians for Ukraine’ claim support from the LRE Foundation, a worthy, Europe-based organisation, whose laudable mission is to promote “a multi-perspective understanding of the history of World War II. As each country had a different wartime experience, it is our goal to present each perspective in relation to each other.”1
‘Historians for Ukraine’, however, are interested in only one perspective – the tired, anti-Soviet story that has long been promoted by western cold warriors, a narrative that begins with the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact and ends with communist subjugation of Eastern Europe in 1945.
The problem with this one-sided narrative is that the Soviets were far from being the first appeasers of Hitler and the Nazis. It was the British and French governments who pursed a deal with Hitler in the 1930s, while the Soviet Union campaigned for the collective containment of German expansionism. It was the Soviets who spent years trying to strengthen the League of Nations as a collective security organisation. It was the Soviet state that stood by Republican Spain during its fascist-initiated civil war. When London and Paris pressurised Czechoslovakia to concede the Sudetenland to Hitler, Moscow was ready to fulfil its mutual security commitments to Prague, provided the French did likewise. It was Poland that snatched a slice of Czech territory after Munich, not the Soviet Union.
The United States’ role in relation to these events was one of a bystander that passed a series of isolationist Neutrality Acts.
Before concluding his pact with Hitler, Stalin spent months negotiating a triple alliance with Britain and France that would have guaranteed the security of all European states under Nazi threat, including Poland. But the anti-communist Poles did not want or think they needed an alliance with the USSR when they had the pre-existing backing of Britain and France.
An Anglo-Soviet-French triple alliance might well have deterred Hitler from attacking Poland in September 1939, but London and Paris dragged their feet during the negotiations and as war approached Stalin began to doubt the utility of a Soviet-Western alliance. Fearful the Soviet Union would be left to fight Germany alone while Britain and France stood on the sidelines, Stalin decided to do a deal with Hitler that kept the USSR out of the coming war and provided some guarantees for Soviet security.
None of this complicated prewar history is alluded to in the ‘open letter’, let alone dealt with. Instead, its authors depict the Soviet Union as simply Hitler’s ally and as a co-belligerent in the invasion of Poland.
Actually, the short-lived Soviet-German alliance of 1939-1940 did not develop until after the partition of Poland. It was Germany’s crushing of Poland’s military power – and the failure of Britain and France to effectively aid their Polish ally – that prompted Stalin to occupy the territory allocated to the USSR under the terms of a secret Soviet-German spheres influence agreement – an action that Winston Churchill wholeheartedly supported: “We could have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present line as friends and allies of Poland instead of as invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.”
The Polish territories occupied by the Soviets lay east of the so-called ‘Curzon Line’ -the ethnographical frontier between Russia and Poland demarcated at Versailles – mostly populated by Jews, Belorussians and Ukrainians, many of whom welcomed the Red Army as liberators from Warsaw’s rule. Such enthusiasm did not outlast the violent process of sovietisation and communisation through which these territories were incorporated into the USSR as part of a unified Belorussia and a united Ukraine.
Nonetheless, it was Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet pact that prised Western Ukraine from Poland. At the end of the war, Churchill pleaded for the return of Lvov to the Poles, but Stalin refused, saying the Ukrainians would never forgive him. As compensation for the loss of its eastern territories, Poland was given East Prussia and other parts of Germany – a transfer that resulted in the brutal displacement of millions of Germans from their ancestral lands.
Also allocated to the Soviet sphere of influence were Finland and the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. According to the open letter: “shortly after the start of the war, the Soviets also attacked Finland. Then in 1940 they invaded and annexed Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.” But, again, the story is not quite so simple.
Stalin’s preferred option was a diplomatic deal with the Finns, including an exchange of territories, his aim being to enhance Leningrad’s security. Only when those negotiations failed did the Red Army invade Finland in December 1939. Soviet losses were enormous but by March 1940 the Finns had been forced to accept Stalin’s terms. Finland could have sat out the rest of the Second World War as a neutral state but the country’s leaders chose, disastrously, to join Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, besieging Leningrad from the north, and thereby contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the blockaded city.
Stalin’s aims in relation to the Baltic States were initially quite modest – loose spheres of influence arrangements based on mutual assistance pacts and Soviet military bases. “We are not going to seek their sovietisation”, Stalin told his comrades, “the time will come when they will do that themselves!” However, by summer 1940 Stalin feared the Baltics were slipping back into the German orbit. There was also political pressure from local leftists who wanted the Soviets to make the revolution for them – to use the Red Army to overthrow the old regimes of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
As in Poland, the sovietisation of the Baltic States and their incorporation into the USSR was extremely violent, including the deportation of 25,000 ‘undesirables’. Such repression could not but feed into the widespread Baltic collusion with the Nazi occupation that followed Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Somewhat grudgingly, the open letter admits the Soviet Union “suffered horrifying losses” during the war, including in Ukraine, and also notes the Red Army’s liberation of Eastern Europe in 1944-1945, but it bemoans the resultant repressive communist regimes. Unmentioned is that many of the countries occupied by the Red Army – Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia – and then taken over by the communists – were ex-Axis states.
Authoritarianism was the hallmark of Eastern European politics long before the communist takeover. The country that came closest to a western-style democracy was Czechoslovakia, where the communists and socialists won a majority of votes in postwar elections. Support for the left was weaker elsewhere but there is no doubting the mass popular basis of East European communism in the early postwar years.
The postwar international context is all important to understanding the transformation of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe into a tightly controlled Stalinist bloc. It was the polarisations and conflicts of the cold war that encouraged the radicalisation of Soviet and communist policy in Eastern Europe, not least in Czechoslovakia, where a communist coup in 1948 overthrew the broad coalition that had hitherto governed the country.
The one country able to find a way through these tensions was Finland – because its postwar leaders wisely refrained from involving western powers in their internal political struggles. Hence Finland remained unoccupied by Stalin and evolved into a semi-detached member of the Soviet bloc that was friendly to Moscow but in control of its domestic sovereignty. Absent the cold war, what came to be called ‘Finlandisation’ might have worked for other Soviet bloc states as well.
Among the Red Army’s most implacable enemies were those Ukrainian nationalists who actively collaborated with the Nazis, participated in the Holocaust, and ethnically exterminated tens of thousands of Poles. Those same nationalists are widely lauded as heroes and patriots in contemporary Ukraine – an inconvenient truth evaded by the authors of the open letter, who claim that “Putin’s assertion that Ukraine today glorifies the Nazis and their collaborators is notonly factually incorrect but insulting to this nation’s own tragic history.”
All politicians distort and manipulate the past for political purposes, and Putin is no exception. But the same is true of polemicizing propagandists.
The Nazi-Soviet pact is a fact but so is Polish collaboration with Hitler in the 1930s. The Soviet Union did cooperate with Nazi Germany but it also played the main role in the defeat of Hitler. Stalin was responsible for vast mass repressions but he was not a racist or genocidal dictator and nor was he a warmonger. The Red Army’s invasion of Eastern Poland was reprehensible but it also unified Belorussia and Ukraine. During the Second World War the Red Army was responsible for many atrocities but it did not commit mass murder and it did, together with its western allies, liberate Europe from the Nazis.
‘Historians for Ukraine’ hope for a suitable diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict but their letter’s shrill attack on the Russian perspective on the Second World War is inimical to the cause of peace.