[Salon] World War II, the Ukraine Conflict, and the Bitter Truths of History

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://braveneweurope.com/geoffrey-roberts-world-war-ii-the-ukraine-conflict-and-the-bitter-truths-of-history

Geoffrey Roberts – World War II, the Ukraine Conflict, and the Bitter Truths of History

May 8, 2025

In delusional Europe history is being revised today not by the victors but by the defeated.

Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy

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.

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.

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