Soviets ‘broke Hitler, not West’, says Putin

Vladimir Putin is leading criticism of ‘pseudo-history’ being used to diminish the huge USSR role in defeating the Nazis.

Vladimir Putin believes the Soviet sacrifice in World War II is consistently underplayed in the West. Picture: AFP

As the leaders of Britain, France and Germany marked the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Moscow was accusing the West of employing “pseudo-history” to diminish the Soviet role in defeating the Nazis.

President Vladimir Putin said it was “not a problem” that he was not invited to join other world leaders marking the anniversary on Thursday.

Mr Putin, who was invited to the 70th anniversary event in 2014, said he had “enough business” of his own in Russia.

However, Mr Putin believes the Soviet sacrifice is consistently underplayed in the West — and he may be right.

Between June 1941, when the Soviet Union was attacked, and June 1944, when the western ­Allies opened what Russians call the “second front” in France, the Red Army suffered massive ­casualties. An estimated 24 million Soviet people died in the war (about 10 million of them military personnel), against seven million Germans and 450,000 British. The Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43 helped turn the tide of the German advance, overstretching Hitler’s forces, which the Red Army then chased back to Berlin.

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of Russia’s foreign ministry, cited the Kursk tank battle as another decisive moment, whereas, she said, the Normandy landings “did not fundamentally influence the result” of the war.

In the summer of 1943 at Kursk, at least 7000 Soviet tanks defeated a smaller Wehrmacht force. More than a quarter of a million Red Army troops were killed, captured or went missing.

Historians have recorded how Winston Churchill was still trying to stall the opening of a second front when he met Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt at Tehran in November 1943.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov voiced a common view this week when he wrote that “false interpretations of history” were belittling his ancestors. “Young people are being told that the main credit in victory over Nazism and liberation of Europe goes not to the Soviet troops but to the West due to the landing in Normandy, which took place less than a year before Nazism was defeated.”

Critics of Russia’s stance recall that the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1939 that lasted two years, with Moscow supplying 865,000 tons of oil, 1.5 million tons of grain and other products to Berlin. During the Battle of Britain, Soviet weather ships were sending meteorological reports to the German air force.

In a poll in 2017 almost two thirds of Russians agreed the ­Soviet Union could have been victorious alone.

British historian Antony Beevor said at the time that it was “absolutely untrue” that the Soviet Union could have won without the Allies. The Soviet Union “broke the back of the Wehrmacht”, he said, but the western Allies’ bombing in Germany, US aid to the Soviet Union and the provision of American vehicles were vital to victory, he said.

His fellow historian Max Hastings agreed that economic aid to Moscow had been “enormously important” and Allied air power had played a role.

But the Soviet Union “probably could have won the war on its own, because the German war economy was much weaker than everyone understood at the time”, he said.

Hastings said the main reason for the high number of Soviet casualties was the fact that “between 1941 and 1944, the western Allies, with a considerable ­degree of cynicism, left the Russians to fight the Germans on their own”.

The Times