Exposing Russia's Great Patriotic Lies

Russia was not one of the Allies during World War II.

If Donald Trump succeeds in his latest quixotic exploit—designating May 8 as a national holiday called “Victory Day for World War II”—he may end up picking a fight with Vladimir Putin. All good Russians and former Soviets know that according to the Kremlin, Victory Day is not on May 8—when the Western Allies mark their triumph over Nazi Germany—but on May 9.

Why the separate Soviet celebration? May 8 is the only real Victory Day, but for decades the West has entertained politically convenient fictions about the USSR’s “special role” in the Second World War—or “the Great Patriotic War,” as Russia describes the selective history it would like others to remember. As Russian troops bludgeon Ukraine—some hoisting the hammer and sickle flag of their World War II predecessors—it’s time to put these Great Patriotic Lies to rest.

The greatest such lie is that the Soviet Union should even be counted among the Allies. Generously, we might call the USSR a co-belligerent of the US and UK after 1941, when Germany invaded. But 1941 is a convenient starting point for the Russian regime to remember the war. In August 1939, the Soviets and the Nazis struck a deal that saw them launch the war in Europe as partners. The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact split Poland between the two dictatorships and assigned Finland, the Baltics, and Moldova to the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin was so intent on signing on to the Nazis’ conquest of Europe that he dismissed his foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, a Jew who favored a collective security arrangement with Britain and France, and someone who was naturally disdained in Berlin. Upon taking Litvinov’s place, Vyacheslav Molotov remarked that “Jews formed an absolute majority in the [Soviet Foreign Ministry] leadership and among the ambassadors. It wasn’t good.” A month later, Wehrmacht and Red Army paraded side-by-side in the city of Brest-Litovsk after jointly vanquishing Poland. Curious that the Russian government does not want us to remember that victory day.

Of course, the Nazis ultimately invaded the USSR. But if two men carried out an armed robbery only for one of the burglars to turn his gun against his erstwhile co-conspirator, we’d still label them both as criminals. This is how we ought to understand the Soviet Union’s role in World War II.

Do not take my criticism of the official Russian history as disrespecting the enormous sacrifice of the Soviet people in the fight against Nazism. But remember that the Soviet Union was a multiethnic empire and Russia cannot lay an exclusive claim to its legacy. Every one of the USSR’s constituent nations paid with the lives of their sons and daughters for Stalin’s shortsighted pact with the Nazis.

Now it is Russia that abuses the memory of that historic sacrifice in order to abuse its former colonies today. The latter-day fascists in Moscow cry “fascism” as they launch their own blitzkrieg against Ukraine (7 million Ukrainians served in the Red Army in World War II). Backed up by spurious accusations of genocide, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 (700,000 Georgians served in the Red Army). Russia demands fealty from countries like Poland and the Baltic states whose territory it annexed under a deal with the Nazis. Russia likes to point to the war as justification for its anti-American stance, while omitting America and Britain’s crucial role in resupplying the Soviet Union after 1941.

All of this brings us up to tomorrow’s inauspicious date: May 9. For decades on that day, Soviet leaders made fearsome demonstrations of tanks and troops across Red Square. Their Russian successors have continued the tradition. While the Germans surrendered just before midnight on May 8, the Soviets insisted on a distinct commemoration the following day, slyly pointing out that it was already May 9 in Moscow—a transparently disingenuous argument. It may have been the ninth for Stalin and his cronies, comfortably ensconced behind the Kremlin walls, but it was the eighth for the soldiers who fought and died to take the war to the heart of the German Reich.

The reality of May 9 is this: dictators don’t like to share, and Stalin needed his own day apart from the pesky capitalists in Washington and London to glorify Soviet victory. The Russians have their excuses for seeking special attention—namely, that the Americans and the Brits supposedly abandoned them in Europe. Never mind that the US was leading a massive fight against Imperial Japan on the other side of the world. The US and UK did eventually invade the Nazi-occupied continent—in Italy in 1943 and in France a year later. The Soviets, by contrast, never joined them in the Pacific. Japan was essentially a defeated nation when the Red Army swept into northeast China, Korea, and the Kuril Islands days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to seize the spoils of American victory.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, some of its former republics followed Russia in continuing to observe Victory Day on May 9, whether out of fear or force of habit. Following Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukraine finally switched to May 8, as some of its Eastern European neighbors have as well. Those countries learned the hard way that Russia’s Great Patriotic Lies are not harmless folklore but pernicious myths leveraged in service of an expansionist agenda. And the fiction of May 9 is central to that mythology.

We should follow their example in repudiating these distortions in favor of the plain truth: That eight decades ago, two murderous dictatorships launched a war of conquest in Europe, and today, one of them is still carrying out its bloody rampage.

The world cannot afford to grant Russia another Victory Day—history tells us that the only chance for peace for Ukraine and freedom for Russia is for Kyiv to win decisively.