Wartime “Tears” in Russia

 

Russian citizens marching on May 9, 2019 in St Petersburg

 

ZOBOKO.COM

Most Americans today believe “we defeated Nazi Germany,” as President Obama wrote on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. It is a misconception fostered by Hollywood films that portray the US landing at Normandy in June 1944 as the beginning of the destruction of Hitler’s Germany.

In truth, America won the war in the Pacific, against Japan, but the Soviet Union fought and destroyed the Nazi war machine on the “Eastern Front” almost alone from 1941 to 1944, from Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad, and eventually to Berlin in 1945. Some 75 to 80 percent of all German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front. By the time US and British forces landed at Normandy, Hitler had insufficient divisions to withstand the invasion, too many of them destroyed or still fighting oncoming Soviet forces from the east.

Soviet losses were almost unimaginable. More than 27 million citizens died, 60 to 70 percent of them ethnic Russians. Some 1,700 cities and towns were all but destroyed. Most families lost a close or extended member. Perhaps most tellingly, only three of every hundred boys who graduated from high school in 1941–42 returned from the war. This meant that millions of Soviet children never knew their fathers and that millions of Soviet women never married. (They were known as “Ivan’s widows,” more than a few doomed to lonely lives in the often-harsh post-war Soviet Union.)

This is an enduring part of Russia’s “holiday with tears.” This is in large measure why so many Russians, not just the Kremlin, have watched with alarm as NATO has crept from Germany to their country’s borders since the late 1990s. Why they resent and fear Washington’s claims on the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. And why they say of NATO’s ongoing buildup within conventional firing range of Russia, “Never has so much Western military power been amassed on our borders since the Nazi invasion in June 1941.” This is the “living history” that underlies Russia’s reaction to the new Cold War. 

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