BACK IN THE US - BACK IN THE US - BACK IN THE USSR

Monday, May 9, is a Big Day in Russia. Victory Day celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. The Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, is the biggest event in the country’s history; to understand it in American terms, one would have to combine the Fourth of July, Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day, and then multiply by a factor of 10. Historians agree that between June 22, 1941 and May 8, 1845, the USSR lost somewhere between 20-27 million citizens - military and civilian. Most Americans are unaware that the Soviets lost more troops killed at Stalingrad than we did in the entire war on all fronts. In fact, 80 percent of the losses on all sides in all theaters of World War II happened on the Eastern Front. It’s an incontrovertible fact of history that the armies of the Soviet Union were primarily responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany.

There is, however, no recall of the fact that Stalin maniaclly continued to believe in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, against all evidence that Germany was preparing to invade for months before the event, refusing to allow Soviet troops to reposition themselves back from the border in positions that were defendable when the invasion came. His military leaders, their ranks decimated by the purge that had seen nearly all the competent leaders declared “enemies of the revolution” on evidence manufactured against them in Germany, were in no position to try to oppose him. The result was a near-rout.

The Great Patriotic War didn’t become known as The Great Patriotic War until the German armies arrived outside Moscow in November 1941. From the outset of the war, Soviet troops had surrendered to the Germans in large numbers. In most cases this was because they were beaten and defeated and surrounded with little choice in the matter, due to Stalin’s incompetence before the invasion. But in a fair number of cases, soldiers went over to the German side out of opposition to the communist government they were forced to fight for. In fact, a Russian Liberation Army was formed in the fall of 1941 with these troops, led by a Russian general, armed and supported by the Wehrmacht.

Stalin discovered during these opening months of the war that his troops were not willing to give their lives for the glory of the Revolution after 20 years of his increasingly-maniacal tyranny, the Holomodor in Ukraine and the terror of the Great Purge that saw millions of Soviet citizens die of starvation in a state-created famine, or the mass killings by the NKVD of anyone who fell afoul of a local commissar for whatever reason, to be charged with treason against the state and end either in a Gulag worked to death or shot outright in the back of the head. Stalin and the communists were forced to revive Official Patriotism and appeal to the love of Mother Russia to get the people to put forth the massive effort needed to win the war. Coupled with word spreading about German attitudes and actions towards the troops who surrendered and the citizens whose territory was overrun, public opinion finally “came around.”

It’s also a fact of history that the USSR would not have won without the massive transfer of military equipment from the United States through Lend-Lease. This fact has been played down in both the USSR and Russia since the onset of what became the Cold War in 1947, but at a meeting in Moscow in 1946, Josef Stalin actually thanked the American ambassador for Lend-Lease and stated that it the Soviets would not have won without it. One can still find Chevrolet “Deuce-and-a-half” trucks working in Russia, and there is a not-so-surprising resemblance to those trucks in the design of most Soviet and Russian trucks since.

One very sad result of this opening period of the war came at the end in 19145. The Germans had refused to grant Geneva Convention POW status to Soviet POWs from the outset; many ended in the death camps and never came out. Those who survived the intentional poor treatment and outright starvation, despite their pleas to the western Allies to be allowed to stay in the West, were turned over to the Soviets who demanded the unconditional return of their citizens. Once back in Mother Russia, the former prisoners were considered guilty of treason for having surrendered, unless they could prove their capture was the result of circumstances beyond their control - a pilot shot down behind enemy lines, troops wounded and then captured when unable to resist, etc. But the majority ended in Stalin’s Gulag and many of those who were allowed to return to their previous homes were ostracized for their “failure” by their former friends and neighbors.

It’s also a fact of history, though never talked about in either the Soviet Union or Russia, that the die-hard resolution of the troops at the front when holding firm against a German attack, or attacking in their own offensives, was reinforced by special battalions of the NKVD stationed behind the front, to summarily execute for treason any soldier who tried to retreat in the face of the enemy or was less than enthusiastic in advancing in battle.

Thus, Vladimir Putin is only the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and thus secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes. This is also the case in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insistthey are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries.

This autocratic rewriting of history in Russia, which is driven largely by a desire to consolidate power, does not only affect a dictator’s domestic population. These myths of history include expansive territorial ambitions and aggressive foreign policies that threaten neighboring democracies, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine, and are used to whip up nationalist fervor against the United States and NATO.

In “1984,” during his “re-education,” Winston Smith is asked to repeat the Party’s slogan about the past. “Who controls the past controls the future,” he responds obediently. “Who controls the present controls the past.”

Putin, Xi, and Kim share an obsession Orwell would have recognized.

Since arriving in power 24 years ago, Putin has elevated the memory of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War to the status of National Religion and positioned himself as heir to that legacy, the tireless defender of Russia and Russians everywhere against their contemporary threats. He does not, however, allow any invocation of the terror and the strategic blunders committed by Stalin. In this, he approaches the Soviet obsession with historical control, which went so far as to have photographs physically modified to remove those who had become “un-persons” in Soviet history.

Following the demise of the USSR, the Soviet archives were opened to western researchers. Many interesting things were found and beliefs that could not be substantiated at the time were now confirmed. I personally benefitted from that in my three books on the history of the Korean War: “The Frozen Chosen,” “MiG Alley” and “Holding The Line,” in which Soviet records confirmed many Western beliefs about the war at the time, such as the collusion between Stalin and Kim il-Sung over planning the North Korean invasion and Stalin’s promise of actual Soviet support for North Korean forces. The massive unofficial participation of the Red Air Force “volunteers” in the air war that American pilots claimed as fact at the time in the face of Soviet denial and U.S. acceptance of that denial was also shown to be factually accurate.

Once Putin came into office, the archives were closed and he has sealed off the official version of history from scrutiny. New laws were passed that make it a criminal offense to challenge the official account or to question the true scale of Soviet heroism. Independent organizations inside Russia that sought to preserve the memory of Soviet-era atrocities have been shut down and those involved have been accused of being agents of foreign powers.

Putin shares the same outlook as Xi, who has identified “historical nihilism,” which is essentially anything that challenges the regime’s version of history and has made keeping a tight grip on history essential to ensuring the future of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Like Putin, Xi has passed new laws to protect the party’s version of history from scrutiny and silenced dissenting views. He extended the length of the war, moving the start date back to 1931 to include what had previously been treated as a separate regional conflict with Japan. While the change has a credible historical basis, the longer time frame also serves a useful political function by including the earlier period when Communist troops played a more active role in the fighting. In official Chinese history now, China fought first and for the longest of any Allied nations, while Mao Zedong and his Communist revolutionaries are the ones who rallied the population to fight back against the foreign aggressors and demonstrated why the party must always be in power, and why China must build up its military strength.

In this history, China won the Korean War; they had a massive celebration of the Chinese “victory” in Beijing in August 2020 to memorialize the date that Mao Zedong directed the People’s Liberation Army to create the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army and prepare to intervene in the Korean War.

They actually have an argument here. As revealed in the official Chinese records available to foreigners before Xi took power, the Chinese intervention in the Korean War was to prevent any foreign invasion of China, as had happened in the “century of shame” before the Communist victory. The United States learned that lesson so thoroughly in what then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson called at the time “the most thorough defeat of American arms since the Second Battle of Bull Run,” that high-level decisions made about the war in Vietnam ten years later were constantly viewed in the shadow of possible Chinese intervention, despite the fact that China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution chaos and unable to intervene anywhere. The most popular movie in Chinese film history is “The Battle of Changjin,” an account of what is known in the West as the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, that is 180 degrees out of agreement with the history known here. These views of China as a strong country that others dare not interfere with are now widespread across much of contemporary Chinese social media today, as the country’s rivalry with the United States grows and the leadership amplifies the idea that modern China must once again be prepared to fight back against its enemies.

While China’s version of history is at least arguably credible, if tailored to serve the Communist Party’s needs, in North Korea the Kim regime relies on an absurd fiction and outright lies. Since 1953, the government has claimed victory in two great wars. The first being the “war of national liberation” led by first president Kim Il Sung, grandfather of Kim Jong Un. In this history, Kim Il Sung “liberated” the country from Japanese colonial rule at the end of the Second World War, when in fact he was an officer in the Red Army in the Soviet Union at the time, who was plucked by Stalin on the recommendation of Mao Zedong to be installed as leader of the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam when that entity was formed by the USSR following the breakdown of negotiations for the reunification of Korea in 1947. Kim then fought the “Great War of Liberation” to reunify the Korean people, after South Korea provoked the war by invading North Korea with the support of the United States in 1950, securing a “great victory” in the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. Much of the commonly-accepted history of the Korean War that is recognized in the West proves on closer review to be unexamined wartime propaganda that fossilized over 70 years into a “fact-like substances,” but the proof that disqualifies the North Korean version of events was to be found in the Soviet and Chinese official archives before Putin and Xi closed them.

Even as many North Korean citizens regularly go hungry in the impoverished and isolated country, Kim Jong Un has invested ample resources in rebuilding and substantially expanding the country’s war museums. Preserving the official version of the past is evidently more important than providing for the population’s basic needs.

“But how can you stop people remembering things?” asks Winston in 1984. “How can you control memory?” Putin, Xi, and Kim cannot determine what individual citizens think or the individual memories they hold in their familial oral histories, but they can control what is presented on the evening news and the information that is available on the internet. And they can make it very dangerous to challenge the official line in public.

In Russia, now, it is illegal to call the war in Ukraine a war. Russian schoolchildren are being taught that their soldiers are “defenders of peace” who are “liberating” grateful civilians. Putin quotes from the Bible and invokes the Great Patriotic War to underline the righteousness of his cause as he insists that he is fighting “for a world without Nazism.”

The mayor of Melitopol, one of the Ukrainian cities occupied by Russian forces in the invasion, recounted how, in March, he was abducted by Russian troops and told hey had come to “free Ukraine from Nazis.” Russian soldiers scrawled the words “For The Children” on a missile that hit the rail depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, grimly ironic in view of the fact the strike killed many children among the evacuees waiting for a train.

The impulse to rewrite history and appeal to glorious myths to rally popular support is not limited to autocrats. But the real danger arises when the official account becomes the only permitted version of history, as is now the case in Russia, China, and North Korea. Though the leaders of these regimes differ in their approach to the past, all three claim that it is their nation that is under threat, and that they must strengthen their military capabilities and ramp up their political control to defend their citizens.

“Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth,” Winston is told in Orwell’s novel. The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea take a similar view, and that has consequences for all of us.

In 2021, Oxford researchers found almost 50 percent of Russians they surveyed identified more with the Soviet Union than the Russian Federation. That marked an increase in such sentiment over the preceding decade. This makes the appearance of the USSR’s hammer-and-sickle red victory flag flying from the radio antennas of Russian armored vehicles, and the raising of that flag in conquered Ukrainian cities, far less surprising than initially thought.

Putin rules a nation in the grips of a long-term demographic crisis with an aging, shrinking population that is now seeing a major brain drain of its best and brightest as they leave for the West in the aftermath of the Ukrainian invasion..

This coming Monday, Victory Day will be unlike any other celebration of this event in the 77 years since the end of the Second World War.

And let us also not forget that much of what is commonly accepted as “popular” American history has failed to stand up to closer examination in later years. I can personally remember in Eighth Grade Colorado History class reading about the “Battle of Sand Creek,” which I argued unsuccessfully with the teacher sounded much more like a massacre of the Indians, an event that continued my career of “polishing the bench” outside the Assistant Principal’s office and to those notes by teachers in my report cards regarding my “failure to recognize and cooperate with properly-constituted authority.” Unlike the Soviet Union and Russia, a 13-year old studying Colorado History in any class since the 1970s reads about the Sand Creek Massacre, and the perpetrators of that act of genocide have been removed from the list of people to be admired as Founding Fathers of the State of Colorado. Whatever one wants to say about the American political system, the fact it includes the ability to change - though seldom easily - is the most important point in its favor. The problem here is current, when one considers the Big Lie that forms the core of belief of the Trump-dominated Republican Party, in which absolute belief in Trump’s 2020 re-election victory being stolen from him through massive fraud is the sine qua non of any Republican politician’s public utterances.

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