NEWS AND VIEWS: Understanding the Great Patriotic War (05/22/05)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Understanding the Great Patriotic War

by David Marples

The 60th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe has already elicited heated debate and controversy, particularly over the role of the former Soviet Union as a partner of the Western allies. Lithuania, for example, declined to participate in the celebrations in Moscow on the grounds that the war brought 40 years of Soviet occupation.

Why is there such diversity of opinions on a war that brought some 61 million deaths worldwide? Why is it impossible to reach a consensus today on what happened?

To begin with, a few basic facts might be of relevance. In the Western world, we commemorate the loss of some 42,000 Canadian troops, along with 388,000 British and 295,000 Americans. Most of our troops died at Dieppe and Hong Kong, and in the post-D-Day campaigns in France, Belgium and Holland.

The war on the Eastern Front, however, was on a different scale and signified different things to different participants. War losses in the Soviet Union are estimated at 25.6 million (higher in some sources), almost 50 percent of total losses worldwide, and the Axis occupation of Belarus and Ukraine brought proportionally more deaths than for any other single region of occupation. The brutality of these years surpassed anything seen in the century.

In the immediate aftermath of the Allied victory, the Soviet authorities developed a myth of a united anti-Fascist struggle that belied certain realities; that the border populations had for the most part welcomed the German invaders, particularly after the Soviet NKVD massacred the prison populations before retreating; and that the Soviet leadership under Stalin and Zhukov intimidated and persecuted their own officers in the early months of the war, causing thousands of unnecessary casualties rather than order retreat from encirclements.

The Germans, in turn, alienated the population through their brutality, massacring Communists, Jews and other "enemies of the Reich," and establishing brutal camp systems of slave workers. Throughout the war, the Allies preferred to ignore Soviet atrocities in a common effort against the Axis powers.

Subsequently, undivided attention to German war crimes has at times left the public with a highly misleading impression of the role of the Soviet leadership. Why, for example, were Soviet losses on the Eastern Front four times higher than those of the defeated Germans? The great advance of 1943-1944, which brought the Red Army close to the German border, occurred through the calculated sacrifice of Soviet troops for short-term gains.

In the Baltic states, western Belarus, western Ukraine and other border regions, the return of the Red Army was regarded with far more trepidation than the arrival of the Germans in the summer of 1941. Once outside Soviet territory, the Red Army went on a rampage that left some 3 million dead, an orgy of revenge that affected mainly civilians and refugees, while in the borderlands civil wars broke out as early as 1943, resulting in brutal massacres on both sides.

Ukrainian insurgents, for example, killed one of the heroes of Stalingrad, the commander of the First Ukrainian Front, Gen. Nikolay Vatutin, in February 1944; they also fought against Poles for control over the region.

These events, in short, were far too complex to be categorized within the framework of a Great Patriotic War.

Alongside the epic and brutal German-Soviet struggle was a series of 'mini-wars,' while the Soviet advance left most of Eastern Europe under Moscow's control for the next four decades, partly with the compliance of the Western allies. Most soldiers returning from the victorious Soviet advance were soon dispatched to the gulag, alongside captured German POWs. Ten years later, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was still appealing for the return of these latter prisoners.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has appealed for the recognition of anti-Soviet insurgents affiliated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to be recognized as war veterans. Conversely, other Ukrainian leaders, such as Communist Petro Symonenko, regard the UPA as traitors who massacred their own citizens and collaborated with the Germans.

The umbrella organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), is even more controversial, particularly as its most influential leaders made up part of the post-war emigration to Western Europe and North America, and in its earlier years OUN collaborated closely with the German High Command.

Like any conflict, the second world war means different things to different parties. For most Canadians, the war was a straightforward struggle, alongside the British, for the defense of the empire against Fascist aggression. After Pearl Harbor, Americans were similarly united for the campaign against Japan and Germany. For the Jews of Europe, the war was simply a quest for survival and one that barely succeeded.

Elsewhere on the Eastern Front, however, the war represented for many citizens little more than a change of occupants, and it ended with the complete victory of one dictator over another. To suggest, therefore, that Canadians have a common cause with Vladimir Putin in celebrating the victory of the USSR is to simplify the issue.

On the one hand, the victory of the West owed everything to the triumph of the Red Army; but on the other, the relentless drive of the Red Army into the heart of Europe only strengthened the regime of Stalin, a man who remains a hero to some, while to others he was the perpetrator of appalling crimes against his own people.

Dr. David Marples is a professor of history at the University of Alberta and director of the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. This article originally appeared in the May 7, 2005, edition of the Edmonton Journal.

| Home Page |