But while the Russian – or, more correctly, Soviet – role in defeating Hitler is beyond question and deserves wider attention and recognition, there are several reasons why the Western acknowledgement of the eastern front will always remain qualified and somewhat ambiguous.
Firstly, while Russia continues to variously deny, downplay or excuse the fact, the Soviet Union was the initial co-aggressor in World War Two and for the first two years a Nazi ally and collaborator. Stalin might have had legitimate realpolitik reasons for the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, in effect sacrificing Europe to win more time to prepare for the inevitable war with Germany (nice in theory, the gambit in any case did not work out in practice), but the fact remains that in concert with Hitler, Stalin invaded Poland and was rewarded with its eastern half, subsequently also helping himself to Bessarbia, annexing the Baltic states and invading Finland. In turn, the fact that Hitler assured himself he would not be facing a war on two fronts, which doomed Germany in World War One, allowed him to successively snatch Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia and Greece, giving Germany a complete dominance over the continental Europe from the Atlantic to the Bug river and the Arctic Circle to Crete. And while Great Britain stood alone against Germany for a year from mid-1940 to mid-1941, Soviet resources and produce kept flowing in, feeding and arming the Nazi monster. This makes Stalin’s subsequent anger over the Allied delay in launching the Second Front in the West quite hypocritical – where was the Second Front in the East while Luftwaffe was blitzing Britain and its troops were battling Italians and Rommel in north Africa?
Secondly, without in any way diminishing the German barbarity in the east, a significant proportion of the Soviet military and civilian casualties were unnecessary and resulted from the communist government’s complete and utter disregard for the lives and well-being of its subjects. Stalin fought the war as he fought the peace at home. The man who prior to 1941 had managed to send somewhere upwards of 15 million of his own people to an early grave, clearly wasn’t going to spare the long suffering population when faced with an external existential threat. The Soviet Union might not have (at least initially) had much else, but it certainly had people, and they were sacrificed in obscene numbers by the man in the Kremlin and his minions on the ground. For most of the war, several Red Army soldiers were dying for every one German, while obeying absurd orders to stand ground or frontally attack in total disregard for the local circumstances or for that matter any reasonable tactical and strategic consideration. When Eisenhower and Zhukov caught up some time later in the war and the conversation turned to the best method of clearing mine fields, the Russian astonished the Allied Commander-in-Chief when he nominated simply sending the infantry through as the easiest and the cheapest method. This wasn’t a joke either; it was the way the Red Army fought from the first days of Barbarossa all the way to Berlin, even though the eventual overwhelming material superiority did save many an Ivan’s life in the later stages of the conflict. Not enough, however, to wipe out the entire generation of men born in the mid-1920s.
Thirdly, while the Red Army did indeed end the brutal Nazi occupation of the Central and the Eastern Europe, it did not bring freedom in any meaningful sense of the word, except perhaps (in most cases) freedom from sudden death. Debates about similarities and differences between the two totalitarian systems will no doubt continue well into the future. Unquestionably, for an average Slav, the Soviet domination was a better option that the Nazi one. Nazis, by and large, considered Slavs to be subhuman (though making some allowances, often quite significant, for their Slavic allies, like the Slovaks, the Croats or the Bulgarians), fit only to be initially enslaved and eventually exterminated. This was the far deadlier and much more ideological continuation of Germany’s 1000-year “drang nach osten” or the “civilising” mission to expand into the fertile east. Particular hatred was reserved for the Poles, who stood as a barrier for most of that millennium, preventing the dream of lebensraum from being realised. Russia was a much more recent enemy, having overlaid its Slavic barbarity with a Bolshevik malignancy. Even the initial Nazi plans called for starving between 25-30 million Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians in order to free up food and resources for Germany. Communists could be deadly too, of course, and both the Reds and the Blacks were fond of decimating the local elites and intelligencia, but the Soviets at least did not see their Slavic brethren as subhumans but as proletarian masses to be converted to the glories of Marxism-Leninism.
Be that as it may, the Soviet liberation did not bring liberty or independence to the people of Eastern Europe. That had to wait until 1989-91.
