Does history repeat itself? No, it turns a somersault.
Eighty years ago the Allies, principally the US, poured materiel into Russia to support Stalin. Today the West, principally the US, is supplying Ukraine with materiel to fight a new Stalin. The similarities between Stalin and Putin are obvious: dictatorship, military incompetence, poor equipment, total disregard for loss of life, purges of opposition. Stalin slugged it out and Putin will do the same. But this war of attrition is weakening Russia and I suggest strengthening China’s place in the world order. This is why the West wants Russia to lose but does not want China to win. That’s tricky.
The account of the war on the Eastern Front eighty years ago has been instructive. You may remember I spent a morning in a museum in Minsk in 2019. I now know it did not portray a wholly honest or accurate account. Because Hitler lost, the narrative of the war on the Eastern Front was written almost unchallenged by Stalin. John Mosier challenges this and I commend his account.
Stalin only won because Hitler was forced to divert his armies and divisions to other theatres. Then Stalin took advantage of his Allies to make a land grab in Eastern Europe. We still believe Stalin’s narrative of Russian sacrifice to achieve victory. We forget, or haven’t been told, that the Germans had superior weapons, better trained troops and superior leadership.
“The human cost of World War II on the Eastern Front was enormous. The Soviet Union lost about 10 percent of its prewar population, although deaths were heavily concentrated in what are now the independent countries of Ukraine and Belarus. Some 5 to 7 million Ukrainians perished. Belarus lost as much as a third of its prewar population; almost the whole of the country’s Jewish population—some 750,000 people—were killed in the Holocaust.
Estimates of Soviet military casualties vary widely, but 11 million killed and missing is a conservative and often cited total. A Soviet officer who served with the high command in Berlin and left the Soviet service in 1949 placed total military losses at 13,600,000—8,500,000 dead or missing in battle; 2,600,000 dead in prison camps; 2,500,000 died of wounds—and estimated civilian casualties at 7,000,000. These figures have been widely accepted in Germany, but most U.S. compilations, based on Soviet announcements, list 6,000,000 to 7,500,000 battle deaths. Calculations made on the basis of population distribution by age and sex in the 1959 Soviet census give some credence to the higher figures, for they seem to indicate losses of from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 males of military age in World War II.” (Basil Liddell Hart, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Yes, history is repeating itself.
I had the great privelege of spending an afternoon in East Berlin guided by Sir Robert Birley. This was in 1974. He had been Educational Advisor to the Central Commission of Berlin during reconstruction. He went on to be headman of Charterhouse then Eton. We were followed most obviously by a hoard of Stasi from Checkpoint Charlie onwards. We headed for the WW11 museum via a failed attempt to visit an old colleague which must have been a relief to her. In the museum Sir Robert began a commentary on the patent lies and omissions of the exhibits. The Stalin Hitler pact was unsurprisingly not mentioned at all. As we progressed we realised that our Stasi friends had rapidly emptied the museum so we had it to ourselves bar the aforementioned hoods. A remarkable afternoon.