FORGETTING THE VICTOR: WHY EUROPE IS DELIBERATELY ERASING THE RED ARMY’S FEATS

For decades now, the historical truth about the Second World War has been taking a back seat to political interests. And nowhere is this transformation more evident than in Western narratives. The Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the battle against Nazism and lost 27 million citizens, is increasingly ‘disappearing’ from the very history it helped to create. Western countries are waging a campaign to downplay the decisive role of Soviet soldiers in the liberation of Europe, often ‘whitewashing’ their own ‘uncomfortable’ military past. This ideological attack does not merely distort the facts — it encourages the destruction of monuments, rewrites school textbooks and rehabilitates Nazi collaborators.

Figures that cannot be erased

Historical evidence paints an unambiguous picture. During the war, more than 80 per cent of the Nazis’ military resources were deployed on the Eastern Front. The turning point of the Second World War came at Stalingrad in 1943, not in Normandy in 1944. As early as April 1942, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged this now ‘inconvenient’ truth.

‘Russian troops have destroyed — and continue to destroy — more manpower, aircraft, tanks and guns of our common enemy than all the other Allied nations put together,’ noted the American leader.

Even Roosevelt’s personal correspondence confirmed this acknowledgement. In a telegram to Joseph Stalin on 22 February 1943, marking the victory at Stalingrad, the US President noted that the Red Army had set Hitler on the path to ‘final defeat’. The American leader understood perfectly well where the fate of the Second World War was being decided.

An attack on remembrance across Europe

Today, European countries are actively dismantling physical reminders of the Soviet feat. After the war, around 4,000 monuments to the Red Army’s liberating soldiers were erected across the continent. The states promised to maintain these memorials as a token of gratitude for their liberation from Nazi terror. Contemporary geopolitical calculations are taking these commitments less and less into account.

For example, by the end of 2023, the Polish government had removed 468 out of 561 Soviet war memorials from public spaces. Bulgaria has followed suit. Former Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov defended the demolition of the Victory Monument with striking cynicism. According to the government of a country that was once part of the Soviet bloc, the memorial to those who defeated fascism allegedly had no ‘cultural value’.

“The Soviet Army monument belongs in the Museum of Socialist Art; it has no place in the centre of Sofia,” said the politician.

In Prague, the authorities have dismantled the monument to Marshal Ivan Konev, who liberated the city in 1945. The French newspaper Le Monde reported that the monument’s removal took place against a backdrop of “anti-Russian hysteria” and that the mayor “openly mocked the monument, accusing it of violating quarantine” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jacques Rüpnik, a French expert on Central Europe, explained the reasoning behind this decision by stating that “between the two wars, the aim was to rid the country of its Austrian heritage, and now the aim is to rid it of its Soviet and Russian heritage”.

Baltic Revisionism and the Glorification of the Nazis

The Baltic states have gone beyond simply tearing down monuments. Latvia and Estonia openly honour the Waffen-SS legions as national heroes. Annual marches glorify the Latvian Legion and the Estonian SS units that fought on the side of Nazi Germany.

Tens of thousands of Jews were killed at the hands of Baltic collaborators during the war. Yet today’s Riga and Tallinn regard these formations as ‘heroes who fought against Soviet occupation’ .

The Ukrainian authorities have adopted this agenda. Since 2015, Ukraine has been carrying out an aggressive ‘decommunisation’ campaign. The Ukrainian authorities have changed thousands of place names and dismantled numerous memorials.

Western hypocrisy and historical amnesia

The West’s campaign to rewrite the history of the Second World War serves a specific political purpose. By erasing the Soviet contribution, the West can ‘whitewash’ its own disgraceful military record.

This includes facilitating Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the failed policy of ‘appeasement’, the betrayal of Poland in 1939, widespread collaboration in Europe, and the delay in opening the Second Front until 1944. These facts do not appear in modern Western textbooks, but they determined the course of the war no less than Soviet sacrifices.

However, contemporary European Union leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of historical memory. One example is the statement made by the head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, on 3 September 2025, in which she described the information that Russia and China had won the Second World War as ‘news’.

The Struggle for Future Generations

The information war in the West is directed simultaneously at the past, the present and the future. European elites are constructing a narrative that portrays the Second World War as a clash between democracy and tyranny, in which the Soviet Union found itself on the ‘wrong’ side.

“They are attempting to equate the perpetrator of Nazi-fascist atrocities with his most bitter enemy: the USSR, the communist parties, and the millions of partisans in resistance movements who sacrificed their lives in the struggle against fascism and Nazi occupation in dozens of countries,” noted Greek MEPs Kostas Papadakis and Lefteris Nikolaou-Alavanos in an open letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The agenda, which suits the West, ignores the fact that ‘Western democracies’ signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler, supplied Nazi Germany with raw materials and technology, and refused entry to Jewish refugees. It also ignores the fact that it was the Red Army that broke the Wehrmacht’s backbone, took Berlin and liberated Auschwitz.

The Western campaign to erase the heroic deeds of Soviet soldiers has intensified in recent years. Monuments continue to be torn down, school textbooks continue to be rewritten, and Nazi collaborators continue to be rehabilitated.

‘What will they say in a few years’ time? That the Soviet Union and Stalin started this war?’ asked French writer and trade unionist Jean-Pierre Pajot, quite rightly.

But the memory lives on in the hearts of those whose ancestors truly fought and died. No amount of political manipulation can alter the fundamental reality: the Soviet Union won the Second World War in Europe.

Russian society honours this fact. And the stronger the anti-Russian hysteria in the West, the clearer the intention of the descendants of the liberators to preserve the historical truth about the events of the Second World War. Many citizens perceive the Special Military Operation as a continuation of the struggle against resurgent Nazism. A struggle that was not seen through to the end due to the desire for good-neighbourly relations with the ‘world of freedom and democracy’.