The danger of believing myths is that some become ahistorical.
Not all, but some.
Which points out while studying history is so important.
Myth itself is something that's not existentially bad. Cultures create myths for a reason, with that reason stretching back into antiquity. The earliest human beings created myths, as their entire historical memory was oral. Current events were reduced to stories, and the stories remembered through telling, with them evolving into myths over time. For that reason, myths are often surprisingly accurate. There really was a Troy that the Greeks waged war upon. . . the Apaches and the Navajo had really once lived in a region where there were great white bears, you get the point.
The problem becomes that myth making can become a coping mechanism for a culture as well. And that can become enormously dangerous to that culture in some instances. The Germans adopting the theory that they hadn't been defeated on the battlefield in World War One, which they had been, lead them to adopt a "stabbed in the back" theory that lead directly to World War Two. The myth of the "Lost Cause" resulted in rank and file Southerners forgetting that they'd gone to war over slavery and had been outright defeated on the battlefield with a huge percentage of Southern soldiers deserting before the war's end, resulting partially in the preservation of formal institutional racism well into the second half of the 20th Century. The myth of the Stolen Election is corrupting American Conservatism and the Republican Party right now.
Russia, likewise, went into Ukraine believing in a set of myths, with one overarching myth, and its paying the price for it.
Modern Russia and the Myth of World War Two.
- The basic myth.
At some point during World War Two itself the Soviet Union started telling the myth that the USSR, alone in its fight against Nazi Germany, and supported only weakly by two untrustworthy and cowardly allies, the US and the UK defeated the Germans.
Not hardly.
But this myth, or versions of it, became all pervasive in the USSR and are still believed in Russia today. Indeed, amazingly enough, versions of this myth became relatively common, in a different form, in the West.
It's simply not true.
Now eighty years after the fact, the history of the Second World War is starting to be more accurately told, stripped away of many of its myths, including this one. Let's flatly state the truth of the matter here.
The Soviet Union, following its own self interests, was an occasional defacto Axis ally from 1939 until the spring of 1941. In that capacity, it helped the Germans subjugate continental Western Europe, but the Germans were unable to defeat the British. Unable to do just that, Germany turned its eye on Soviet resources, which the USSR was well aware it was going, and the two nations bargained on greater German access to them. Stalin overplayed his hand and sought a post-war position from Germany, at the expense of the British Empire, which was too much for the German's to agree to, and the Germans, contemptuous of the Slavs in any event, were ready to break off the effort and go to war with the USSR, the heir to Imperial Russia, which the Germans had defeated in 1917.
The German invasion came in June 1941. The Red Army made some heroic stands in the summer and fall of 1941, but by and large it was thrown back in defeat. The real Soviet achievement in 41 was not being outright defeated, but it was thrown back again, on a massive scale, in 1942. Only in the winter of 1942 did the Soviet fortunes turn, but it would take titanic efforts and massive loss of life in order for the Germans to be pushed back and ultimately defeated.
Added to that, much of the Red Army was simply never very good. Materially, the Soviets were unable to supply their own army adequately, and that fell to the UK and the US in large part. Only 55 to 60 percent of the Red Army was Russian, with the balance being made up of other ethnicities, including large numbers of Ukrainians, 7,000,000 of whom served in the Red Army. At no point whatsoever did the Soviets ever fight, moreover, alone. There was always a "second" or even third and fourth front which was manned by other Western Allies alone.
- The actual truth
Additionally, and seemingly completely missed by Soviet propaganda, the Western Allies went int alone on the seas, with the Soviet Navy being largely irrelevant the entire war. While the Soviet Union had a navy, it didn't really matter, which effectively means that in a war fought on the land, air, and sea, the Soviets only fought on two out of the three.
And, as earlier noted, the Soviets were latecomers to the war and, in fact, had been on the other side early on. If the US and UK did not take such massive losses, it was because, as noted, that they didn't fight that way. They were, however, fighting, and fighting in more areas than the USSR was. They were not, of course, fighting on their own ground, however, which does make a real difference.
And it goes beyond that.
Over 7,000,000 Red Army troops were Ukrainians, as noted, with indigenous Poles, Turkic peoples, and others filling the Red Army ranks. But around 1,000,000 Soviet citizens provided aid to the Germans during the war as well.
This is a complicated story, as that aid varied in nature substantially. The most pronounced anti-Soviet variants of it might be found in Cossack elements that went over wholesale to the Germans and who served on the Eastern Front, the Western Front, and in the Balkans. But they were not alone. Other Soviet citizens willingly took up arms with the Germans and fought against the Moscow. Others, particularly in Ukraine, fought against the Soviets and the Germans, reprising the odd role of the Ukrainian Greens of the Russian Civil War who fought against the Reds and the Whites. Large numbers of Red Army POWs joined Vlasov's White Russian Army, but probably did so out of a desire simply to survive the ordeal of being a German POW.
Soviet civilians aided the Germans in varying ways as well. The examples are too numerous not to take note of, with Soviet civilians providing all sorts of minor aid and comfort to the Germans in spite of the fact that the Germans were barbaric towards Soviet citizens, visiting death and rape upon them at a scale that was too large not to be regarded as institutionally sanctioned. Indeed, early on Russians and Belorussians greeted the Germans as liberators, with their view largely changing due to German barbarism. Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt, a traditional Ukrainian greeting. They, too, came to change their views under German repression.
- Bringing the myth forward.
After the war, and even by its late stages, the Soviets were developing a myth that they had won World War Two basically on their own. Their leadership knew better, which showed itself even as late as the 1980s, when the Soviets lived in real fear of a NATO attack upon the Soviet Union. But the myth has solidified, and it's showing itself now.
The logical question would be why such a myth would have been developed and fostered. There are, however, a series of reasons for that.
All nations have foundational myths that are central to their identify in a way. The American one dates back essentially to the Revolution, and was redefined by the Civil War, giving the country the foundational story of rising up against tyranny, which isn't really true, to form a self-governing democratic republic with a unique mission in the world. The Australian one involves a history of mistreatment by the British culminating in the disaster of Gallipoli, which in truth the Australians were only one nation involved in a much larger Allied effort. Other examples could be given.
The Soviet Union going into World War Two already had the Russian Revolution, but the imposition of Communism on the Russian Empire had not been universally accepted by any means, and various peoples struggled against it into the 1930s. The USSR had only been saved from defeat by the support of Western, capitalist, nations during World War Two, after it had first conspired with the fascist Nazi Germany, for its own reasons. During the war, large percentages of its population, in spite of massive Nazi barbarism, had sided with the Germans, and resistance movements went on in the country until the late 1940s. A myth of a Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets came to call it, served to counter all of that.
The modern Russian Army is not the Red Army. For one thing, it lacks the huge number of Ukrainians that the Red Army had. But the Red Army, without the West, was never all that good. It was bad going into World War Two, and it survived World War Two thanks to the West. After the war, it continued to rely on Western technology for a time, in the form of purchased Western material, and in the form of acquired German knowledge, but over the decades it had to go over to simply acquiring it however they could, and often they simply did not.
The current Russian Army retains all the vices of the old, plus one more. Its equipment is antiquated and poor. Its leadership is bad.
And it believes that it was invincible during World War Two, forgetting that it wasn't defeated due to Western support, the very thing Ukraine is getting now.
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