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WWII for Russia was a question of “to be or not to be” - analyst
Published: 08 May, 2010, 12:28
Edited: 14 July, 2010, 07:41
TAGS: Anniversary, Military, Russia, Europe, History
The role of the USSR in WWII was the greatest, thinks Yury Rogulev, from the Roosevelt Foundation at Moscow State University.
“For each country, its role in the war was the major role, but if we look at the major events of WWII and if we see that Germany was the center of this war, the center of this aggression, it means that to end the war it was necessary to defeat Germany,” he said, adding “From this point of view, certainly the role of Russia, of the USSR in this war was the greatest, speaking about the scale of this front, the number of German losses in the war – in troops, planes, tanks and any other aspects of the war – the losses on the Eastern Front were the greatest. The number of German troops on the Eastern Front was the largest and of course the scale of fighting was the biggest.”
Read more about WWII on the new RT "War witness" website
Rogulev also stressed that co-operation with other countries was really very important, as it helps psychologically when you are fighting and you know that somebody is on your side.
“What usually is forgotten is that the help that Russia began to get was during the most serious and difficult part of this war, when Russia lost a lot of its industry in the European part, lost a lot of troops and had a lack of supplies, even gunpowder was in deficit. Raw materials like steel, like other metals to produce tanks, airplanes were very important. And when this help began to come to Russia at the beginning of 1942, it was really very important for Russia. And not to speak of American automobiles, vehicles – for the Russian [Soviet] Army it was one of the major advantages. It was a modern war, a war of motors, and for Russia, which didn’t end its industrialization plans before the war, such supplies were necessary.”
“What should not be forgotten is that the difference of meaning of this war for Russia and the US. For the Russian people it was the war as a struggle for survival. The question was to be or not to be. We should not forget about the racist ideas of the German leaders, of Nazis who didn’t regard the Slavic people as equal to themselves. That is why this war in Russia is called Great Patriotic War.”
Artyom Drabkin, creator of the Iremember.ru website, interviews war witnesses for his project and most of the questions are about their daily lives.
“Usually I have about 3,000 visitors a day, and currently I have about 10,000 visitors a day. There is a growth in personal accounts, personal view of the historical events,” he says.
Concerning young people visiting this website, Drabkin thinks that “by reading the accounts, they can approach their relatives and ask questions.”
“The state supports my work and my website by annual grants, so they are doing something, but I don’t think enough,” he added.
Watch the full interview with Artyom Drabkin
Anton Bespalov, political analyst from Voice of Russia radio Station, says Victory Day is such a big holiday for Russians today as “at the personal level WWII is an event concerning almost every Russian family. Statistics say that about 90 per cent of Russian men born in 1921 died in their twenties.”
“At the political level, WWII was about survival, not only a political survival, but also biological one,” he added.
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08.05.2010, 12:42
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Yury Rogulev is correct in delineating links between racial ideology of Untermensch[i.e. Nazi assertion that Slavs were inferior people] to German expansionist imperative of Lebensraum and that these two imperatives were the founding ideologies that supported German policy of war of annihilation against the people of the Soviet Union. Thus, it is imperative to stress whenever possible that the 65th anniversary of the Patriotic Victory over Nazi Germany also marks the death to German policy of racial hierarchy and racial order. However, Germany was not unique in theorizing and trying to achieve a world order based on racial order and spatial domination. As Hannah Arendt reminds us in the Origin of Totalitarianism, and elsewhere, Reich’s racist global order was based on the 19th century Europe imperative of Scientific racism and racial imperative of Manifest Destiny. Germany went one step further by turning these deadly ideologies into concrete practice of death and destruction within the continent of Europe.
I was recently involved in a forum discussion about the USSR's contribution to World War II. This all started when one of the contributors claimed that the US won the war, from his perspective, alone. I asked how he could make such a claim when ninety percent of the combat troops of the European Axis Powers were in the Soviet Union at the time. He stormed back that I was an ungrateful wretch who was not welcome in the United States for spreading what he called, “typical Soviet revisionist history.” He, like nearly every American that I have ever talked to, was completely ignorant of the Soviet contribution in the war. I referred him to historical accounts such as those in “The World at War,” by Mark Arnold-Forster, and “Barbarossa,” by Alan Clark, both of which he will almost certainly refuse to read. He will go to his grave secure in the knowledge that The Battle of the Bulge was the turning point in World War II, refusing to acknowledge that the Soviet Union played any significant part in the defeat of Nazi Germany. We love our myths in the United States. A reassuring lie is always to be preferred to a disagreeable truth.