&host=www.rt.com&uri=/news/wwii-russia-rogulev-drabkin/comments/&via=1.1 205.128.88.25:80 (Footprint 4.8/FPMCP)&ua=CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html))
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
The role of the USSR in WWII was the greatest, thinks Yury Rogulev, from the Roosevelt Foundation at Moscow State University.
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.
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.