For many years the west was downplaying the role of the Soviet Union in WWII and was completely overlooked in western historiography, says John Laughland from the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.
“When you look at the history of the Second World War, the fighting in the east was of such an enormous magnitude that the fighting in the west, like the Normandy landing, pales into insignificance, they are almost non-events in comparison,” Laughland said.
“One can, of course, compare Soviet communism and German Nazism, but there’s one big difference that emerges. Hitler came to power explicitly on the basis of war and racial prosecution. Soviet communism never had a racist element in the way Nazi Germany did.”