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Notes -
Russia has been very much at the table in WW2, chomping on pieces of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Baltic states, etc. Is it when their former friends the Nazis turned out to be less than friendly, the trouble began. Russia and Germany were probably the two European parties that were ok with the war started - the rest remembered WWI and so were going out of their way to not provoke another one - which, paradoxically, ensured it would happen.
Agreed on the actual historical facts, but my impression is that the historical mythology of WW2 is extremely important to the versions of national identity being promoted by both the Soviet and the Putinist regimes. And the key points of the myth are:
The innocence of the Soviet Union and the utter wickedness of Hitler's unprovoked aggression (the Molotov-Ribentropp pact is ignored, obv), occasionally backed up with ahistorical claims that the Soviet Union was abandoned or betrayed by the western democracies in the pre-war period.
The Soviet Union's underdog status at the start of the war (probably true)
The extraordinary deadliness and destructiveness of the eastern front in WW2 (which is true) which is blamed on Nazi wickedness (ignoring the contribution of Soviet incompetence)
The extraordinary effort and sacrifice of the Soviet people to defeat the Nazis (definitely true)
The idea that defeating the Nazis was a mostly-Soviet achievement while the western Allies effectively sat the war out and watched Nazis and Communists shoot each other, Spanish Civil War style, and that the rest of the world being insufficiently grateful to the Soviet Union for singlehandedly saving the world from Nazism at enormous human cost is a sign of western wickedness. (Ahistorical)
In other words, the myth clearly centres aggression and not genocide as Hitler's supreme crime, and the intended lesson of the myth is that Russia is always at risk of a surprise attack from the west, needs to be stronk so that the attack can be repelled well before the "Nazis" get to Stalingrad, and suffered massively from being insufficiently stronk in 1941.
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