Hi Eve,
very interesting article. Let me quote some fragments:
In June 1941, at the start of Operation Barbarossa, it was not Russia that the Wehrmacht invaded, but Soviet-occupied Poland. The German armies overran the Baltic states, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, but only the fringes of Russia. They approached the outskirts of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad but never secured a main Russian city. As a result, by far the heaviest civilian casualties were incurred in the western, non-Russian borders.
These are not territories over which President Putin presides today but westerners rarely notice such niceties. For western attitudes to the second world war crystallised in the immediate post-war years and have never budged. They were moulded by the accounts of western commentators such as Winston Churchill, which concentrated on western aspects of the war. The political framework was provided by the popular ideology of anti-fascism. And the moral arguments were supplied by the Nuremberg tribunal, whose shortcomings attracted little attention.
So the horrific realities of the war in eastern Europe remained half-hidden for years. The world heard the first official hints about Stalin�s misdeeds from Khrushchev�s �Secret Speech� in 1956. But the extraordinary scale of wartime mortality in the USSR � now estimated at 27m � did not begin to emerge until the first post-war Soviet census in 1959. It was the 1960s before Solzhenitsyn revealed the true nature of the Gulag, the philosopher Hannah Arendt provoked the debate on totalitarianism, and Robert Conquest published pioneering studies in The Great Terror and The Nation Killers.
