As the Preobrazhensky March blasts over Red Square, will Moscow’s air raid sirens play an unauthorized descant? The threat of Ukrainian drone and missile strikes is just one of the questions looming over Russia’s victory celebrations on May 9th. Others revolve around the guest list: which foreign dignitaries will come, and what kind of military presence will countries such as North Korea provide?
Even without these uncertainties, the military highlight of Russia’s official calendar is phony. Among the topics that Vladimir Putin will have to leave out of his speech are the following. The Soviet Union was a co-conspirator with Hitler before the war. Stalin sabotaged his own armed forces with frenzied pre-war purges, hugely compounding the success of the Nazi invasion. Western aid was crucial to Soviet survival. Most of the fighting was outside what is now the territory of Russia. The “liberation” of eastern Europe quickly turned into occupation.
For all the bombastic talk of “eternal glory,” the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” is not hallowed by time. The war was a traumatizing non-topic in the Soviet Union until the Brezhnev years. Only as real memories fade has the yearning for borrowed valor mushroomed.
And not only in Russia. Other countries also indulge in a self-centered and selective approach to history. It is quite right to celebrate VE-Day (May 8th for the Western allies, May 9th for those who mark Nazi Germany’s capitulation, a day later, to the Soviet side). But the best way to honor the sacrifice of the fallen is to reflect on the mistakes that led to the war.
Chief among these is complacency. None of the countries that were to end up fighting for their lives invested in the strategic diplomacy that could have avoided war. The big countries imposed pointlessly punitive terms on Germany and Austria-Hungary after 1918, and alienated Japan. All of them failed to deal with the inevitable results. Again and again they showed the regimes in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo that aggression went unpunished. They dithered, procrastinated, and—worse—cut their own deals. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazi and Soviet regimes was undoubtedly the summit of cynicism, but it was preceded by years in which other countries sought to buy time—and then wasted it. The Anglo-German Naval agreement of 1935, which handed the Baltic Sea to Hitler, deserves special mention here.
To the brink of war and beyond, the decision-making was shockingly short-sighted. It was not until the spring of 1938 that Poland and Lithuania normalized relations. Neither Poland nor Hungary helped Czechoslovakia resist Nazi aggression; instead, they saw it as a chance to seize territory. Sweden stayed neutral when the Soviet Union attacked Finland. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, nobody saw the bigger picture.
Most importantly, nobody spent enough on defense. The Spanish Civil War had given a foretaste of the new kind of warfare, with German Stukas used to dive-bomb defenseless cities. But Hitler’s “Blitzkrieg” (combined-arms offensive) still caught its victims by surprise. The newly poured concrete on Polish fortifications was still setting when the Germans attacked.
All that looks horribly familiar now. Far from punishing aggression, we have shown Putin that nuclear blackmail works. We have seen a new kind of warfare unfold in Ukraine, but most countries have barely started to devote the time and money needed to get ready to fight the new way. Our decision-making is slow, barnacled with bureaucracy and duplication, and plagued by ancient grievances (can anyone explain why Ireland is not in Nato?). We do what we feel we can, not what we know we must.
Edward Lucas is a Non-resident Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
