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LAST Saturday’s parade in Moscow, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazi war machine in Europe, also served as a reminder of a less auspicious outcome of the Second World War: the Cold War that very soon afterwards pitted former allies against one another.
Although the festivities in the Russian capital were attended by a reasonably impressive array of foreign dignitaries, including the presidents of China, India, Egypt and South Africa, the West was generally represented at the ambassadorial level in a pointed snub intended to remind Vladimir Putin of the cost of Moscow’s machinations in Ukraine.
The only Western leader who felt obliged to pay her respects was the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who turned up on the day after the parade to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, acknowledging the enormous Soviet sacrifice in defeating the forces of Adolf Hitler. She also used the occasion to berate Russia for “the criminal and illegal annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine”.
President Putin was, in turn, relatively conciliatory, telling Merkel: “We do face some problems today, but the sooner we can end their negative impact on our relations, the better it will be.” He also couldn’t resist a barb at the US for its “attempts to set up a unipolar world order”.
Military parades are preferable to battlefield deployment.
The unprecedented scale of the military parade marking Victory Day was no doubt intended to underline Russia’s continued claim to superpower status. The fact that such displays of lethal hardware are still considered an acceptable means of underlining a nation’s clout is a sad reflection on the ways of the post-war world.
But Russia is hardly the only culprit in this regard, and it could easily be argued that military parades are infinitely preferable to battlefield deployment of the latest weaponry, which is all too often the means whereby the US chooses to demonstrate its prowess.
Russian actions in respect of Ukraine, meanwhile, are easy to deplore, but surely deserve to be viewed in the broader context of Western-backed regime change in Kiev, as well as Moscow’s apprehensions about the eastwards expansion of Nato.
Much the same could be claimed in respect of the controversies that continue to swirl around the Soviet role in the Second World War. For instance, it is not unusual to come across the claim that whereas the Red Army was undoubtedly instrumental in defeating Hitler, the Soviets also bear some responsibility for enabling Hitler to launch the conflict.
This argument centres around the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, concluded just days before the official start of the war. It is not an argument that can easily be disregarded. But again, the context matters: it is all too often forgotten that the reprehensible pact followed unsuccessful efforts by Moscow to form an alliance with western European nations such as Britain and France.
Had those efforts not been rebuffed, who can say what effect it might have had on Nazi war plans? As things panned out, Hitler was able to overrun much of western Europe before picking an opportune moment to launch a massive attack on the eastern front.
Operation Barbarossa took Joseph Stalin by surprise: he had ignored reports from Soviet spies about an imminent invasion, preferring to believe that Hitler would abide by the pact. As a consequence, the Germans initially faced little resistance and overran vast swaths of the USSR.
Another aspect of the conflict that is unpleasant for Russians to recall is that nationalist groups in several constituent states of the USSR collaborated with the Nazis, seeing them as allies against Russian hegemony. In some of the post-Soviet states, not least Ukraine, there is a tendency to celebrate these nationalists as heroes.
Yet another aspect of the war that tends to be overlooked is the fact that, despite increasingly desperate entreaties from Moscow, the US and Britain delayed opening a second front in Europe until June 1944. By then the tide had decisively turned on the eastern front, and the Western powers were keen to beat the Red Army in the race to reach Berlin. They didn’t quite succeed.
It is not uncommon for the Red Army’s role as a liberation force to be weighed against its repressive inclinations in eastern Europe thereafter, but post-war Western machinations in countries such as Italy and, perhaps most notably, Greece rarely score a mention. The Cold War that was in full flow by 1946 wasn’t a one-way affair, and the same could be said about its recurrence today.
Who can say whether a sizeable contingent of Western leaders led by Barack Obama might have helped to break the ice in Moscow last week, but it may well come to be seen as a wasted opportunity. When asked about the boycott, Putin responded: “Everyone we wanted to see was here.” His churlishness is unsurprising, but it does not augur well.
Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2015
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