Who has won?

A while ago, when Syria still had a state, I had the opportunity to correspond with a Kurdish nationalist on a social network. I was arguing (and I still hold this view today) that independence under the US umbrella actually meant nothing more than a neocolonial dependency relationship. He, however, had taken the traditional rhetoric of Kurdish nationalism (“it’s a tactic”) up a notch and believed (and probably still does) that the US possessed unique and invincible power, not just in a specific historical period, but throughout history—or at least throughout the history of imperialism. I’m adding the phrase “history of imperialism”; there was no place for imperialism in his words. So, the issue was no longer a matter of “tactics” at a certain stage (and in those circles, that word has always meant a lack of strategy), but had directly become a matter of siding with a superhero in the world order—that is, being on the side of the one who always wins and always will win.

Thus, our correspondence extended to other historical periods before that day, and eventually, we arrived at World War II. And then, an assertion I encountered for the first time genuinely stunned me: he acknowledged that the Soviet peoples had suffered great losses, but this, he claimed, did not mean at all that the Soviet Union had won the war. On the contrary; the US had won the war through its alliance politics, military tactics, and economic superiority, and moreover, had achieved this without suffering great losses, which pointed to an immense political talent, thereby reinforcing the power of the victory.

This is, in the most fundamental sense of the concept, a purely ideological stance, because historical truth has been completely turned on its head.

No one, neither during Soviet history nor today, presents the number of casualties as the measure of victory. That would be an idiotic assertion anyway, because throughout history, there are many victories where the victorious side suffered far greater losses than the defeated armies. That doesn’t mean the defeated actually won. Victory in a war is achieved when one of two conditions—which are actually two different expressions of the same thing—is met:

1. Enemy armies are physically destroyed;
2. The enemy’s will to fight is broken.

The number of casualties gives an idea about the intensity, brutality, savagery, and lawlessness of the war; it indicates its nature. But casualty rates are completely irrelevant to the outcome of the war.

1) Physical annihilation of the enemy

On June 22, 1941, the balance of forces on the western border of the Soviet Union was roughly as follows (I am quoting this based on relatively recent research; older sources show the fascist alliance as overwhelmingly superior in the balance of forces):

Ostensibly, the Red Army was far superior to the enemy in terms of tanks and combat aircraft; in reality, the situation was different. Within the entire tank inventory, the legendary T-34s were still very few (at most 1,200), as were the SU series self-propelled gun systems (at most 300), and moreover, not all of them were at the front line. In contrast, in the fascist alliance, if one doesn’t count the almost dysfunctional Panzer Is and the Czech-made Pz series, which the Germans did not much trust, the number of all tanks and Stug III type self-propelled gun systems was over 2,500. Of the total combat aircraft, only 1,540 were new planes capable of dealing with the enemy, and most of these were destroyed in the first week due to the rapid advance of enemy forces.

In short, the fascist German forces and their allies were far superior in terms of troop numbers, technology, equipment, and materiel.

Another aspect of the balance of forces is this: 3.3 million of the Wehrmacht’s total 4.12 million combat personnel (including the SS) were deployed to the Eastern Front. This constitutes 80 percent of the combat troops. Similarly, 84 percent of tanks and self-propelled artillery systems, 67 percent of artillery and mortars, and 80 percent of combat aircraft were on the Eastern Front.

Try to picture this: This war machine had occupied all of Europe; countries not occupied were fascist collaborators. British forces and their allies had been ignominiously chased out of Dunkirk. In Europe, there were only local resistance movements, mostly organized by communists. And the German army, with almost 80 percent of its entire strength, had attacked the Soviet Union.

In Germany alone, a total of nearly 18 million people were mobilized and fought in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Approximately 5.5 million of them died on the battlefields and in prisoner-of-war camps. Nearly 80 percent of military deaths occurred on the Eastern Front.

In contrast, nearly 35 million people were mobilized in the Red Army throughout the war. Of these, 8.7 million died or went missing. More than 3 million of these were deaths in concentration camps.

Therefore:

While Germany’s civilian losses constituted about 25 percent of its total losses (7.4-8.5 million), the Soviet Union’s civilian losses constituted 60 percent of its total losses. In contrast, about 30 percent of the German army’s total combatants throughout the war were killed in clashes with the Red Army. About 15 percent of the Red Army’s total combatants throughout the war were killed in clashes with fascist armies.

In other words, the Red Army ended the war in a “positive” manner (in Clausewitz’s terms) by destroying 30 percent of the enemy.

2) Breaking the enemy’s will

Starting immediately after the Stalingrad debacle, from the spring of 1943 onwards, a series of secret peace talks were held in Switzerland between fascist German officials and Westerners, primarily Americans. I will not delve into conspiracy theories; presumably, at this stage, no faction in the US, even if inclined, could risk a separate peace. However, for fascist Germany, attempts to narrow the enemy front due to defeats on the Eastern Front were becoming increasingly necessary.

Even after Normandy in June 1944, the center of fascist resistance was the Eastern Front. This is evident from the numbers. Already at the Tehran Conference (November 28 – December 1, 1943), the Soviet Union’s insistence on its allies opening a second front in Europe had weakened because the self-confidence to destroy the enemy single-handedly, albeit at a heavier cost, had been reinforced by the victories gained.

Therefore, the common refrain in Western secondary school textbooks does not reflect reality: (At the Tehran Conference) “The Soviet Union agreed to launch a major offensive against Germany from the east.” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub., Module 11, World War II.) Yet, by this time, the victory at Kursk had been won, Kyiv had been liberated; there was only one month left to break the Leningrad blockade, and only three months left to cross the USSR borders at every point on the Ukrainian front. In other words, the Red Army was already on the offensive in all directions. Moreover, according to much research, the Normandy landings had not paralyzed the fascist armies, nor did the Red Army’s advance gain extra momentum because of the Normandy landings.

Not even the suicide of their “beloved Führer” on April 30th, nor even the morning of May 8th, had completely broken fascist Germany’s will to resist. Perhaps the most concrete indicator of this is the story of Göring’s surrender to the Americans. It is generally assumed that Göring was immediately arrested; this is not true: he was arrested only the next day, with the definitive fall of Berlin, because the will of the fascist beast was completely broken only at that moment.

3) “History falsifiers”

While working on this article, I had the opportunity to look at 10th and 11th-grade history textbooks in the US and Britain, as well as another high school supplementary textbook in Britain (“Russia and its Rulers”). (This last one is surprisingly objective compared to the others.) There is no information in these about the countries’ losses in the war. The answers to the questions of who destroyed the enemy, who broke its will, and who paid the price for it are somewhat vague, and inevitably, within that vagueness, it is glaringly obvious that the US and Britain are cast in the role of saviors.

Still, when their history books are placed side-by-side with ours [Turkish textbooks], one must admit that their formulations are much more skillful. The creators of the US and British curricula, at least until now, have tried not to appear as captive to anticommunist hysteria as ours, whose every sentence, starting from these lines, is almost entirely wrong: “The USSR was no different from Germany in terms of human rights violations.” (From the 12th-grade “Contemporary Turkish and World History” textbook by the Ministry of National Education [MEB]).

But why this falsification of history?

A few days ago, I came across an interview with Daniel Simić, president of the Republika Srpska journalists’ association. Simić rightly lamented the erasure of history: “Americans are already like that; but for the average Western European reader too, D-Day is the sole and most important event of World War II. The heroism and sacrifices of the Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union are disregarded… The battles of Stalingrad and Kursk are generally described in the West as ‘events on the Eastern Front’; but every bomb dropped by the Allies on Germany is presented as a heroic act leading to victory against Hitler.”

This is a pustule of mass ignorance. There is such a difference between writing history and making it. Then those lies create narcissistic buffoons, each more ignorant than the last, and one of them comes out and says something like: “We will never forget that Russia helped us win World War II by losing almost 60 million people.” (Trump wrote this on his blog on January 22nd.)

4) Qualitative leap

But there is a difference between the past and today.

A few months ago, they demolished the monument erected in Tallinn in memory of the Red Army and USSR Baltic Fleet soldiers. In the same days, the “reputation” of the Estonian legionnaires in the Waffen-SS 20th Division was being restored. For the aggressive “little instigators” [a Turkish idiom, “küçük enişteler,” referring to minor but troublesome actors, often with a sense of being meddlesome relatives or associates, ed.n.] of the Baltics, this kind of fascist vandalism has now become routine practice.

The Baltics are a miniature Europe.

In many European countries, including Moldova, there are discussions about banning or at least restricting May 9th Victory Day celebrations, associating them with “Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, celebrating May 8th is often proposed; there are also those who want that day to be declared a day of mourning for all “victims” who died between 1939-1945, including the dead of the Wehrmacht and its fascist allies, a “Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation.” Previously, distortions or denials mostly concerned singular events in the war; today, the emphasis is shifting towards completely denying the decisive role of the USSR in the liberation of Europe and the world, and in the defeat of fascist Germany.

This is a qualitative leap in history falsification. The primary reason underlying this was stated by Marshal Zhukov to Marshal Rokossovsky in Berlin in 1945, where the fascist beast was dismembered: “We saved them, and for that, they will never forgive us.” In other words, at least some of them are burning with the desire to take revenge for being saved.

But more important than this is the following: today, it’s as if a new dawn has broken for the flea market [a Turkish idiom, “bit pazarına nur yağıyor,” meaning what was once considered worthless is now being prized, ed.n.], and European leaders are, apparently, studying the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s more closely. Why shouldn’t war be the way out of the crisis? Isn’t suppressing general dissatisfaction through violence and directing aggression towards others a wonderful solution?

But perhaps, we should congratulate them for finally showing sincerity. Declaring Bandera—the leader of a gang of fascist murderers who killed not only Jews, socialists, communists, and Russians, but also citizens of the Polish state, one of the Kyiv regime’s staunchest allies—a hero and howling his slogans in front of his portrait is no small measure of sincerity, indeed.

Who won the war? The Red Army won, the Soviet peoples won, the leadership of the Bolshevik party won, Russian patriots won… But not only them. We won! Because the war against fascism was our war too, the victory was our victory too.