Russian Fears

The western media are beating the war drums, claiming that Russia is about to invade Ukraine, but they ignore the bigger issue of NATO expansion. They have no idea how fearful Russians are that their nation will be invaded from the West. Russians hate seeing NATO forces and missiles moving closer to their border. The nations of Western Europe believe that they are trustworthy, but they dont have a great record.

The biggest western nations have all invaded Russia at some time in recent history. The French armies under Napoleon burned Moscow in 1812. Britain and Sweden had a go at different times. Germany has invaded Russia (twice) in both the first and second world wars.

Professor Stephen F. Cohen has written about the terrible human cost of the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe. He says that much of what we learn about World War 2 in textbooks and especially schools and popular media is false:

Most Americans today believe that “we defeated Nazi Germany,” as President Obama wrote on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, a misconception promoted by Hollywood films that portray the US landing at Normandy in June 1944 as the beginning and eventual end of the war against Hitler’s Germany. In truth, America won the war in the Pacific, against Japan, but the Soviet Union fought and destroyed Hitler’s war machine on the “Eastern Front” almost alone from 1941 to 1944, from Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad, and eventually to Berlin in 1945. Some 75 to 80 percent of all German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front. By the time US and British forces landed at Normandy, Hitler had relatively few divisions available to withstand the successful invasion, many more still embattled against the Soviet Union.

Soviet losses were almost unimaginable. More than 27 million Soviet citizens died, 60 to 70 percent of them ethnic Russians. Some 1,700 Soviet cities and towns were all but destroyed. Most families lost a close or extended member. Perhaps most tellingly, only three of every hundred boys who graduated from high school in 1941–42 returned from the war. This meant that millions of Soviet children never knew their fathers and that millions of Soviet women never married. (They were known as “Ivan’s widows,” many doomed to lonely lives in the often-harsh post-war Soviet Union.)

The trauma of these events has not been forgotten.