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T h i s s p e c i a l a d v e r t i s i n g s u p p l e m e n t i s p r o d u c e d a n d s p o n s o r e d b y R o s s i y s k a y a G a z e t a ( R u s s i a ) a n d d i d n o t i n v o l v e t h e r e p o r t i n g o r e d i t i n g s t a f f o f t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l N e w Yo r k T i m e s .

EXCLUSIVELY AT RUSSIA-DIRECT.ORG

RUSSIAN SOFT POWER: REVIEWING THE OPTIONS

EXPERT

The term soft power has many dif-ferent connotations. It is impor-tant to remember, however, that in the end, soft power is still

power — an ability to achieve desired outcomes with fi nesse and authority, not coercion or economic resources. Rus-sia has long been developing public di-

ALEXEI

DOLINSKY

Russia’s current confl ict with its European neighbors has raised new questions about the role the Soviet Union played in World War II

As the 70th anniversary of the allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II approaches, a discussion is under way among Russian government offi-cials and historians about how best to preserve the historical truth about what is called the Great Patriotic War in Russia.

In the months preceding the anni-versary, a number of provocative state-ments have been made regarding the role played by the Soviet Union in the victory. Two of the most challenging came from Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna, who said that the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was liberated by Ukrainians, and from Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yat-senyuk, who said, “the Soviet Union invaded Germany and Ukraine” dur-ing the war.

During a recent session of the 70th Anniversary Celebration Organization Committee, Russian President Vladi-mir Putin connected these statements to the ongoing difficulties between Rus-

sia and the West over the confl ict in Ukraine. Putin said that these “at-tempts to alter and distort the events of that war” and “these cynical, un-concealed lies” could be tied to the at-tempts “to undermine the strength and moral authority of contemporary Rus-sia, deprive it of the status of a victor nation” in order “to use historical spec-ulations in geopolitical games.”

Verbal ‘slips’Russian historians are not united in their opinions on whether or not the problem that Putin was promoting re-ally exists.

Nikita Petrov of the Memorial human rights organization says he be-lieves that the issue the way Putin for-mulated it does not exist. “Actually, no one is distorting the history of the war,” says Petrov. He calls Schetyna and Yat-senuyk’s words “slips,” “verbal an-nouncements” and “emotional expres-sions,” which cannot be taken seriously since the words do not re-

fl ect the official position of the gov-ernment they represent.

Historian Oleg Budnitsky, director of the International Historical and So-ciological Center of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, also believes that the problem of the distortion of history is contrived. He stresses that professional historians outside of Rus-sia do not attempt to falsify history.

‘Revising facts’Not every Russian historian, however, is ready to agree with this approach. Many say they believe that Russia’s neighbors have been using historical issues in the interests of contemporary politics for a long time.

According to Dmitri Andreev, a his-torian and political analyst at Moscow State University, “our ideological op-ponents have begun revising some well-known facts about the Great Patriot-ic War, the results of the war.”

Historian Alexander Dyukov, Direc-

tor of the Historical Memory Founda-tion, also ties these announcements to today’s politics and uses the Baltic states as an example. “The picture of history that the Baltic governments are painting is becoming a great violation of human rights here and now,” says Dyukov, explaining that the national narratives of “the horrible Soviet oc-cupation” of two Baltic countries — Estonia and Latvia — are used to jus-tify the failure of these countries to guarantee the rights of their Russian-speaking minorities.

In light of this, Dyukov does not think that connecting the war to the crimes of the Soviet past — such as deportations and repressions — con-tributes to the “right understanding of the real historical tragedies” of the Soviet era.

Dyukov also mentions Ukraine, say-ing that historians there have been “re-writing history” for the past several years, glorifying the crimes commit-ted by the Ukrainian nationalists dur-

ing World War II. This has provoked a schism in society, he says, and became one of the reasons of the current trag-ic civil war.

An honest discussionAt the same time, Nikita Petrov be-lieves that it is in Russia and not abroad where excessive politicizing of the sub-ject is taking place.

“When in Russia someone begins an honest discussion on the war, without embellishments, when the repressive essence of the Soviet regime is uncov-ered, for some reason we become afraid and say: The truth is being distorted,” says Petrov.

Meanwhile Alexander Dyukov says there are no serious problems in Rus-sia with revealing information about the problems of the past.

“I do not see any systematic hush-ing up of the tragic pages in Soviet history. At least I’ve never seen any-one on a governmental level denying the Stalinist repressions and the trag-

ic hunger of the 1930s,” says Dyukov.Historians who do not agree with

Dyukov’s views say that the narratives being told about the war and the So-viet Union in Eastern Europe are a reaction to the way those countries feel about the communist system that was imposed on them after the war, rather than “distortions of history,” and it is not surprising that the these countries’ governments want to paint their So-viet pasts in exclusively gloomy hues.

Yet historians say it is important to differentiate between the inevitably varied interpretations of the Soviet era in Eastern Europe and principled eval-uations about the war that are based on historical facts. “Black must be called black, and white — white,” says historian Andreev. “Facts shouldn’t be twisted. Individuals can stress certain interpretations, but historical truth is something else.”

plomacy instruments aimed at boost-ing its soft power, but the outcome has been less than optimal for both inter-nal and external reasons.

Konstantin Kosachev’s appointment as head of Rossotrudnichestvo in March 2012 was expected to start the golden age of Russia’s soft power, but his re-

cent resignation ended those hopes, and that golden age never took place. Just three years ago, when Kosachev took office, there seemed to be a win-dow of opportunity for the country’s public diplomacy. For almost a decade, Russia had been building up its soft power capabilities with no apparent

strategy or coordination mechanism. As neither has been put in place and the window of opportunity is now closed, the country’s public diplomacy needs a new long-term approach.

Rossotrudnichestvo itself was far from a dream agency; it combined So-viet-era representative offices, a chain of Russian schools abroad inherited from the Defense Ministry, and a tiny budget. Kosachev was a unique indi-vidual who combined diplomatic and

public policy experience and could use his authority and direct connection to the national leadership to coordinate Russian public diplomacy.

His idea was to turn the agency into Russia’s international development ve-hicle and move the aid budget that Moscow currently donates to interna-tional institutions toward bilateral products.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

■ALEXEI TIMOFEICHEV

RBTH

70 YEARS ON, A BATTLE FOR HISTORY

More than 27 million Soviet citizens died in World War II, many in major battles that took place in the Soviet Union itself. Hitler considered Slavs an inferior eth-nic race, and Nazi records suggest that if Germany had been successful, millions of Russians would have faced a genocidal regime of enslavement and exile. Facts like these help demonstrate why the

Second World War still looms so large in the minds of Russians. Nearly every Rus-sian has a direct connection to the war; Every family has its story to tell. This edi-tion of RBTH, and our online project, The Unknown War, hope to reveal some of these narratives and give our readers a sense of the human tragedy of the war and why victory meant so much.

Read previously untold stories of a world at war in this issue of RBTH and find out much more at UNKNOWNWAR.RBTH.COM

of the Soviet Union are estimated to have died during the Second World War, more than from any other country

and self-propelled guns took part in the Battle of Kursk in June 1943, still the world’s largest battle of its kind

was how long the Battle of Stalingrad las-ted. It was a major turning point in the war that cost the lives of more than a million Red Army soldiers and civilians

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YURY LEVITAN: THE VOICE OF VICTORY A fortunate twist of fate made a young provincial man the best-known voice in the country.

When a young aspiring actor by the name of Yury Levitan became a radio announcer in Moscow in the early 1930s, after being rejected by the the-atrical institute because of his provin-cial patois, nobody could have fore-seen that he was destined to become a household name across the Soviet Union and one of the most iconic voic-es in Soviet history.

Levitan, the son of a tailor and a housewife, had come to Moscow from the nearby city of Vladimir — after only fi nishing grade nine — hoping to make his career in acting. After the theatrical institute refused to enroll him, he was admitted to a group of radio announcers selected by the re-nowned actor Vasily Kachalov. Then fate took over.

In January 1934, after hearing the young broadcaster’s voice on the air, Stalin phoned the Radio Committee and demanded that from now on only Levitan read his reports. Thus the young intern, thanks to the rare and expressive timbre of his voice, so un-pleasant to the professors at the the-atrical institute, became the main radio anchor of the Soviet Union, the best-known voice on Radio Moscow.

Radio during the war yearsRadio was an extremely important in-strument in broadcasting both news of the war and propaganda to Soviet citizens. Across the country, people would listen for news of which cities had fallen, which regions had been re-taken, and whether there were immi-nent air raids. Nina Trifonova, a na-

■OLGA BELENITSKAYA

SPECIAL TO RBTH

Thanks to a personal intervention by Joseph Stalin, the radio newsreader Yury Levitan rose from humble beginnings to national adulation, forever connected with the words “Moscow is speaking,” which began his broadcasts.

tive of Orenburg in the south Urals, remembers the impact Levitan’s broad-casts had.

“In those days we couldn’t afford a radio,” she said, “but there were loud-speakers mounted on certain streets, and people would fl ock to them at a strictly defi ned time to listen to news from the front.”

This communal experience brought people closer together, and Trifonova describes it as “like being part of one big family, with Yury Levitan at the head.”

‘Attention! Moscow is speaking!’On the morning of June 22, 1941, the phone at the Radio Committee was ringing nonstop because correspon-dents in Kiev and Minsk were calling in to report Nazi Germany’s unexpect-ed attack on the Soviet Union. Mos-cow was afraid that the reports were a provocation, but Levitan was called to work just in case. Shortly a courier brought a package from the Kremlin containing a piece of paper with two lines that had to be broadcast: “At 12 o’clock an important government an-nouncement will be made.”

At noon that day, Yury Levitan took over the airwaves: “Attention! Moscow is speaking! Citizens of the Soviet Union! We are transmitting an an-nouncement from the Soviet govern-ment. Today at four o’clock in the morn-ing, without presenting any claims to the Soviet Union, without declaring war, German forces invaded our coun-try.” Levitan’s announcement launched four years of regular broadcasts on the Red Army’s progress in its struggle to push back the Nazis.

From the fall of 1941 onward, Lev-itan pronounced the words “Moscow is speaking” from Sverdlovsk (mod-ern-day Yekaterinburg), around 900 miles (1,400 kilometers) east of Mos-cow. All radio towers in the Russian capital had been dismantled because the German air force had been using them as targets for their bombing runs. Levitan received instructions from his commander-in-chief and reports from

the Soviet Information Bureau in Mos-cow by phone.

In March 1943, he was transferred to Kuibyshev (now Samara), 540 miles southeast of Moscow, where the Radio Committee was located. But through-out the course of the war, Soviet citi-zens listening to his broadcasts were convinced that his voice was coming from the capital. The fact that Levi-tan was announcing the news from Sverdlovsk was divulged only a quar-ter of a century later.

On May 9, 1945, Levitan was called to the Kremlin, where he was present-ed with a text from Stalin on the al-lied victory over Germany. He had only 35 minutes to prepare the broadcast. In order to make it to the radio sta-tion’s studio, he had to cross Red Square, which was overfl owing with people.

In an essay recalling that day, Lev-itan’s friend and publicist Yury Bel-kin said that Levitan screamed over the crowd: “Comrades, let us through, we have important things to do!”And the people in the crowd shouted back: “What things! Levitan is about to an-nounce the victory. Stay put like ev-eryone else and listen!”

Levitan immediately saw that the situation was hopeless and returned to the Kremlin, which had its own radio station, and broadcast from there. At 12:55, Levitan removed the wax seal from the envelope he had been given

Yury Levitan, rejected from acting school because of his country accent, became

the best-known voice in the Soviet Union during World War II.

FEMALE PILOTS WHO TERRORIZED THE NAZISSoon after the beginning of World War II, Russian authorities began receiving messages from female pilots who wanted to fi ght at the front with the men.

The decorated pilot Marina Raskova, who became a hero in the Soviet Union for her nonstop fl ight from Moscow to the far east-ern city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur in 1938, took up the cause, pro-posing that the military create a special all-female fl ying squad-ron. Despite Raskova’s fame, the idea was not an easy sell. Finally, Stalin intervened and, on Oct. 8, 1941, the order came to create three combat regiments of female pilots — one to fl y fi ghter planes, one for dive bombers and one for night bombers. The units also had female support staff and engineers.

Raskova herself commanded the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment. However the best-known of the units was the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Regiment, originally called the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

The Night WitchesThe 46th Night Bomber Regiment was the world’s only female night bomber regiment, and the only one of the three Russian units to remain all-female throughout the war. The unit was command-ed by Evdokia Bershanskaya, who was the only woman to have received the Order of Suvorov. The Germans came to call the mem-bers of this regiment the Night Witches, because of their precision at hitting targets, but also because of their practice of turning off their engines to approach targets silently, which caused the incom-ing planes to sound like sweeping broomsticks.

On May 27, 1942, the regiment, consisting of 115 ladies aged be-tween 17 and 22, arrived at the front. They fought their fi rst battle on June 12. At the height of the regiment’s strength, 80 pilots served.

“For Lyuba! For Vera!”The pilots of the 46th Night Bomber Regiment fl ew small Polikar-pov Po-2 slow-moving biplanes. The planes, called puddle jump-ers or bookcases, had been used for training pilots before the war. The Germans called them “Rus veneer,” because they were made of wood with a veneer coating. The plane had an open cabin with a Plexiglas visor, which could neither defend the crew from bul-lets nor from strong wind. There was also no radio communica-tion. The plane’s speed was only 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, per hour and its altitude was three kilometers. The only weapons the pilots had were handguns until 1944, when they acquired machine guns.

There was no bomb compartment, so the bombs were hung right under the plane’s belly. At the beginning of the war, the women would write “For the Fatherland” on the bombs, but after pilots began to be killed, they instead wrote the names of their fallen comrades, so the bombs would read “For Lyuba! For Vera!” The Po-2 could not carry many bombs, but because the planes fl ew so low, they could hit targets with great precision. A Po-2 crew con-sisted of a pilot and a navigator. The navigators would carry small-er bombs on their knees and throw them overboard with their hands. The women would make up to 10 fl ights a night. Just be-fore the target, the pilots would turn off the engines and the bombs would fall on the enemy in silence.

The navigators were usually university students. Polina Gelman studied history and Irina Rakobolskaya studied physics at Mos-cow State University; Raisa Aronova attended the Moscow Avia-tion Institute. They brought a certain educated sensibility to the regiment: they read lectures, published magazines and wrote po-etry.

One of the most famous of the Night Witches was Lilya Litvyak, the White Lily of Stalingrad. She was the fi rst female pilot to shoot down an enemy plane and held the record for most kills by a fe-male fi ghter pilot. She was shot down during the Battle of Kursk in 1943 at the age of 21.

Thirty of the Night Witches died in combat; twenty-three of the pilots were named “Heroes of the Soviet Union.”

During the war, the Night Witches fl ew more than 24,000 fl ights and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs.

Before the war, Stepan Sosnin’s fam-ily had their own workshop: both his parents were set designers at the Bol-shoi Theater. But in 1941, Sosnin’s fa-ther was sent to the front. “That same year we received news that my father was missing in action,” Sosnin remem-bers. “My mother told me.” She re-mained in the city protecting the skies of Moscow as an anti-aircraft gunner. Sosnin was four years old at the time.

Even 70 years later, he remembers the air-raid sirens and his grandmoth-er telling him to move faster. “We would descend to the sounds of the bombardments. The windows in our house were sealed with paper so that the glass would not fall out. It was like that in all the houses.”

Sosnin recalls the war in fragments. He did not even understand what war was, but he clearly remembers that something was happening that did not give anyone any peace. And it was not only the German airplanes that fl ew right above the city.

Barrage balloons and anti-aircraft gun divisions had been set up to coun-

■OLGA BELENITSKAYA

SPECIAL TO RBTH

■EKATERINA SINELSCHIKOVA

RBTH

CHILDHOOD IN WARTIME: A COMPOSER REMEMBERSAlthough he was only four when the war began, Stepan Sosnin recalls that time vividly.

cards were the only thing that saved the family from hunger. “One of the boys was entrusted with cutting the bread in a way so that no one would have more,” Sosnin remembers.

Sosnin was able to return to Mos-cow in 1943, although he remembers it was very difficult getting there as there was no direct road. First he and his grandmother navigated the Volga, then they hopped onto a train with soldiers heading for the front; Sosnin was hidden under a bench. Near Mos-cow, they climbed into a packed truck and rode to their apartment, where they lived in an eight-meter room. By 1943, the planes had stopped fl ying over the capital, but the government had ordered the anti-aircraft divisions to remain in place, so Sosnin’s mother continued living in the dugout built for the anti-aircraft gunners. “We ex-cavated the earth, put logs all around the dugout, made a roof and covered it with earth so that it would not be seen from the sky,” says Sosnin, who lived there with his mother until 1944.

Toward the end of the war, Sosnin entered a music school, after hearing radio announcements for singing les-sons (this would lead to his career). When he fi rst started school, he went every day from the dugout. Later he was transferred to a boarding school. “The fi eld where our dugouts were still exists,” he says. “It is empty. Nearby there are tram rails. Whenever I pass the fi eld, I remember the anti-aircraft squadron that was stationed here.”

and read: “Moscow is speaking! Fas-cist Germany is destroyed!”

During the war years, between 1941 and 1945, Levitan read about 2,000 reports from the Soviet Information Bureau. The reports were not record-ed at the time and Levitan was later asked to record part of the announce-ments on tape in the 1950s for poster-ity.

‘I can’t let the people down’After the war, Levitan continued to broadcast on Radio Moscow. For the next 28 years, he read government an-nouncements and reports from Red Square. In 1953, he announced the death of Stalin, his wartime command-er-in-chief. In 1961, he announced the fl ight of Yury Gagarin.

Levitan died from a heart attack in 1983, in the central Russian town of Prokhorovka during 40th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Kursk. Levitan had fi rst experienced heart problems in mid-1945, while reading material about Auschwitz on the air.

Before departing for Prokhorovka, Levitan complained to his friends about heart pains, but when they tried to persuade him not to go, he respond-ed laconically, “I can’t let the people down. They’re waiting for me.”

ter the German bombardments. Women would service the locating devices of the anti-aircraft installations and search for moving targets. “My mother serviced one of these batteries,” he re-calls. “My grandmother and I were evacuated in November-December 1941

to Ulyanovsk [553 miles or 890 kilo-meters from Moscow], to the house of my aunts. There were many boys there who they were looking after. I was the ninth! Can you imagine that?”

Both Sosnin’s aunts worked and had ration cards through their jobs. The

Stepan Sosnin experienced the war both in Moscow and as an evacuee.

Special Report

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During Kosachev’s term, the country did adopt a new international devel-opment concept. However, the confl ict in eastern Ukraine and a sharp de-cline in relations with the West in 2014-2015 created an entirely new interna-tional relations and soft power landscape, as Moscow took a compet-itive rather than a cooperative ap-proach to its interactions with key Western players. Coupled with Rus-sia’s current challenging economic sit-uation, the overall context puts the government into a “rapid reaction force mode,” where decisions are made based on momentary policy priorities, rath-er than long-term strategies.

Throughout 2014, Russia was “hard-ening its soft power policies” with greater priority given to media efforts. As a result, the vast majority of Rus-sia’s international communication ef-forts are currently used to create an alternative to the way most global media frame the coverage of major international political events. Although potentially benefi cial for the nation’s current policies, that approach does not contribute to greater internation-al understanding or an overall frame-work of cooperation.

Meanwhile, long-term public diplo-macy instruments and institutions are essentially left out of the mix, as they

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

March Brief:

After Nemtsov

April Brief:

Russian Studies

in the U.S.

The murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in the center of Moscow on Feb. 27 was a shocking event for Russians and Russia-watch-ers around the world. Was the killing a turning point in the Russian political scene or will the tragedy quickly fade into memory? What is the future of the opposition without Nemtsov’s charisma and influence and who will take his place? Will the per-son who ordered his killing ever be found? Read this brief to learn more.

Welcome to RD’s first rank-ing of Russian studies pro-grams in the United States. We examine the results of this survey, which involved the opinions of hundreds of educators and experts from both Russia and the United States. We also look at the trends in American-Russian studies programs and at what the future holds for them as they attempt to strike a balance between increased interests and de-creasing state funding.

RUSSIAN SOFT POWER INITIATIVES:

REVIEWING THE OPTIONS

ACCESS ALL RUSSIA DIRECT REPORTS

WITH ONE CLICKrussia-direct.org/archive

C O N V E R T I N G M O N O L O G U E

I N T O D I A L O G U E

Russia Direct is a forum for experts and senior

decision-makers from Russia and abroad to

discuss, debate and understand the issues

in geopolitical relations from a sophisticated

vantage point.

cannot react fast enough to affect cur-rent events. Therefore, international development is no longer a priority and the policy was tabled indefi nitely. Besides, limited fi nancial resources due to Western sanctions and the fall in the price of oil, make Russia less prone to engaging in international develop-ment.

Changed attitudes toward Russia are yet another reason to rethink public diplomacy. According to surveys, Rus-sia’s approach toward political devel-opments in Ukraine has led to in-creased negative attitudes about Russia in other countries even before the start of fi ghting in the eastern part of the country. There is hardly any rea-son to think that situation has im-proved since then.

Moreover, the Russian leadership’s changed rhetoric, implying that it in-tends to restore the “unity of historic Russia” shortly after Crimea was in-corporated as part of Russia, also cre-ated tensions in relations with some neighboring countries. Russia’s soft power was greatly undermined.

What to do nowAccording to Harvard Professor Jo-seph Nye, who originally coined the term “soft power,” the main resources of soft power are values, culture and policies. It is highly unlikely that Rus-sia’s current policies will become more

popular than they are now, so over the short-term, soft power prospects for Russia are limited. No immediate pub-lic diplomacy solution can improve the country’s soft power without resolv-ing the foreign policy troubles fi rst. That means it will take a number of years for a breakthrough to be possi-ble, which will give experts and prac-titioners time for a longer-term ap-proach.

The current situation, therefore, leaves Russian public diplomacy al-most no options but to continue im-proving operational efficiency and es-tablishing a platform for cooperation in the future. That means investing in education exchanges and second-track communication channels, as well as promoting language and culture. Soon-er or later, when the crises are over, all sides of the current confl icts will need to be able to cooperate with each other, which could lead to a burst of soft power. It will not be possible if the groundwork is not laid now, however.

That leaves Lyubov Glebova, who was recently appointed head of Ros-sotrudnichestvo, a surprising but apt choice as leader for the agency, given the circumstances. When there is not much money for development, one tries to makes more use of the resources that are already there and the educa-tion system is one of them. Despite certain drawbacks, Russia is still

among the top 10 countries in terms of attracting international students, and it also covers tuition for some 10,000 foreign students annually. How-ever, both the admission process and selection of universities to send stu-dents to are far from transparent and efficient.

Given Glebova’s prior experience in education management as a former head of the Federal Agency for Edu-cation Supervision, it is reasonable to expect that she will be focusing on bringing order to the system of inter-national education exchanges.

With almost no chances for imme-diate soft power results in the coming years, the national leadership also has a chance to rethink the overall ap-proach, develop a public diplomacy strategy and design a coordination mechanism for all the various agen-cies involved in the process. Experts and practitioners have been correctly pointing out that clear KPIs and bet-ter interagency cooperation could rad-ically improve soft power outcomes for the country.

Last, but most important, Russia could use the current soft power slow-down to invest in better understand-ing of international attitudes toward the country and the factors that shape those attitudes. There is still much to be done in terms of listening to what the world has to say.

WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF THE SECOND FRONT?

The fate of fascism was determined at Stalingrad

The opening of the second front saved the lives of Soviet soldiers

HISTORIAN EXPERT

ALEXEY

ISAEV

MICHAEL JABARA

CARLEY

Coordination in the planning and execution of military operations has always been the most dif-fi cult part of working with a

coalition during wartime. Dealing si-multaneous blows to different fronts has obvious advantages, but such syn-chronicity of action meets with great difficulties in practice. In the case of the Soviet Union and its Western Al-lies, there was no real coordination or harmonization. The reasons for this, however, lay not in the political sphere, but in the reality on the ground.

During the preparations for the sum-mer campaign of 1944, difficulties ac-cumulating ammunition forced the Red Army to delay the start of Operation Bagration in Belarus, so it did not syn-chronize with the landing of Allied forces in Normandy on D-Day. Simi-larly, poor weather conditions that made it difficult to use aircraft made it necessary for the Soviet command to shift the dates for the start of the Soviet Vistula-Oder Offensive until after the Battle of the Bulge had al-ready ended.

For a long time, the opening of the second front in Europe served as grounds for fierce political debate. There were many accusations made that the U.S. and the UK delayed open-ing the second front so that the Sovi-et Union would exhaust itself in the fi ght against Germany.

There is another, stronger argument, however, that there were great tech-nical difficulties in invading Europe from the sea. The main problem here was capturing a seaport that would make it possible to provide an unin-terrupted supply of a large mass of troops. The raid on the seaside town of Dieppe in northern France in 1942 had shown that the Germans were aware of the threat and prepared to defend the French ports. Additionally, simply capturing a port would be no guarantee of success for a long-term operation. The Germans could blow up the port infrastructure as they with-drew, which is exactly what happened with Cherbourg. Because of these ex-periences, the invasion took place only after the idea of landing on a beach was proposed in the fall of 1943. The invasion of Normandy would require

On July 3, 1941, 11 days after the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, Ivan M. Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in Lon-

don, met British Foreign Secretary An-thony Eden to discuss the military sit-uation and the larger question of Anglo-Soviet military cooperation. At-tacking the Soviet Union, Maisky said, was Hitler’s fi rst big mistake. “Russia is eternal” and cannot be beaten,” Maisky said, but it needed help. The Soviet Union was bearing the full force of the Nazi juggernaut. Could the British gov-ernment not make some landing on the coast of France? Such a move would indicate the willingness of the British. This was the fi rst Soviet request of many for a second front in the west to take German pressure off the Red Army.

In the summer of 1941, Britain was

the construction of an artifi cial break-water and fl oating piers, and a strong air defense, so the operation took months of preparation. It is important to note that the chief driving force be-hind the D-Day operation was Amer-ican President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who insisted on the landing in France in 1944.

If it were possible to express in one phrase the signifi cance all the Allies played in the victory over Germany, it would be: “The English and the Amer-icans broke the neck of the Luftwaffe and the Soviet Union broke the back of the German ground forces.”

Three-fourths of German casualties

occurred on the Eastern Front. Even after the landing in Normandy and the opening of the second front in Eu-rope, the total losses of the Germans on the Eastern Front were triple the losses on the Western Front. After con-centrating almost all of the strength of its air power in the east in 1941, however, the Luftwaffe’s forces were gradually pulled to the Western Front in defense of the Reich. The daily Amer-ican bombings of Germany became a way of drawing out the German fi ght-ers. The contribution of Soviet soldiers and officers cannot be overestimated. The victory was achieved at the cost of millions of their lives. But the sec-ond front helped to speed up the vic-tory over Germany, which in turn helped save the lives of many Soviet soldiers.

Alexey Isaev is a historian who spe-cializes in World War II and is the au-thor of a number of books about the war.

Michael Jabara Carley is a professor of history at the Université de Montréal and has published widely on 20th-century international politics.

ties were horrendous. But the Red Army kept fi ghting. On a wall in the Brest Fortress, a wounded soldier wrote: “I am dying, but I am not sur-rendering.”

Britain said it was doing its best to help the Red Army, but not even Brit-ish public opinion believed that. The British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, accused his own gov-ernment of shirking the fi ght, letting the Red Army take all the casualties. Soviet opinion, he said, believed that Britain was ready “to fi ght to the last drop of Russian blood.”

The U.S. State Department also had a poor opinion of the Russians, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not share the views of his bureaucrats. He worked to overcome anti-Soviet re-sistance and, in November 1941, an-nounced the extension of the Lend-Lease program to the Soviet Union.

Then, in December 1941, everything changed. The Red Army won a strate-gic victory in the Battle of Moscow, breaking the aura of Wehrmacht in-vincibility. In the Foreign Office, the British bureaucrats worried about the Red Army winning the war without their help, so fi nally the discussion re-turned to the second front in France.

In February 1943, the Red Army vic-tory at Stalingrad sealed the fate of Nazi Germany. And still the only place where the British and Americans were fi ghting German ground forces — and there only with three divisions — was in North Africa.

Roosevelt fi nally put his foot down. At the Tehran conference in Novem-ber 1943, he allied himself with Sta-lin to insist that a second front be es-tablished in France. Churchill resisted, but to no avail. Planning for the Nor-mandy Invasion became the priority. By the time the Western Allies landed in France in June 1944, the fate of fas-cism in Europe had long been deter-mined. But better late than never. Sta-lin was pleased to have some relief for his forces. If the U.K. and the U.S. had not fi nally joined the fi ght in France, Red Army soldiers would have washed in the waters of the English Channel, which is just what worried the West-ern Allies. Europe would have been liberated by the Red Army alone.

“The English and the Americans broke the neck of the Luftwaffe and the Soviet Union broke the back of the German ground forces.”

In the Foreign Office, the British bureaucrats worried about the Red Army winning the war without their help.

in no position to undertake a landing on the coast of France. The British army had yet to win a battle against the Weh-rmacht, although they had been at war for two years.

That summer, Britain started to send supplies, tanks and fi ghter aircraft, but not on a large scale: 200 fi ghters and a few hundred tanks. This was minis-cule, considering Soviet requirements. Red Army losses during the fi rst six months of the war were unimagina-ble: 3 million soldiers lost, killed, wounded or prisoners of war left to starve to death by the Nazis; 177 di-visions had to be written out of the Soviet order of battle; civilian casual-

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EXAMINING THE LEGACY OF YALTAFor some, the Kremlin’s behavior today is reminiscent of that of the Soviet Union after the war.

At the Yalta Conference in 1945, So-viet leader Joseph Stalin, U.S. Presi-dent Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill took on the ambitious challenge of creat-ing a geopolitical system that would prevent future major global confl icts.

From Feb. 4-11, 1945, the three lead-ers met at the Livadia Palace in Crimea and hammered out plans for the Unit-ed Nations, as well as the division of Europe into the spheres of infl uence that defi ned the post-World War II era. In remembering the conference, sev-eral Russian historians expressed the opinion that the kind of openness and leadership shown at Yalta could be use-ful for resolving the geopolitical con-fl icts facing Europe today.

Miroslav Morozov, chief researcher of the Institute of Military History of the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, said that while Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt each had an agenda going into the Yalta meeting, they were open to compro-mise, which made the success of the conference possible.

Morozov called compromise the “de-cisive factor” in the discussions. “The ability to fi nd a compromise allowed the leaders of countries that were part of the anti-Hitler coalition to make important decisions, which became the basis for a lasting peace,” he said, ac-cording to the news agency TASS.

Another military historian, Vitaly Bogdanov, agreed that compromise was key to the meeting, and that the need for cooperation was clear before the discussions began. Soviet officials pre-pared their proposals for the confer-ence in a way that would not alienate the West, while Roosevelt was betting on the infl uence of the strong U.S. econ-omy to open up the Soviet Union after the war, Bogdanov said.

Historians say that it is difficult to call the desire to compromise shown at Yalta an “illusion.” Surely the par-ticipants of the Yalta Conference them-selves did not think so, says Mikhail Myakhkov, scientifi c director of the Russian Military-Historical Society. “They [Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill] indeed wanted to agree on the rules of the game, about how the world would live after the war,” he said. “The main objective of the meeting was to prevent Germany’s future domination of Europe, prevent the appearance of Nazism and fi nish the war so that there would be a long period of peace. The Yalta Conference by and large real-ized this mission.”

Discord already in YaltaAt the same time, the viewpoint of the German historian Jost Dülffer was that despite “having reached separate com-promises, the leaders were in complete disagreement” over the composition of the Polish government, the dimension of Germany’s reparations owed to the Soviet Union and other issues.

“The factors that united the Allies were practically exhausted by 1946-1947,” Dülffer said during an interview on the German radio station DW. Ac-cording to him, the “confrontation of ideologies — communism and capi-talism — made the sides start con-structing their spheres of infl uence ac-cording to their own images.”

Dülffer notes another radical dis-agreement between Moscow and the Western capitals: “The Soviet Union had liberated Eastern Europe from Nazi Germany and consistently sought to have its interests followed in the liberated territories.”

Other scholars place the responsi-bility for deviating from the compro-mise at Yalta on Stalin. According to the military historian Boris Sokolov, the West did not expect that the So-viet Union would dominate its sphere of infl uence so completely. Sokolov says the West thought “there would be some-thing like Finland there, a country that was in the Soviet sphere, but that was independent and was not Sovietized.”

And yet a third opinion holds that the Soviet Union simply wanted a buf-

In an interview with RBTH, the histo-rian Geoffrey Roberts, a professor at Cork University in Ireland and an ex-pert on Stalin, spoke about the com-plex legacy of the Soviet leader.

How would you characterize Stalin’s con-

tribution to the victory?

The war was won by a combination of Stalin’s leadership, the role of the Red Army and its generals, and the colos-sal sacrifi ces of the Soviet people. It is also important to recall the important contribution of the Soviet Union’s West-ern Allies, especially during the latter years of the war.

The centrality of Stalin to the allied victory in the Second World War was widely recognized at the time, by his enemies as well as his friends, but that

fer zone on its border, to prevent the kind of invasion from the West it had experienced during the war.

“Stalin never announced that these countries [Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia] would be Sovi-etized and their governments would be fl ooded by Communist leaders. Ev-eryone (in the Soviet government) un-derstood that in this case the West would counteract, especially in the eco-nomic sphere, since at that time Mos-cow was discussing the continuation of America’s post-war aid for the re-construction of the destroyed country,”

says the Russian Military-Historical Society’s Myakhkov.

Repeating past mistakes?Dülffer says that the current situation in Europe reminds him of that period. “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin, in his policy and in the way he acts, is continuing the Stalinist tradition.” Dül-ffer says that Europe is again being divided into spheres of interest, which was not expected after 1989-1990.

Not all political analysts, however, think that the driving force behind to-day’s confl ict is Kremlin policy. “In a

geopolitical sense, the battle for spheres of infl uence that began in Yalta never really ended,” says Myakhkov. “It ei-ther raged or it subsided. Today we are witnessing the fi nal act of this battle, when the West thinks that it has all the aces, while Russia after the 1990s will never get back up on its feet.”

Myakhkov says that in order to solve the current problems a “new Yalta” is needed to establish rules in interna-tional relations and to re-assert the importance of the United Nations.

Speaking at the conference “Yalta 1945: The Past, Present and Future,”

■ALEXEI TIMOFEICHEV

RBTH

which took place at the Livadia Pal-ace on Feb. 4, the British political sci-entist Richard Sakwa said today’s les-son of Yalta is that we need to move beyond Yalta and establish a truly plu-ral world order.

“We must fi nd a more secure system of world order and European stabil-ity,” said Sakwa, according to Russian news agency RIA Novosti. “We are ob-ligated to use diplomacy to fi nd the best way forward.”

Historians say they believe it is difficult to call the desire to compromise shown at Yalta an illusion. Surely the participants didn’t think so.

Stalin as a wartime commander and his role in the victory

INTERVIEW GEOFFREY ROBERTS

perspective was lost during the Cold War.

To argue that Stalin was a great war-lord is not to deny that he was also a brutal dictator nor that he made many costly mistakes or pursued excessive-ly harsh policies. The great paradox of Stalin is the way he changed the course of history for both good and ill.

How would you characterize Stalin’s skills

as a planner of military operations?

All the Soviet generals who worked closely with Stalin during the war had a high opinion of him as a supreme commander. According to [Marshal Georgy] Zhukov, “Stalin mastered the technique of the organization of front operations and operations by groups of fronts, and guided them with skill.

He had the knack of grasping the main link in a strategic situation… Stalin’s merit lies in the fact that he correctly appraised the advice offered by the military experts.” It was [Chief of the General Staff Alexander] Vasilevsky’s “profound conviction that Stalin… was the strongest and most remarkable fi g-ure of the strategic command… As su-preme commander, Stalin was in most cases extremely demanding, but just.”

After victory, however, Stalin got somewhat carried away with his im-portance as a generalissimo and en-couraged a postwar cult of his mili-tary genius. Among the victims of his arrogance was Zhukov, his deputy su-preme commander, who was banished to the provinces for claiming too much personal credit for Soviet victories.

What would you say about relations be-

tween Stalin and his generals?

During the war, Stalin changed his leadership style. He became less dom-ineering and more collegiate, more a chairman than a managing director. He surrounded himself with talented generals and forged them into a high-ly effective supreme command. Some of these generals were over-awed by Stalin and did not always speak their minds. But others, like Zhukov, were not. Stalin encouraged truthfulness and honesty among his generals, but insisted on obedience and conformity once his mind was made up.

It’s often said that Stalin and other Soviet

military commanders did not pay much

attention to human costs while fighting

Nazis, therefore creating high casualties

among Soviet troops. Do you think such

statements are justified?

In English, you would say that the troops were considered to be “cannon-fodder” but I don’t think this is true of Stalin and his generals. True, they were ruthless in pursuit of their goals and prepared to pay a high price to avoid defeat and achieve victory. When Zhukov was asked if he and Stalin had been cruel during the war, he said yes they were, because they had to be.

But neither he nor Stalin were profl i-gate with their troops, which would have been an irrational attitude given that most of the time they lacked sol-diers. There are many instances of ef-forts to extract troops from encircle-ment and an increasing willingness as the war progressed to withdraw or call off engagements in order to conserve forces. Stalin and Zhukov were hard men, but they were not unfeeling. Sta-lin lost a son during the war and Zhu-kov’s home village was captured and burnt by the Germans. The casualties were high not because they were cal-lous but because of the nature and conditions of the Soviet-German war.

In retrospect, it is possible to point to various ways casualties could have been reduced. For example, was it nec-essary for 80,000 Soviet soldiers to die capturing Berlin? Would it not have been better to lay siege to the city and force its surrender? At the time, how-ever, the rapid capture of Berlin was seen as a way of ending the war as quickly as possible, of saving the lives of those who would have perished had the war dragged on. And who is to say that this calculation was wrong?

At the Yalta conference, which took place in February 1945 in Crimea, Winston Churchill, Franklin

Roosevelt and Josef Stalin hammered out a compromise on the structure of postwar Europe.

■ALEXEI TIMOFEICHEV

RBTH

Special Report

Heirs uncover forgotten medals thanks to projectIgor Rozin, RBTHSoviet schoolteacher Vasily Maslenkov managed to send 150 letters from the front, but he himself never returned home to his wife and daughter – he

was killed in August 1943 at Smolensk. But in 2015, his daughter Tamara Maslenkova, a teacher just as her father had been, learned that he was posthu-

mously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd Class. The discovery was made possible thanks to a special Internet database called Stars of Victory

(Zvyezdy Pobedy). The database, which is available only in Russian, is published on the website of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper with support of

the Russian Ministry of Defense.

During the nearly four years the Soviet Union fought World War II, soldiers of the Red Army were awarded over 38 million various orders and

medals. Unfortunately, in many cases the award never made it to the person who earned the honor. Now the families of veterans and in some cases

the veterans themselves, can check online to see if there are awards that belong to them.

In the 70 years that have passed since the end of the war, its survivors and their descendants have scattered all over the world. The goal of the

Stars of Victory Internet project is to provide a way for these far-fl ung former Soviet citizens to receive their honors. There are more than 8,200

names listed in the database, which can be read in Russian at rg.ru/zvezdy_pobedy. With the help of readers, RBTH editors have already found the

families of fi ve women listed in the database.

Unfortunately, any honor or award issued during World War II can be legally given only to the person who actually won the award. If the person

was killed or lost in the war, or has since died, the heirs of the person have the right to receive a certifi cate noting the honor won by their loved one

upon presentation of the relevant documents.

THE UNKNOWN HEROES HAVE TO BE FOUND! CHECK IF SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS AMONG THE FORGOTTEN AWARD WINNERS AT UNKNOWNWAR.RBTH.COM

LIVES AT WAR: THE UNTOLD STORIES

Every person who lived through

World War II has a story to tell,

whether it be a story of suff ering,

great strength, love, hatred or libera-

tion. This time was perceived diff er-

ently by every person, and it was one

of the world’s greatest tragedies. We

must remember the war, so that such

a confl ict can never happen again.

We want to make sure that each

story from this time gets told. Send

the war stories and photos of your family and friends and

help build our archive.

Email our editorial team at [email protected]

and be part of this project, preserving this important part

of history.

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