Here’s the ash is so hot in kind,
It will burn hard – breathe, touch, remember…
Don’t cry while stepping over it and hide
Your tears, before future ash don’t tremble…
(Olga Bergholz, In Stalingrad)
In February 1943, on the banks of the Volga River, humanity dared to hope again after nearly three years of Hitler’s unbroken string of victories in Europe. This is where Nazism began to be defeated at the Battle of Stalingrad. Today, in the center of the modern city of Volgograd, the tricolor flag of the Russian Federation flutters on a mast some twenty meters high. Yet every year, in the week leading up to the Victory Day celebrations on May 9, the Russian flag is taken down and replaced by the red banner bearing the hammer, sickle, and star of the Soviet Union. More specifically, they hoist the legendary “Victory Banner” marked with the insignia of the 79th Regiment of the Red Army, commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov – the same banner that stormed Berlin, drove Hitler to suicide, and sealed the unconditional surrender of the Nazi forces. In addition, thousands of small Victory flags are placed on lampposts throughout the city alongside the Russian tricolors. Every year, on ten landmark dates of the war – including Victory Day – the city officially changes its name back to Stalingrad. Signs are erected at various points around town, and the city government refers to it by its former name in documents and official acts. On April 15 of this year, President Vladimir Putin even signed a decree renaming the city’s international airport “Stalingrad.”
Just as in Stalingrad, weeks before Victory Day the capital, Moscow, is lavishly decorated with Victory flags, posters, electronic billboards and banners – in public spaces like squares, subway stations, and bus stops, and in private venues such as shops, restaurants, bars, and banks. All of them bear the 80th anniversary logo with the word Pobeda (Victory) and the design of the magnificent statue The Motherland Calls, one of the largest statues in the world (85 metres), located on top of a hill in Mamayev Kurgan, Stalingrad: a warrior woman in a tunic fluttering in the wind – as if it wasn’t even made of stone – with a raised sword and a facial expression that mixes the horror felt and the bravery shown by the Soviet people in a war that claimed 27 million lives in the USSR.
One in seven Soviets died in the conflict; virtually every family lost someone. That is why Victory Day mobilizes the entire nation and serves as a unifying element in the face of yet another war in defense of its sovereignty. On that day, across the country, the “Immortal Regiments” march: millions of people take to the streets bearing photographs of their ancestors who perished in the war, ensuring the memory of those who gave their lives – so that the nation, and humanity, would not succumb to the Nazi threat – never dies. In recent years in Moscow, for security reasons – after all, the country is at war – the Immortal Regiment has not marched in the streets. This year, days before the celebration, Ukrainian drones attacked the city on two consecutive nights, forcing airport closures, complicating the arrival of foreign delegations, and putting the security forces – thousands of soldiers and police on the streets – on permanent alert. The tension was palpable everywhere.
The two contemporary battles against the collective west
Eighty years after the victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” as Russians call World War II, Russia finds itself engaged on at least two interconnected fronts. One is the battle for memory, which is permanent, because the Collective West has been trying for decades to rewrite the history of the greatest war humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately, in some cases the distortions and erasure of memory have had relative success, as we shall see. The other front is the military battle being fought on Ukrainian territory – against the killing of thousands of the Russian-speaking population in the Donbass and against NATO’s attempt to push even closer to Russia’s borders by stationing US nuclear warheads some 500 km from Moscow, as envisaged by Zbigniew Brzezinski – one of the architects of White House foreign policy for decades – in his famous book The Grand Chessboard. In that 1997 book, Brzezinski argued that to weaken Russia it was crucial to keep it politically and economically separated from Ukraine. Twenty-eight years later, that objective had been realized. He prophesied that the process of Ukraine’s incorporation into NATO should begin between 2005 and 2015. Recall that George W. Bush did everything he could to bring Kyiv into NATO for the first time at the 2008 Bucharest Summit, but was blocked by Angela Merkel and Jacques Chirac, when EU leaders still had some realpolitik sense. Then, in 2014 – with the Maidan coup and the ousting of President Yanukovych – the West, led by the White House, launched its offensive to separate Russia from Ukraine and bring the latter into NATO. It was the unfolding of this process that unleashed the current war. By now, it is clear that Russia has defeated NATO – a victory whose full dimensions are yet to be understood – and that Ukraine will not become a NATO member any time soon. But Brzezinski’s timeline was correct, and at least half of his objectives were achieved.
After more than three years, the war has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides (incomparably more in Ukraine, of course), devastated the Ukrainian economy and social fabric, and severed – probably for a long time – family and friendship ties between peoples once considered brothers. There are countless thousands of families with relatives on both sides. A young 25-year-old Russian woman recently told me a sad story. She is Russian, her parents are Russians, all Muscovites, but her four grandparents were Ukrainians who migrated to the capital many decades ago. Her best friend was Ukrainian, daughter of Ukrainian parents, but her four grandparents were Russians who had moved to Kyiv many decades prior. Since the war began, tensions between them had been rising – until the day her friend joined the Azov Battalion, part of the Ukrainian armed forces, with its neo-Nazi ideology. “Then,” she told me with a despairing look, “it became impossible to talk and we broke off our relationship. Maybe forever.”
On a gilded plaque in the Kievskaya Metro station (that is, the “Kyiv” station) in Moscow – among mosaics depicting the daily life of Ukrainian workers and peasants, just below a mosaic of Lenin – it celebrates “the unbreakable brotherhood between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.” The greatest military confrontation on European soil since World War II has not only shattered that brotherhood, but has become a new driving force in the battle for memory: both in the attempt to erase the Soviet role in defeating Hitler’s Germany and in the resurgence of Nazi ideology in numerous Western (and even Global South) countries.
Post-truths: Erasing the Soviet victory and the resurgence of Nazism
Immediately after the end of World War II and with the start of the Cold War, the West’s greatest narrative-making machine – Hollywood – began to rewrite the war’s history, fantasizing an alleged American protagonism in hundreds of films. As early as 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives, which portrays the difficulties of veterans returning home, won seven Oscars. In 1970, Patton, the biopic of General George S. Patton focusing on his campaigns in North Africa and Europe, repeated the feat with another seven statuettes. Perhaps the most famous film of all was Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), which tells the story of D-Day in Normandy. It was seen by over 100 million people in theaters worldwide. Beyond films, TV shows, newspapers, magazines, books, and countless other cultural productions, schools, universities, and other state institutions over decades have managed to establish a “post-truth” about the war and the victory over Nazism.
A famous 1945 survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) found that 57% of the French credited the USSR with defeating the Nazis, while only 12% credited the US However, a 2025 YouGov poll showed that only 22% of French respondents now believe the Soviets were the protagonists, whereas 44% subscribe to the American-first myth. The same poll found that in Germany, Americans edge out the Soviets by 34% to 31% (though more favorable to the USSR than nine years earlier, when it was 37% to 27%); and in the US itself, 59% attribute the victory to their own country, and only 12% to the USSR (versus 47% to 12% in 2015).
If the story of Soviet resistance and victory is being erased in the West, something even worse has occurred in recent years: the resurgence of Nazi ideology. Early in this decade, the news site Forward – whose origins go back to New York’s Jewish community in 1897 – mapped streets, monuments, plaques, etc., named after notorious Nazis. They found nearly 1,500 such items in 25 countries. In Germany and Austria – where one would expect these traces to have been purged by state policy – over 110 were identified. In the US, the supposed “great victors” of the war, “the land of freedom,” 36 items were mapped. Yet by far the country with the most Nazi homages is Ukraine, with about 420. According to the study, many of these namings occurred after the Maidan coup in 2014; “at times,” say the authors, “at the rate of about one new naming per week.”
The champion of these homages is Stepan Bandera, leader of one faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who collaborated with the Nazis. Bandera has become the principal symbol of Ukrainian neo-Nazi nationalism, inspiring many leaders in Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government. In other words, when Russia says that one of its objectives in its Special Military Operation is to “denazify” Ukraine, it is not mere rhetoric or war propaganda, but a sad reality. It concerns not only Zelenskyy’s government, nor is it simply about defeating the Azov Battalion or other similar units; it is about fighting a political culture that, sadly, seems to have taken root in Ukraine, especially since 2014. Under US leadership, NATO has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into weapons and direct military assistance to a regime whose many leaders do not hide their sympathy for neo-Nazi ideology. On the one hand, if the ends justify the means and the strategic objective – as some Western leaders say – was to “weaken Russia,” then there is no problem using neo-Nazis to achieve it. Yet despite the countless Hollywood films denouncing the horrors of the Nazi regime, the truth is that the West carries an obscure relationship with Nazism in the post-war era.
There are bad Nazis and there are useful Nazis
During Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the Canadian Parliament, former SS Galizien officer Yaroslav Hunka was given a standing ovation and hailed as “a Ukrainian hero” who had fought against Russia for his country’s independence. Yet, this “hero” also fought alongside the Nazis, and the occasion became a scandal that led Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to issue a public apology and House Speaker Anthony Rota – the one who introduced him – to resign. However, this gaffe should surprise us less if we recall the fate of many senior Nazi figures in the West after 1945.
It is no secret that numerous high-ranking officers of Hitler’s regime were absorbed into the German army (Bundeswehr) and NATO – such as Adolf Heusinger, Hitler’s former Chief of Operations who became Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee (1961–64); Hans Speidel, Rommel’s Chief of Staff, later Supreme Commander of Allied Land Forces Central Europe (1957–63); Johannes Steinhoff, Johann von Kielmansegg, Ernst Ferber, Karl Schnell, Franz Joseph Schulze, Friedrich Guggenberger, and Wolfgang Altenburg, all senior NATO commanders from the 1960s to the 1980s.
But perhaps the most striking story is that of Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, a Wehrmacht officer who took part in the invasion of the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) and fought at Stalingrad, where he was wounded and evacuated. He later fought the Soviets in Romania, then returned to Berlin, until he was captured by the US troops. From 1979 to 1983, he was none other than Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Allied Forces Central Europe.
Another repressed episode of the West’s collective memory is the infamous Operation Paperclip, in which about 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were clandestinely brought to the US to work in military, academic, and industrial institutions, continuing to develop and apply their advanced knowledge in fields such as rocketry, aeronautics, medicine, and physics. The most famous figure in this story is Wernher von Braun, leader of Germany’s V-2 rocket program and instrumental in developing NASA’s Saturn V rocket that enabled the Apollo Moon missions. Von Braun received numerous honors at NASA and appears on the list of Nazis commemorated by Forward as mentioned above.
A similar, though less documented, case involved the little-known but extremely brutal Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army, responsible for chemical and biological weapons research based on experiments on prisoners of war – mostly Chinese, but also Koreans, Mongolians, and Russians. The unit, based in Harbin, northern China, employed over 3,600 staff across more than 150 buildings. Before surrendering, the Japanese tried to destroy evidence of their war crimes, but the Chinese were able to reconstruct many atrocities from material remains and testimony. Nevertheless, numerous key figures – such as directors Shirō Ishii and Masaji Kitano – were granted immunity by US authorities, likely in exchange for abundant research data, and lived out normal post-war lives in Japan.
If Soviet protagonism is being erased by the West, what is even more obliterated is the monumental sacrifice of the Chinese people in World War II. Many still know that nearly 30 million Soviets died, but few realize that about 20 million Chinese lost their lives due to Japanese invasions and attacks that began in 1937. Had the Chinese people not fought so fiercely, the Japanese might have opened a second front against the Soviets in the east – potentially jeopardizing their victory on the western front against the Nazis. According to People’s Liberation Army figures, 35 million Chinese were killed or wounded. Indeed, while the “World” War began in Europe in 1939, it actually started in Asia in 1937 – well before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Chinese and other Asian peoples were already suffering the consequences of Japanese fascist expansionism. The war also ended later in Asia – in September 1945. That is why Chinese President Xi Jinping’s prominent presence next to President Putin at the 80th-anniversary celebrations of the victory over Nazi fascism carries such powerful symbolism, resurrecting the indispensable role of the Chinese people – organized in a United Front of Communists and Nationalists, but in practice led by another Red Army under Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De.
As President Xi Jinping wrote in a letter published during Victory Week:
“During the Anti-Fascist World War, the Chinese and Russian peoples fought side by side and supported each other. The strong camaraderie between our two nations, forged in blood and sacrifice, flows onward, powerful as the Yellow River and the Volga.”
That camaraderie today is expressed through countless shared strategic interests and actions. As President Vladimir Putin reminded us in a media statement, along with the Chinese president, “Russia and China stand united in their consistent efforts to preserve historical truth about the Great Victory as a common value for humanity and, together, prevent attempts to falsify history and rehabilitate Nazism and militarism.”
The USSR and China – with their respective Red Armies – were the protagonists of the fight against Nazi fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Eighty years later, once again Moscow and Beijing are leading the struggle to build alternatives to Western unilateralism and coercive practices. In short, they are striving to construct alternatives to the warmongering hyper-imperialism that threatens humanity with endless wars. The struggles of the present and future are directly tied to the battle over the interpretation of the past, which is being transformed into “post-truth” by the Western narrative-machine. In these days, it’s worth recalling one of the greatest truths ever spoken about World War II, attributed to the American writer Ernest Hemingway:
“Every human being who loves freedom owes more to the Red Army than he will ever be able to repay in his lifetime.”
It might not be historical injustice to say that we actually owe both Red Armies.
Marco Fernandes is a Brazilian Beijing-based geopolitical analyst with Brasil de Fato and an editor of Wenhua Zongheng International.
