Victory Day! С днём Победы!

Let us not forget that Britain and Russia were in the fight against Hitler together

Whatever the state of our relations today, Britain and the Soviet Union were allies during the World War II/ The Great Patriotic War. Dismissing the solemnity of Victory Day and its importance to Russian people is absurd and offensive. Despite the obvious conflict between our nations today, let us not repurpose history.

If you visit the British Ambassador’s Residence in Moscow, directly across the river from the Grand Kremlin Palace, you might get a chance to see ‘Churchill’s bathroom’. Just off the main reception rooms on the first floor, it was specially fitted out for the Prime Minister’s two visits to Moscow during the war, in August 1942 and October 1944. There he’d sit, in a large bathtub, smoking his cigars and drinking whiskey, staring out the window and contemplating what to discuss with Josef Stalin.

Of the Prime Minister’s relations with Stalin, the American Churchill museum notes: ‘They never fully trusted each other. They had acrimonious differences. And, as a life-long anti-Bolshevik, Churchill harboured few illusions about Soviet post-war intentions. Nevertheless.. Churchill's relationship with Stalin had the marks of respect. Churchill was fond of Stalin and enjoyed their interplay.’

Sir Alec Cadogan, Permanent Secretary at the UK Foreign Office, who accompanied Churchill, recalled their visits in vivid detail, including the amusing tale of a drunken banquet at the Kremlin involving Stalin, Churchill and Molotov. In terms of the substance, he said ‘I think the two great men really made contact and got on terms, Certainly, Winston was impressed, and I think that feeling was reciprocated…. Anyhow, conditions have been established in which messages exchanged between the two will mean twice as much, or more, than they did before’.

Despite huge differences, both leaders recognised the need to work together to defeat Hitler, and their meetings undoubtedly solidified and improved that partnership. Churchill wasn’t the first senior British politician the visit Moscow during the war. That accolade goes to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden who travelled in January of 1942, having first visited Russia in 1935. Of his wartime visit he said:

‘I believed then, as I believe now, that there was no real conflict of interest between this country and the Soviet Union. I believed then as I believe now, that despite the many obvious differences, our overriding purpose was the same.’

Shortly before Eden’s visit, America had finally entered the war. But until that time, Britain and the Soviet Union shared a common purpose in facing Nazi Germany, to the west and to the east, together, and practically alone.

When operation Barbarossa started, France was already out of the war, Britain was still licking its wounds from Dunkirk and being pushed out of North Africa by Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The Soviet Union held back the full force of Nazi Germany on the eastern front. US ground troops wouldn’t step foot on mainland Europe until the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, having helped Britain push Rommel out of north Africa.

By then, Soviet forces had turned the tide against the Nazi advance at Stalingrad and were routing the Germans in the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, involving 2 million troops and around 6000 tanks. That’s an order of magnitude far greater than any battle waged by the British and Americans.

Most German troops who died during the war did so at the hand of the Soviet Army, not the British or American. I say this not to belittle British efforts, of which I am immensely proud.

I say it merely to encourage the many western commentators who criticise Victory Day commemorations in Moscow to have some perspective on why May 9 is important to Russian people. Not least because of huge differences in stance over the war in Ukraine, repurposing Russian history to demonstrate British and American exceptionalism is absurd and offensive. At a time when we should be striving for peace in Europe, it also builds deeper wells of hatred and mistrust.

Twenty seven million Soviet citizens died, around half from Russia, with enormous numbers also in Ukraine and Belarus. The Nazis were defeated, but at a staggering cost. That is why Russia, and other former Soviet States commemorate Victory Day with such pride and solemnity. This has nothing to do with glorifying events happening in the present day in Ukraine or anywhere else. It was, as we would say in Britain, to remember those who, ‘for our tomorrow, gave their today’.

Yes, I understand and am aware of the violent excesses of the Stalin regime within the Soviet Union itself, something Russophobe critics like to bring up at every turn. Ideologically, our countries could not have been more different, and I have always been a proud, royalist Brit. But as His Majesty King Charles said last night at the VE Day celebration in Horseguards.

‘The Allied victory being celebrated then, as now, was a result of unity between nations, races, religions and ideologies, fighting back against an existential threat to humanity.’

Britain and the Soviet Union were allies in an existential fight against Hitler’s Germany. If you ever have a chance to visit Victory Park in Moscow, in Moscow, you may happen upon a bronze statue of a Soviet, American, British and French soldier. This alliance was, and still is, very symbolic to Russian people.

Britain delivered tens of thousands of items of military materiel to the Soviet Union during the war, including over 15000 trucks, plus tanks and fighter aircraft. The Arctic Convoys suffered terrible losses delivering this aid and that sacrifice is still remembered in Russia today.

Stalingrad in particular drove military innovations, for example in the use of aircraft in ground support, the development of the Katyusha rocket system, an improvements in sniper rifle technology and tactics, made famous by Vasily Zaitsev.

War triggered a seismic industrial shift within Soviet Union. In the teeth of the Nazi advance, around 1000 separate industrial enterprises were relocated from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia to the rear areas including to the Urals, where much of Russia’s military industrial complex remains today. In just two years, the Soviet Union became a military manufacturing juggernaut, for example, producing almost 60,000 T-34 tanks throughout the wartime period.

The Soviet Union’s prized cultural heritage was shifted too, whole orchestras, opera and ballet companies moved to the Urals and Siberia. Visit Novosibirsk and you’ll find the impressive State Opera and Ballet theatre which opened just three days after the war ended, on 12 May 1945. The Leningrad Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra had been moved to Siberia just after the war started.

Eighty years after the war ended, it is these and other achievements that people throughout Russia will remember today, May 9. It is, for them, a day filled with much pride and poignancy.

At this time of remembrance, I pay tribute to all the forces of the Soviet Union for their magnificent struggle to defeat Nazi Germany, to those who died, to those who survived, and to all who still mourn the fallen. С днём Победы!