For Eastern Europe, V-E Day Commemorates The Exchange Of One Oppressor For Another

Hitler and Stalin…rivals who used millions as pawns in their games of conquest and oppression.

This month we celebrate the 80th anniversary of V-E Day, “Victory in Europe” which marked the end of the European Theater’s part in the Second World War. It is a date certainly worth commemorating as it closed one of the darkest chapters in European history that was the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich.

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For the countries in what today we call Western Europe that languished under the jackboot of Nazi oppression—France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Greece—the Allied victory truly represented liberation.

British and American victors celebrate V-E Day, May 8, 1945.

But there was another side to V-E Day which seems to get glossed over. And that is the less happy fate of the Eastern European nations who were not liberated by the Anglo-Americans rolling in from the west, but rather the Red Army coming in from the east. And for those nations—Poland, Hungary, then-Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states—V-E Day merely meant trading one brutal oppression for another. Indeed, as the Allies were closing in from both sides, the dark joke in Germany was “Optimists are learning English, pessimists are learning Russian.”

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In the film Jaws, mayor Vaughn makes an interesting observation. “You yell ‘barracuda’ and people say ‘huh? What?’ You yell ‘shark’ and you’ve got a panic.” I mention this seeming non sequitur to illustrate a mindset that is somewhat applicable to the way we have come to react to the mention of Joseph Stalin vis-à-vis Adolf Hitler. We have been so conditioned over 80 years to viscerally recoil at the very mention of the mad Führer’s name that he has become the go-to analogy by the left especially whenever confronted by a politician or public figure who does not conform to their progressive ideology.

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Just say “Hitler” and the mind conjures up images of the Holocaust and mass murder of millions of innocents carried out by robotic, goose-stepping troopers tramping through the streets with their signature coal scuttle helmets that were even the model for Darth Vader’s headgear.

The Wehrmacht marches before their Führer who will soon plunge Europe into the worst conflagration since the Black Death.

Yet, when we utter then name Stalin no such dark imagery materializes in the collective mind. Even though, in terms of pure numbers, it can be argued that the Georgian “Man of Steel” had more blood on his hands than Hitler. We say “Hitler” and one thinks of concentration camps…as they should. But why do so few think of the Gulag when Stalin is mentioned? Most have heard of Hitler’s Gestapo. But what of Stalin’s brutal NKVD? We properly curse the memories of Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, but the name Lavrentiy Beria means nothing to most people.

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This can be attributed to a curious media tendency of apologetics towards communism. As polls consistently show, the media leans very much to the left. And Stalinism is the ultimate expression of their collective ideology come to fruition in all its vicious and destructive inevitability. During the 1930s, for example, dispatches from Moscow-based New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty were shamefully obsequious, offering up for his readers images of a prosperous happy Soviet worker’s paradise…even as Stalin’s secret police and soldiers were systematically executing, torturing, starving, and imprisoning millions to achieve his ill-conceived collectivist ambitions.

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No matter that the Soviet dictator was coldly stripping Ukraine of food and inducing a famine in 1932-1933 (called the “Holodomor”) during which anywhere from 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians died of starvation. In fact, so brutal were the communists to Ukraine that when the Germans invaded in 1941, being ignorant of the racial/anti-Semitic Nazi ideology of Hitler’s legions at the time, many Ukrainians at first welcomed them as liberators.

In 1947, the Washington Post’s Leonard Lyons wrote: “One official rose and made a speech about…the tragedy of having millions of people dying of hunger. He began to enumerate death figures. Stalin interrupted him to say, ‘If only one man died of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.’” Whether or not Stalin actually said this is still unclear, but it most certainly captures his barbaric psychopathy.

Ukrainian children, among the millions who starved during Stalin’s Holodomor.

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Then there was Stalin’s 1929-1933 genocide against the Kulaks (wealthy peasants who resisted his policies) to facilitate the expropriation of farmland. In one directive the Soviet leader declared “We must smash the Kulaks, liquidate them as a class.” Millions died.

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And what of the estimated 700,000 to 6 million (the latter figure from dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who was imprisoned for eight years) who died in Stalin’s Gulag, the far-flung network of concentration camps?

Red Army Soldiers raise the banner of the USSR over captured Berlin, 1945. Eastern Europe would be condemned to another 45 years of dictatorship before the Soviet Union ended.
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Starting in 1936, after twelve years of consolidating his power through terror and murder following the death of Lenin, Stalin wiped out his political and military adversaries in a series of show trials called “The Great Purge” that ended up with his most dangerous enemies facing a firing squad. Stalin’s biographer Oleg V. Khlevniuk estimates that 1.6 million were arrested with 700,000 shot; no one knows how many died of torture.

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During the Second World War on the Eastern Front, Stalin was so profligate with the lives of his people that by the time the red banner of the USSR was flying over the Reichstag in the conquered Berlin some 27 million Soviets lay dead. Many as a result of combat and German atrocities, of course, but also due to Stalin’s unimaginative strategies that callously offered up his people before the guns of the Wehrmacht as fodder. As just one example, in 1942 as the Germans marched on Stalingrad (a city he renamed for himself) Stalin refused to evacuate the over 500,000 civilians who were directly in the approaching enemy’s path. His logic was that Red Army troops would “fight harder for a live city than a dead one.” It is estimated that 70,000 civilians died as a result, forced to stay in harm’s way by a leader who had absolutely no sense of humanity and viewed human beings as pawns.

Russian civilians, forced by Stalin to stay in the city even as the Panzers were just over the horizon, burying their dead at Stalingrad.

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Whereas Hitler’s policies were driven by twisted racial hatred, delusions of grandeur, a sense of grievance on behalf of a nation he felt was ill-treated at Versailles, and, by the end, drug-addled bona fide madness, Stalin in some ways is even more disturbing as there was a cold, calculating, and ruthless nature to his mentality. And the depths of his paranoia knew no bottom. He saw everyone around him as a potential threat to his power, and usually a bullet in the skull was his resolution.

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Stalin will also go down as one of the most treacherous characters in history. It should be remembered that, until Hitler turned on him and attacked Russia in June 1941, Stalin and the German dictator were allies. Hitler only felt secure enough to invade Poland in September 1939 and trigger the Second World War because Berlin and Moscow had just entered into a non-aggression pact the month before. In fact, Poland was not just invaded by the Wehrmacht but also the Red Army. After which Stalin’s NKVD promptly rounded up 22,000 members of Poland’s military and intelligentsia, marched them to the Katyn Forest, and massacred them all.

Aerial view of an unearthed mass grave of some of the 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals murdered by Stalin’s NKVD in 1939.

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From 1939-1940, while the West was focused on German aggression, Stalin attacked Finland then proceeded to invade and subjugate the Baltic States. And but for his pact with Hitler, the Nazi leader would have never turned his armies west. Says historian Victor Davis Hanson: “Of the six major belligerents of World War II, on the Axis side, Italy, Japan, and Germany, and the United States, Russia, and Britain, Stalin made a deal with every one of them at one time or another, and he honored the ones with the Axis better than he did us.”

FDR enjoys a light moment with Europe’s worst mass murderer. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. While FDR negotiated in good faith with the Soviet leader to craft a post-war Europe dedicated to democratic principles, Stalin was instructing his generals to take as much of Eastern Europe as they could to extend communist dominaton to a people caught between the evil sisters Nazism and Bolshevism.

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But, unlike Hitler, Stalin’s image during the war was softened by the Roosevelt administration and pliant media due to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Russians were now our allies after all. And we needed the Red Army to kill as many Germans as possible before we invaded France. FDR especially was hopelessly naïve about the duplicitous nature of the man whose military he was now supplying through Lend-Lease. The mass murderer of Moscow was thus re-christened “Uncle Joe”. And as it was his Red Army more than any other that destroyed the Wehrmacht, what he did to his own people and those in Eastern Europe were swept under the rug. After all, as the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

While the New York Times was painting a picture of a communist “worker’s paradise” millions were dying by execution, torture, starvation, disease, and overwork on the orders of “Uncle Joe” Stalin.
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80 years after the war has ended, modern Germany is still horrified by, and ashamed of, their Nazi past. But to this day even in a post-Cold War Russia in which information regarding the horrific crimes carried out by the Bolsheviks is now widely accessible, Stalin is still revered by the Russian people. A 2021 poll by the Levada Center found that 70% of Russians held a mostly or very favorable view of Stalin.

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And that same lack of revulsion over Stalin’s decades-long reign of terror carries over into the West today as a misguided affinity for Marxism slithers its way through the halls of so-called higher education. A poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that millennials, particularly younger ones, displayed an abysmal ignorance of communism and even support for it. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 20 “said they would vote for a socialist, while 21% would go so far as to back a Communist.” Even more shocking was that a “third of millennials say they believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than Joseph Stalin.” This is criminal negligence on the part of academia…and dangerous.

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I have a shirt that reads “Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” (One cannot imagine even printing such a shirt about Nazism). Though gallows humor, the message is also a searing indictment of a left-leaning apologist academic and media establishment that is so quick to label anyone who wears a MAGA hat as a “Nazi” but are utterly dismissive of the crimes perpetrated by founding fathers of their own defunct and cruel ideologies.

Stalin (1878-1953). It is difficult to see the blood of tens of millions on his hands either in this photo then or in halls of media/academia today.

Brad is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books.