![]() ![]() ![]() Herded into open pens, most of them perished. In the first six months of the German invasion (June to December 1941), 2.6 million Soviet soldiers were killed in battle and 3.35 million taken prisoner. But 'Russia's War', as Richard Overy called it in his landmark 1997 work, reminds us how strange and terrible it really was. Perhaps no historical event is as familiar as the Second World War. This revival of a Cold War thesis of interchangeable Nazi/Soviet totalitarianisms makes it an open question whether these Western leaders would have made the journey to Moscow even without the conflict in Ukraine. ![]() Since then, much-read works like Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands and Anne Applebaum's Gulag and Iron Curtain have asserted or implied the equivalence of Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. United by the War on Terror, US President George W Bush and other Western leaders stood alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2005 parade in Red Square. But of major Western leaders only German Chancellor Angela Merkel will go, not to the parade but to a subsequent wreath-laying ceremony in honour of the Soviet war dead. Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend. The leaders of the Soviet Union's allies in that conflict, Great Britain and the US, will not be present. On 9 May, Russians celebrate the 70th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. ![]()
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