ABSTRACT
When Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg, Izvestia was not amused. It objected to his failure to recall Soviet sacrifice in the Second World War and thought that he had got his history wrong: ‘The head of the American administration…intolerably distorted historical truth in Bergen-Belsen, where he confined the crimes of the Nazi regime solely to the extermination of the Jewish population.’1 What Izvestia would have preferred was reference to the some 20 million Soviet citizens who were direct casualties of the German invasion. It might also have expected acknowledgement of the other terrible statistics of Operation Barbarossa and its aftermath, some reflection on the tally of POWs who died in captivity in the Second World War-4 per cent of Anglo-Americans in German hands, 27 per cent of Anglo-Americans captured by the Japanese, up to 37.4 per cent of Germans held by the Soviets and 57.8 per cent of Soviets taken by Nazi Germany.2 In his recent general history of the conflict, Alastair Parker has remarked that the Second World War was really two wars, a European one and an Asian-Pacific one.3 Soviet readers, armed with the memories of German invasion, would disagree.They would point to at least three Second World Wars-the conflict with Japan, the rather gentlemanly sideshows of Western and Southern Europe, and, most importantly, the mortal combat in Eastern Europe, the ‘real Second World War’, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ as their textbooks call it, their war, their history.This war, which they had suffered, endured and won, they were loath to share with anyone, not even the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
