Join Red Youth and the CPGB-ML tomorrow (Tuesday 9 May) at the Soviet War Memorial to commemorate the heroic struggle of the soviet people and the sacrifice of 27 million lives in the fight against fascism. We will be meeting at the Soviet War Memorial in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, Kennington, from 10:30am.
In this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, it is as important as ever to remember and educate people about real, proletarian history. As Engels noted in Material for the History of Ireland in 1870: “The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is a part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods; it falsified the writing of history. And the best-paid historiography is that which is falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie.”
We must not let this happen. The bourgeois institutions this year have organised cricuses of misinformation about the October Revolution, hosted at venerable institutions such as the British Library and Royal Academy of Arts, to name a couple. Over decades they have convinced people through academia and hollywood that it was the British and the Americans that saved Europe from barbarism, with no explanation of what gave birth to the fascist threat, nor more than a brief mention of the Soviet Union.
It is being asserted that the freedom of the Baltic states and east European countries only brought the subjugation of these nations to the Soviet Union. And now it is not uncommon to see the symbols of Soviet socialism and of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people attacked, hand-in-hand with the glorification of those who collaborated with Nazism during the War.
This is particularly true of the Baltic states, Poland and, especially, Ukraine. In the last-named country, Stefan Bandera, the notorious Nazi stooge, is honoured with statues and street names as a great fighter for national liberation – not against the Nazis but against the Soviet Union!
Soviet sacrifice
The victory over fascism came at a terrible price. 50 million died; of these 12 million were exterminated in fascist concentration camps. On top of this another 95 million were left invalids. The Soviet Union lost 27 million, of whom 7.5 million were soldiers. A third of Soviet territory and economic resources were laid waste. 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages were completely destroyed. 6 million homes and buildings were ripped apart. 31,800 industrial plants were stripped bare. 98,000 collective farms were broken and their livestock, totalling 64 million animals, destroyed or taken to Germany.
This is the price paid by the Soviet Union in a war waged by imperialism to prolong its outmoded existence.
By comparison, the US lost 300,000 lives and the British empire 353,652, of whom British losses came to 224,723 and an additional 60,000 civilians.
It goes to the credit of Soviet socialism that within 3 years after such a devastating war, the Soviet economy had been restored to its pre-war level. And in the following 3 years, it had doubled in size.
In the course of the war, the Soviet armed forces destroyed 560 German divisions and another 100 divisions belonging to German satellites. In comparison, the American and British forces together destroyed no more than 176 German divisions.
Germany lost 10 million men in the war against the USSR, accounting for three-quarters of its losses in the Second World War.
The victories of the Red Army in the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin shall forever remain an eloquent tribute to the Soviet people, to the socialist system, to the CPSU(B) and to Joseph Stalin. Humanity at large shall never fail to express its gratitude for the contribution of the Soviet Union in the defeat of fascism.
The Soviet Union, alas, is no more, thanks to the treachery of Khruschevite revisionism. The present, worst-ever economic crisis of capitalism is driving the various imperialist powers to war as the only solution to their problems. Wars from Yugoslavia, through the Middle East and North Africa, and now Ukraine, are reminiscent of the Nazi hordes of yore. While remembering, and paying tribute, to the great sacrifices of the Soviet Union, and ordinary people in several countries, including those in the imperialist countries, in the fight against fascism, progressive humanity must wage a determined struggle against the present-day and coming imperialist wars, remembering that the struggle against imperialism and for socialism is inseparable from the struggle against war and fascism.