Cheryl Rofer at balloon-juice.com makes an observation about Russia’s defeating the Germans:

The Russian government has been cranky this week over the observances of the 75th anniversary of D-Day. The Allied landings on Normandy beaches were the beginning of the end of Germany’s Western Front.

Russia would like to have a word about that. Russia defeated Germany’s Eastern Front, at enormous cost. The message the Russian government was trying to get out was that it was the eastern front that was really the defeat of Hitler. Further, Russia is owed bigtime by the rest of Europe for that.

The Russian role in World War II is often minimized in Western versions of the defeat of Hitler. Russia suffered enormous losses.

But the Russian role is not unambiguous. In 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to fight together with Germany and divide up the parts of Europe between their then boundaries after the victory. That assured Hitler that he could concentrate on the Western Front and invade France and adjacent countries while bombing the UK. Without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and with the USSR solidly standing with the rest of Europe, Hitler would have had to think twice.

Hitler double-crossed Stalin, of course, by invading Soviet territory in 1941. That forced Russia to fight on the side of the Western allies. Russia could have put up a better fight if Stalin hadn’t purged the generals in 1937. The Soviet military was in disarray, allowing the German army almost to reach Moscow.

Meanwhile, bombing on the Western Front weakened Hitler, and American Lend-Lease strengthened the Soviets. But a competition remained: Soviet spies were sending the plans for American nuclear weapons to Moscow, and there was a race in the Far East to occupy Japan first.

But Russia wants the story to be of the damage it survived and went on to help the Allies win. That is true, but it is only part of the story.