“LITTLE, perhaps nothing, of the experience of most Western readers and historians will have prepared them for what they will find in the history of Russia’s War,” wrote Professor Richard Overy.

The Soviet Union’s war against German fascism and its allies lasted four years and took an immense toll on the people of the Soviet Union with over 27 million soldiers and civilians killed.

As Overy notes: “The cost of the war dwarfed the sacrifices of any other fighting power.”

In the West lip service is paid to the massive price paid by the Soviet people during the course of the Nazis' war of annihilation on the Eastern Front. Mainstream media, politicians and even school curricula will highlight the contribution made by Allied forces during the D-Day landings of 1944 but remain silent over the vast battlefields of the Soviet Union where the German Wehrmacht was broken and destroyed.

The work of Professor Richard Overy, who is one of Britain’s leading historians of WWII, helps us understand the enormous achievements and the horrendous price which the Soviet people paid for victory over fascism.

Hitler’s war of extermination against the people of the USSR ended by destroying its German initiators and by embedding a Soviet presence in eastern Europe for over half a century.

The disaster which befell the Red Army during the year which followed the German invasion of 1941 led to it losing over six million soldiers to the Nazi onslaught.  

During the winter of 1941-42, when the Wehrmacht was laying siege to both Moscow and Leningrad, the Soviet Union appeared close to defeat. Yet, by the spring of 1943 the balance of forces on the Eastern Front had been decisively transformed in favour of the Red Army. This is down to several interlinked processes.

The Russian economy was completely reorganised during the winter of 1941-42 as German troops pressed 500 miles into Soviet territory. Thousands of factories were dismantled and moved to the Urals and western Siberia. The entire population was mobilised on a vast scale into war production and the armed forces, that were made up of the Red Army and the partisan units behind German lines.

We must pay tribute to the critical role played by the state-owned planned economy in the successes of the Soviet armed forces. Despite the loss of most of its industrialised western regions, the Soviet planned economy displayed a great flexibility and organisational power that enabled it to out-produce the vast German economy.  

By 1943 the Soviet Union was out-producing Germany in the critical areas of aircraft, tank and artillery production.

As Overy admits, despite the significance of the Anglo-American role on the Western Front, it was events on the Eastern Front which broke the back of the German war machine.  

Over 80 per cent of German battle casualties occurred on the Eastern Front where the overwhelming weight of the Wehrmacht was concentrated.  

In June 1944 the Wehrmacht had 228 divisions facing the Red Army and only 58 divisions facing the Western allies.

The Nazi leadership of Germany never expected the Soviet Union to recover its economic and military strength following the devastating losses of 1941-1942. Nor did it expect the Red Army to be able to reform its armed forces, adopt new tactics and produce commanders of remarkable ability.

Besides this, Soviet military intelligence again and again was able to outfox its German counterparts which gave Red Army offensives from 1943 onwards a major tactical advantage.

Overy points out another critical factor that contributed to the Soviet victory and that was the role played by women in sustaining the Soviet war effort and the modernisation of the armed forces, especially in critical the field of weapons production: “It is a myth that the Soviet Union won the war because it had endless spaces in the east from which to suck its manpower. The Soviet Union survived only by mobilising two-thirds of its women to run the factories and farms, and by modernising its armed forces so that they did not have to rely any longer on raw numbers of men, but could rely, like the American army, on mass produced weapons.”

By early February 1943 the Red Army had inflicted a decisive and crushing defeat on Army Group South following the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. It was the first nail in the coffin of German fascism.

Hitler had lost one of his most experienced armies which was an irreplaceable loss. This was followed by the devastating and decisive defeats suffered by the German army at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 and Operation Bagration in the Summer of 1944 that destroyed Army Group Centre, which at that point, was Germany’s largest and most experienced military formation.

Overy pays tribute to the forgotten victims of the titanic struggle waged by the Soviet people in their defeat of German fascism: “There is no dispute that the Soviet population suffered out of all proportion to the sufferings of Soviet allies, and suffered in many cases not a quick end from bomb or bullet but an agonising end from starvation, or torture, or enslavement, or from countless atrocities whose mere recital still, after the accumulation of almost 60 years of further miseries worldwide, humbles and defeats the imagination.”

On May 2 1945 the capital of Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich fell to Red Army troops. The German garrison surrendered to Marshal Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, who had led the Red Army’s heroic resistance at Stalingrad.

Yet fighting continued in the south where 600,000 Germans continued fruitless resistance to the Red Army in Czechoslovakia.

Hitler’s successor Admiral Karl Doenitz had fled to Flensburg in northern Germany where he engaged in surrender negotiations with the Western allies. On May 7 General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s chief of operations, signed an act of  unconditional surrender in a ceremony orchestrated by the US.

On hearing of this news Stalin was furious as he believed that the Soviet war effort was the real source of Hitler’s defeat. He refused to accept the German surrender to the Western allies on May 7. He told Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who was in Berlin: “The surrender must be arranged as a most important historical fact, and accepted not on the territory of the conquerors but at the place where the fascist aggression sprang from.”

Zhukov was ordered to arrange a new surrender ceremony in Berlin as Stalin was keen to “demonstrate to the world the critical role which the Soviet people played in the downfall of Hitler.”

At 12.43am on May 9 Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the surrender in front of Zhukov and several senior Western generals. In the evening of May 9 1945, over 3 million people gathered in Red Square to celebrate the hard-fought victory over German fascism.

To this day the Russian people have celebrated May 9 as Victory Day as they remember the terrible sacrifices their country made to defeat the bestial regime of Hitler.

The people of Europe and the wider world owe a great debt of gratitude to the Red Army and the Soviet people for their freedom from fascist tyranny, for it was they who were largely responsible for defeating Hitler’s armies.

Dr Dylan Murphy is a labour movement historian who has researched the struggle against fascism for his doctorate.