ON a rainy day in June 1945 — just over a month after the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst — 45,000 Red Army troops marched across the Red Square, Moscow, in the Parade of Victors.

Towards the end of the two-hour procession, a contingent of the Separate Operational Purpose Division of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs entered the square. They carried 200 German battalion and regimental flags and standards captured during the war, hurling them before the entrance to Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum.

Hitler, who had hungered for control over Soviet lands, was deposited at Lenin’s feet.  

Eighty years later, Moscow is once again adorned in red flags. The victory banner, first hoisted above Berlin’s Reichstag in 1945, flies across the city. Foreign dignitaries from 29 nations — China to Cuba, Vietnam to Brazil — have arrived and taken to the stands by Lenin’s mausoleum, sitting among veterans of the war.

Army contingents from Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Egypt, Laos, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam joined Russian soldiers in the parade across the Red Square.

Victory Day holds particular significance for the peoples of the former Soviet Union. In Russia, the annual commemoration is among the year’s most important events — a time for reflection and remembrance in spaces both public and private. No family here was untouched by the war, and, year after year, the memories resurface in kitchens, meeting halls, and streets across the country’s cities, towns and villages.  

Together with China’s struggle against the Japanese occupation, the Eastern Front was the decisive battleground of that bloody war. It was communists who finally broke the back of Hitler’s seemingly unstoppable army, which had blitzed its way through much of Europe in just months.

Although Germany made quick gains at the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, its troops were soon stunned by what confronted them.

“We calculated the potential of the Bolsheviks in a completely erroneous way,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on September 16 1941 — just months after the start of the invasion. “How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time?” Hitler asked on November 29, as reports emerged of grand Soviet steelworks and extensive railway lines that had not featured on German reconnaissance maps.

By the end of the war, the Red Army would destroy or defeat over 600 German divisions on the Eastern Front, eliminating three quarters of all German military equipment. It would kill some three million German soldiers, wound more than four million, and capture another three million.

Stalingrad, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, and other key fronts in the war entered the pantheon of Soviet “Hero Cities.” To this day, their names sit alongside the Eternal Flame at the wall of the Moscow Kremlin.  

But the Soviet Union also bore the brunt of the sacrifice. Slavs — like the Jewish, Roma and Sinti people, among many other persecuted groups  — were considered “subhuman,” unworthy of life.

The Eastern Front, Hitler said, would be “very different from the fight in the West.” Communism and its adherents had to be destroyed. “It is a fight for annihilation...  We are not waging war to preserve the enemy.”

If annexation was the aim, genocide was the means. Some three million Soviet prisoners of war would be killed in German camps through starvation, exposure, forced labour, and summary executions. In Leningrad, the 872-day siege claimed more than a million civilian lives — over 1,000 per day. Here, a single city endured more loss than the combined wartime death toll suffered by Britain and the US.

Towns and villages across the Eastern Front would be burned to the ground, their inhabitants systematically exterminated — shot in ditches or rounded up in churches or barns and burned alive. In this way, Germany would kill a quarter of the population of Belarus.

These assaults — each of which can and must be considered a genocide in its own right — sought to erase the peoples of the Soviet Union from the map.

By the end of the war, some 27 million had been killed. 

This year marks 80 years since the end of that war, and its memory has itself become a battleground. “Something has happened to this memory,” Tamara Shashikina, Director of the European Studies Institute at the MGIMO School of Government and International Affairs, said at an event hosted by Valdai Club in Moscow days before Victory Day, “There cannot be two parallel memories.”

And yet two very different visions of what the war meant are being advanced around the world, with the countries of imperialism mounting a full-frontal assault against its memory.

Today, that assault follows three principal lines of revisionism, some of which are now mandated by law.

The first seeks to excise Nazism from its colonial roots and, in doing so, to exculpate Europe from the many other crimes of colonialism that marr its sordid history.

Hitler, of course, was not the first architect of colonial genocide. From the Americas to Africa to Asia, European prosperity was built on the bones and broken backs of tens of millions of people.

Germany itself was responsible for the first genocide of the 20th century, against the Herero and Nama people in south-west Africa. It was there, in modern-day Namibia, that Germany recorded the first use of the term Konzentrationslager — the concentration camp — to describe a site of mass torture, starvation, slave labour, medical experimentation, and extermination.

Hitler’s war, as many thinkers of the anti-colonial canon have written, brought the European colonial tradition — honed for centuries in the peripheries — back to the metropoles. And the peoples of the colonies, for the mere fact of existing as colonial subjects, were drawn in by European powers to feed the war with their bread and their bodies.

It was colonisation that turned a European war into a world war, sowing violence and hunger in terrains far from the front lines.  

The second narrative advanced in the West seeks to sever fascism from its capitalist roots. World War II — like World War I before it — has its origins in a profound crisis of German capitalism.

Unlike other European powers, Germany was late to the scramble for colonies. Its internal market could not keep up with its growing industrial capacity, and it could not secure external markets, resources, and labour to ensure the continued profitability of its industries.

It is in that state of capitalist decay that fascism was incubated and nurtured. The pursuit of lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people was really a pursuit of markets, resources, and labour for German monopolies.

Thus, war became a strategy of accumulation, and fascism became its bulwark, securing by force the organisation of the whole of society for violence.

This mode of social organisation stood in stark contrast to communism, which sought to organise productive forces as social forces, using the common wealth of society to advance its development, fight ignorance, eliminate disease, and dismantle the structures of class and prejudices of ethnicity and nation.

So the third and perhaps most consequential battleground of revisionism is the attempt to equate communism with fascism — to put the creators and liberators of Auschwitz on equal footing — and to obscure the differences in their material, social, and cultural foundations.

The Soviet Union not only provided the greatest material contribution to ending the war — one hailed by US General Douglas MacArthur as “the greatest military achievement in all history.” It also fought that war on the basis of an entirely different social paradigm.

The Red Army, at once the defender and embodiment of the working people, acted as the subject of history rather than its object. Its troops carried, as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi recognised, a basic dignity that explained their ultimate victory: “And yet, under their slovenly and anarchical appearance, it was easy to see in them, in each of those rough and open faces, the good soldiers of the Red Army, the valiant men of the old and new Russia, gentle in peace and fierce in war, strong from an inner discipline born from concord, from reciprocal love and from love of their country; a stronger discipline, because it came from the spirit, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why this former discipline, and not the latter, had finally triumphed.”

Today, the erasure of Nazism’s colonial inheritance has allowed states from Germany to Poland to repurpose the memory of the war in defence of our generation’s holocaust, the zionist genocide in Gaza, which carries stark similarities to the siege of Leningrad or the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The obfuscation of Nazism’s capitalist roots has seen imperialism redeploy fascism again and again — from the killing fields of Guatemala to the war in Ukraine — in the service of accumulation and under the guise of “freedom.”

And the equating of communism with fascism has disabled our most powerful tools of resistance, defanging our movements and casting over progressive forces a lingering shadow of self-loathing and shame.

That is why the anniversary of the victory will long stand as a critical battleground — and why so many nations struggling against imperialism today are in Moscow to commemorate it.

In the autumn of 1941, a young poetry student called Nikolai Petrovich Mayorov volunteered to fight in the war. He would serve as a political commissar in the 1,106th Rifle Regiment of the 331st Rifle Division. He died just a few months after enlisting, in February 1942, in a front-line battle near the village of Barantsevo in Smolensk oblast. His poems stand as a record of the cruelty of that time — of the lives truncated and youths stolen. They stand as a testament to the heroism of those who fought. And they stand as a command for future generations: to remember and to carry forward the struggle for memory.

We were tall, fair-haired.
You’ll read about us in books, as if in legends—
Of people who departed without having fully loved,
Without having smoked their last cigarette.
…
And however the years may weigh upon memory,
We will not be forgotten,
Because, in making this world,
We rendered the word “humanity” into flesh.