ON THIS day 80 years ago, over three-and-a-half million German and other Axis troops attacked the Soviet Union along a 1,800-mile front. 

Some 148 divisions, representing 80 per cent of the German army, were supported by Romanian, Italian, Hungarian, Slovak and Finnish forces.

For the Nazis, in particular, this was the highest point yet of their project for fascist expansion and it was underpinned by a racist ideology toward the Jews, but also toward the Slavs living in the Soviet territories. 

As the attack on the Soviets ensued, plans were firmed up for the Generalplan Ost, a practical delivery of the Nazis’ “new order” through the “drive to the east.” 

Under the plan, the Jewish populations would be annihilated, political opponents exterminated and vast numbers of Slavic inhabitants would be enslaved to SS “soldier peasants” and forced to work on stolen land. 

The fascists planned a genocidal orgy of killing. Heinrich Himmler was recalled saying: “It will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply.”

Hitler was bullish about the prospects of success against the “Jewish-Bolshevik” state, saying: “We have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down.” 

Yet of course, the Soviet Union was the rock on which fascism foundered.

Many of today’s mainstream historians, like the Wehrmacht generals in the post-war period, seek to explain this with reference to Hitler’s mistakes, German strategic errors, even the weather. 

But it was the incredible resistance of the Soviet people, articulated through a massive military organisation, fierce partisan warfare and, perhaps above all, a Herculean industrial production effort that decided the war in the east and destroyed the fascist new order.  

The cost was appalling. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died, representing around one in seven of the pre-war population. 

The German military, not just the SS, committed atrocities across the Soviet territories on a terrifying scale: mass murder; rape; enslavement; deliberate mass starvation. 

Alongside the Holocaust, this was barbarism of the most depraved order, a stain on the history of humanity that must never be forgotten. 

Yet it is now being deliberately erased in a shameful act of historical collaboration that spans various theatres of memory.

As austerity policies have smashed the economic and social infrastructure of European — and especially eastern European economies — far-right politics have resurged, dragging mainstream conservative and even centre parties to the right to shore up their fragile electoral coalitions and beginning, in the process, a spiral of hate.  

There are many dimensions to this phenomenon, but one key part of this politics is a conscious effort to smear and erase the memory of the critical role of the Soviet Union, and together with that, of the transnational resistance movements, led in the main by communists, who fought fascism in the years between 1936 and 1945. 

Far-right parties lead the demands to tear down Soviet and anti-fascist plaques and rename streets, often seeking in the process to rehabilitate European fascists with direct responsibility for atrocities. 

These actions are coupled with attempts to proscribe the activities of Communist Parties today and they dovetail neatly with the concerns of ruling classes and their parties growing increasingly anxious about internal opposition and China’s burgeoning international economic influence. 

With the formation of the Prague Declaration Movement, this process has been taken into the European Parliament and the distortions of the far right have been enshrined in a series of political resolutions aimed at rewriting the history of the second world war. 

As I’ve written here before, the concept of “totalitarianism” is being used to attract liberal support in equating Nazism and communism and to completely gloss the wider phenomenon of 20th-century fascism. 

The latest resolution included a call to “raise the younger generation’s awareness of these issues by including the history and analysis of the consequences of totalitarian regimes in the curricula and textbooks of all schools in the EU.”  

Shockingly, the massed ranks of today’s supine Social Democrats in the European Parliament have gamely followed the right and centre parties through the lobby, seemingly terrified of being seen to support totalitarianism but content to vote with today’s far right. 

The extremely foolish actions of the Social Democrats will have deadly consequences, though, as they further embolden the apologists of fascist bestiality.  

This muitifaceted attack on historical memory is a genuine danger that will ease the progress of today’s fascists into the seats of government. 

We need to start to organise and contest the fascists’ growing grip on the theatres of memory. 

Tonight, the Marx Memorial Library and the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies hold the latest in a series of panel discussions aimed at discussing this wave of pro-fascist revisionism and uniting those struggling to preserve the memory of the great anti-fascist victory of the 20th century. 

The aim of this latest panel was to bring together voices from the struggle for historical memory across Europe. 

Dr Vladimir Vasilik from the Institute of History at St Petersburg University will discuss the Soviet contribution to the war effort.  

Simone Rossi, president of the London Section of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI) and Dr Almuldena Cros, president of Spain’s Asociacion de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (Association of Friends of the International Brigades) will discuss the ongoing battles over the memory of anti-fascists in Italy and Spain. 
 
The defeat of European fascism was literally unthinkable without the Soviet Union, but it was also a joint mass endeavour that belongs to all the peoples of the world: those who worked in the factories and fields of the international war efforts; those who fought and died in the armies and the partisan movements across Europe. 

They are all part of a magnificent human achievement which must be remembered and commemorated.  

“Historical Memory and the Fight Against Fascism Part III: A discussion of ongoing attempts across Europe to rewrite the History of the 1930s/’40s Anti-Fascist Alliance and Present-Day Pushback” is today, Tuesday 22 June 2021, at 7pm. Register here: mstar.link/HistoricalMemory.