In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.

But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.

On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will play host to one of Moscow's largest ever military parades to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. More than 16,000 troops will participate, as well 140 aircraft and 190 armored vehicles, including the debut of Russia's brand new next-generation tank.

Britain during WWII - in pictures Show all 30 1 /30 Britain during WWII - in pictures Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1939: A squadron of Spitfires took part in mimic 'air alarms', during a speed demonstration at Duxford Aerodrome Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1939: British railway workers fit floodgates below river level at Underground Stations Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1939: A patient on a stretcher is loaded into a Green-Line coach ambulance when being evacuated from Guy's Hospital in London Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1939: Metropolitan Police Constables wearing gas masks line up to enter a mobile gas chamber at East Ham Police Station, London Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1939: A young female British Navy officer sitting astride a minesweeper's cannon and lighting a cigarette whilst two officers look on Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1939: Schoolchildren crowd Ealing Broadway Station in London, some of the first youngsters to be evacuated to the country during World War II Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1940: Bells rescued from the belfry of St Giles in Cripplegate, London, which was bombed during a night raid Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1940: A projector, operating from its sunken sandbagged emplacement, at a searchlight station in the London area Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1940: Auxiliary Territorial Services personnel sealing and preparing a Churchill tank for export to the Soviet Union Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1940: An Australian soldier leaps from a tank during training exercises in Britain Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1940: A man flies a Union Jack on a bomb site. The area was bombed twice, and the second time it tore the flag in two Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1941: A policeman coaxing his pony to leave an area which is being evacuated due to the discovery of an unexploded bomb Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1941: Charles de Gaulle (C), Chief of the French Free Forces, inspects the French colonial troops during during his visit of a military base in Great Britain Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1941: US politician Wendell Willkie viewing the bomb damage to the Guildhall during the Blitz, London Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1941: Men, women and children stand with their belongings on a pavement in Clydeside, in the aftermath of a severe bombing raid Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1941: The famous American 'Eagle' Volunteer Air Squadron, formed during WWI, takes its place in the ranks of the RAF Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1942: Work in progress of the decks of almost completed ships, being built for the merchant navy Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1942: Two London buses passing through thick smoke screens during Civil Defence Service training operations Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1942: A British ship (either the Cathay or the Karanja) on fire in Bougie Harbour (Bejaia), during the North African 'torch' landings. The Luftwaffe bombed three of the Allied ships as they attempted to reach shore Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1943: American soldiers viewing some of London's raid damage during a tour Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1943: A crashed German Messerschmitt is towed past the Houses of Parliament in London Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1943: The wreckage of Sandhurst Road School in Catford, south London, the day after it was partially destroyed in a German bombing raid Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1944: Extensive manoeuvres for invasion being carried out by American Sherman tank units in Britain Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1944: Rescue workers searching through the rubble of a block of flats destroyed by German raids in London Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1944: Bomb damaged buildings in London's Pall Mall after an air raid Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1945: British officers liberated by the 9th Army from Brunswick Oflag 79, the largest British officers' camp in Germany Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1945: Essex-class fleet carrier USS Franklin after suffering a hit by a Japanese dive-bomber off Japan, during war in the Pacific Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1945: The scene in Farringdon Road, London, after a V-2 rocket had fallen in daylight on the Central Markets Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1945: VE day, held to commemorate the official end of Britain's involvement in World War II, is celebrated by crowds at Trafalgar Square in London Britain during WWII - in pictures WWII 1945: Soldiers from the Women's Royal Army Corps in their service vehicle, driving through Trafalgar Square during the VE Day celebrations in London

It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present, with Putin's relations with the West having turned frosty after a year of Russian meddling in Ukraine. When Russia's T-14 Armata tank broke down at a parade rehearsal on Thursday, the snickering could be heard across Western media.

Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism's destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies' extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire 'butcher's bill' for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.

The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.

World War II Animation from IWM

Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.

"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin."

By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.

In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:

When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.

To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.

"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.

By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.

For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.