Peter Eltsov is senior research fellow and associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U. S. government. Klaus Larres is the Richard M Krasno Distinguished Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The D-Day invasion is sanctified in the collective memory of the West. Starting at dawn on June 6, 1944, 150,000 men braved withering German resistance to secure a foothold in Europe and hasten the defeat of Adolf Hitler. No one questions that interpretation today, or so you would think. But as U.S. and European leaders gather on the windswept beaches and bluffs of Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day on Friday, one of the invited guests is likely to be … skeptical.

It’s no accident that he’s the same guy who’s causing a lot of fresh trouble in Europe today: Vladimir Putin.


We already know that the Russian leader has been revising the history of the Cold War to justify his annexation of Crimea and his claims to Ukraine—by suggesting, for example, that Ukraine was never really an independent country. What is less well known is that Putin and his acolytes have also depended on a flagrantly distorted history of World War II—or what is known in Moscow as the “Great Patriotic War”—to rally Russians to the Kremlin’s expansionist new policies.

Since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, this new version of World War II has been turned into the spiritual backbone for Putin’s resurrection of Russian power. In the new mythology contained in textbooks and official histories, victory in World War II came mostly from the “flawless” and “selfless” actions of the heroic Red Army, which is portrayed as a model for the future in the region. Putin himself, asked recently about Ukraine's contributions to victory in World War II, replied bluntly: "The war was won mostly due to the human and industrial resources of Russia."

Today many Russians would agree with him. They have come to believe that D-Day was late and not militarily significant—and was driven mostly by fear that Stalin would "liberate" the rest of Europe on his own.

Early last month, Putin even signed a law that criminalizes the purposeful distortion of the Soviet Union’s actions during the war. Based on recent court actions, the law appears to be an effort to prevent Russian historians from portraying Stalin as a war criminal or blaming him for huge casualties, and from characterizing the USSR as an ally of Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war (all of which happen to be mostly true).

Gone as well is any realistic discussion of the moral compromises that marked the beginning of World War II, in particular the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or Hitler-Stalin) Pact of August 1939, which freed up Hitler to invade Poland. At that time, with Josef Stalin allied with the Nazi dictator, Soviet propaganda was portraying Germany as a friendly country.

Today, the Russian government officially acknowledges the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but it denies all interpretations that portray the USSR as an aggressor at any stage of the war. The joint German-Soviet military parade in Brest-Litovsk that marked the division of Poland on Sept. 22, 1939, was recently described by the minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, as “the withdrawal of German troops under the supervision of Soviet authorities.”

It is true that Hitler might never have been defeated without the Red Army, which lost at least 11 million soldiers, compared to just under 300,000 fatalities on the American side. Obama himself, in a speech in Moscow in 2009, quoted John F. Kennedy as saying, “No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War.” What is left out is that, once they stopped the German army at Stalingrad and began advancing, the Soviet forces ended up terrorizing much of Eastern Europe. This behavior, sanctioned initially by the Soviet commanders and even by Stalin personally, accounted for much of the suspicions, mistrust and resentment the Soviet Union faced when occupying large swathes of Europe during the Cold War. Long memories of this behavior in the last two years of the Second World War—followed by Moscow’s takeover of East Germany and invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968)—is still the basis for much of the deep mistrust Moscow faces in countries such as Poland and the Baltic states. It is also one reason why so many Ukrainians sought to join the EU and NATO why Georgia would still like to do so.

Even today, Putin’s spokespeople tend to portray the Soviet conquests that took place either at the beginning or end of World War II as an unfortunate “historical necessity.” In the semi-official Russian rendering, the occupation of East Germany was also seen as the ultimate compensation for the terrible suffering of the Russian people, and the loss of it is still bitterly felt. Russians tend to despise former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for “selling” East Germany so cheaply, while the Americans were allowed to remain in Europe. Re-conquering some territory today may help to make up for this loss in the Russian psyche—another reason Putin is so popular.

Westerners and Russians have never entirely agreed, of course, on how credit for victory in World War II should be apportioned. Even during the war there were plenty of tensions over how best to take on Hitler. Stalin and his pro-Soviet supporters in the West pushed hard for an early “second front” in Europe, but Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill kept putting it off. Churchill was looking in part to preserve the British empire in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, while FDR believed, with some justice, that U.S. forces wouldn’t be ready to land on the continent until 1944. But Stalin suspected that the United States and Britain also preferred to let the Germans and Soviets—the fascists and communists, in other words—do most of the fighting and bleed each other to death. And the rhetoric of the time from anti-communist hawks in Congress and Britain sometimes reinforced those suspicions. On June 24, 1941, only two days after the start of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, then-Senator Harry Truman was quoted as saying: “If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.”

Even so, after D-Day a delighted Stalin volunteered extravagant praise of the landings, calling them a “brilliant success” and noting that both Napoleon and Hitler had failed to mount successful cross-channel invasions in the past.

But Putin, at the moment, may have less interest than even Stalin in accommodating the West. In his version of history, D-Day is barely a footnote.

The Russian leader has personally involved himself in this historical revisionism. The standardization and dogmatization of history have become the direct business of his government; its aim is to create a separate Eurasian identity that will justify a Russian “sphere” in Eastern Europe. One of Putin’s favorite intellectuals is Ivan Ilyin, a Russian monarchist philosopher who, shortly after the Second World War, claimed that international conspirators were planning the partitioning of Russia. Ilyin also contended that Western nations neither understood nor tolerated Russian identity, which included protective buffer zones on Russia’s periphery.

In a manner reminiscent of past Russian dictators, Putin is now supervising the preparation of a new standardized Russian history textbook, which is likely to become a required read for every high-school student. Textbooks “should not have internal contradictions and double interpretations,” Putin declared at a meeting of the Council for Interethnic Relations on Feb. 19, 2013. “Without the official interpretation, there will be no spine of understanding of what was happening with our country during past centuries and decades.”

Putin has also been using a twisted history of World War II to simplistically denigrate the protesters in Kiev and the acting Ukrainian government as “fascists.” During World War II many Ukrainian politicians and militaries did show sympathy for the Nazis, although this was partially motivated by anti-Soviet views. But the extreme extent of Putin’s distortion in casting the opponents of his annexation as neo-Nazis is amply illustrated by the results of the recent presidential election, in which the leaders of anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist parties got only a tiny sliver of the vote. But for Putin it seems to be working: He has been rewarded with a rise of nationalist feeling in the Russian federation and a surge in popularity.

No doubt Putin will be thinking of all this as he travels to Normandy to attend what, for him, will be a rather minor event.