It's uncomfortable to acknowledge - especially for Barack Obama - but without Russian autocracy between 1914 and 1917 or Soviet totalitarianism between 1941 and 1945, there would have been no victory for democracy at all, writes Matthew Dal Santo.

One anniversary passes, another approaches. A week after the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the world prepares to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War: 100 years ago on June 28, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne.

No international commemorations are planned this European summer - no gathering of world leaders in Sarajevo, no holding of hands on the Marne or bowed heads at Tannenberg (two of its defining early battles). So Western leaders will be spared another awkward photo shoot with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

But the impending anniversary of a conflict that would, in war but above all in its troubled peace, define a century will again highlight Russia's awkward, unresolved position in the world. For in that First World War as in the Second, Russia was in fact an invaluable ally in arresting Germany's march across Europe.

In 1914, Russia started out among the founding allies. It ended defeated and in revolution, its leaders uninvited to Paris's famous peace conference. Yet in three years of fighting, Russia lost more men than France did in four.

Uncomfortable to acknowledge: but without the involvement of Russian autocracy between 1914 and 1917 or Soviet totalitarianism between 1941 and 1945, there would have been no victory for democracy at all.

We're yet to find a way of talking about this. Without it, our own feats lack proportion. And we tell ourselves a tale about the sufficiency of our own exertions.

Consider Barack Obama's speech last Friday in Normandy.

Russia's recent meddling in Ukraine has seemingly made Obama newly conscious of the American President's honorary mantle as "Leader of the Free World".

On the beach at Omaha, his phrases swelled with this theme: "Omaha - Normandy - this was democracy's beachhead. And our victory in that war decided not just a century, but shaped the security and wellbeing of all posterity."

The story is only partially true.

D-Day led directly to the liberation of France: within four months, American armies would be in Paris. In March 1945, they would cross the Rhine. While Obama named two of America's war-time allies (Britain and Canada), startling was his omission of the third of the war's "big three" - the Soviet Union.

Yet victory over Hitler was far from America's or even democracy's alone. It was Stalin's. And it was terrible. But for the bravery of the Soviet armies that had already rolled 1200 miles across the short-lived Nazi empire in Eastern Europe, in all likelihood D-Day wouldn't have been ventured at all.

On an Eastern Front that saw horrors - cholera, cannibalism, the cruel Russian cold - few in the West could imagine, none did more to destroy Nazism than they. By the end of the war in Europe, Britain and America together had lost half a million men; the Soviet Union counted losses of nine million. The fighting brutalized those that survived.

We ought to remind ourselves of this. For it doesn't diminish the courage of the returned diggers and GIs, or dishonour the memory of those who did not survive, to recognise that in vanquishing Nazi Germany others played a greater, even more terrible role.

With America and Russia today locked in a war of words over the same Ukrainian steppes where the fate of Nazi Germany was largely decided, these were awkward facts to recall at Omaha. Without them, however, Obama's declamation lacked grace, the magnanimity that marks out a truly great statesman.

"It was here, on these shores, that the tide was turned in that common struggle for freedom," he said.

He might have meant that D-Day helped determine when and how Hitler would be defeated, but not if. (The tide, we know, turned at Stalingrad.) The distinction muddies the waters of memory, but only by recalling it do we do justice to the epic moral dimensions of last century's struggles.

Unfortunately, Obama's speech had little use for such subtleties. As a result, his claims lacked humbling proportion; his crescendos rang self-satisfied - almost, strangely, insincere. Hollow.

We chide Putin for whitewashing Stalin's early collaboration with Hitler, the terrors of the Gulag and the mass murder of thousands of Poles and Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. But what does it mean when our leaders handle the same conflict so one-sidedly themselves?

Whatever our disagreements with today's Russia, is it right to skate over the fearful price Soviet soldiers and citizens paid for a victory fate denied them the right to enjoy in freedom?

In Normandy, the crowds cheered Obama wherever he went; they met Putin with a hushed and angry silence. Though they spoke briefly in private, Obama greeted the Russian president only by way of a giant split screen television. The day before, Britain's David Cameron had refused to shake his hand in public.

It was a shabby way to treat the leader of a war-time ally who, on a day of recollection, stood not so much for Russia today as for so many million war-dead. As a people, there's none as conscious of its part in the defeat of Nazism as the Russians.

A word of thanks to them from the Leader of the Free World, an acknowledgement of the awful immolation Hitler meted out to the Soviet Union or the superhuman effort that its peoples made to rid Europe of his madness would have been a powerful gesture itself to peace today - a step towards that "common European home" in which Mikhail Gorbachev hoped so fervently in 1989.

For a moment Obama might have stood above history, at that point, where, occasionally, a handful of men and women actually shape it. For, after Putin has gone, Russia will remain. And the Europe to which we are travelling must, eventually, be the Russians' home too.

Over the next four years, expect to live in constant reminder of the "Great War" and its terrible totalitarian legacy in Europe: Australia has set aside some $83.5 million for commemorations. The BBC has commissioned more than 2500 hours of radio and television for its World War One Centenary Season, much of which will doubtless find its way to Australian living rooms.

On the beach at Omaha, the story Obama began telling was simple and stirring. He ended inviting us into a myth that felt ersatz, too sweet to belong to the real world.

In a time of big anniversaries, we need bigger myths to navigate the century that lies ahead of us.

Matthew Dal Santo is a freelance writer and foreign affairs correspondent. He previously worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. View his full profile here.