The History of Isolation

To coincide with the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9, Sergei Shoigu, Russia's Minister of Emergency Situations and co-head of the supreme council of Putin's United Russia party, gave a speech to military veterans in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) in which he called for a new law "to criminalize the denial of the Soviet victory in World War II". The law would affect not only Russian citizens, but also anyone in the world who makes such a denial. It appears that under such legislation, if their leaders and/or citizens contest the rightness of Stalin's victory, countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which suffered Soviet occupation either during or after World War II will be considered rogue states, and diplomatic and economic relations with them will be severed.

According to a survey by the VTsIOM polling agency, 60 percent of Russians support such a law, and a recent Levada Centre poll revealed that 63 percent believe that the Soviet Union could have won the war alone, without the help of Britain and the United States.

At Grani.ru, Valeria Novodvorskaya has made clear her view of the matter [my tr.]:

Hitler's Germany, beyond any doubt, had to be smashed. For the sake of humanity, for the Germans' sake. The Hitlers of this world must not win. But the USSR should have lost, for the Stalins of this world, too, should not be handed victories. The Allies should have won the war: Britain and the United States. And they would have done so. No one would have left Hitler in power and at liberty, no one would have forgiven the Holocaust. Only - it should have been done wthout us. The Americans and British should have brought us liberation.

Soviet power would have fallen, and the country's agony from 1948 until 1953 would have been avoided. And there would have been no Khrushchev or Brezhnev or Afghanistan or Andropov, no Putin and no KGB. And we would not have appeared to the world like slaves. The USSR should have lost the war. The United States already had the atomic bomb, they would have finished Hitler, even if he had conquered the USSR all the way to the Urals. Leningrad should have been surrendered. Of course, it would not have been pleasant to live under the Hitlerites, but millions of Leningraders would not have died from hunger, just as the Parisians did not die, or the citizens of Lyons.