🗓 September 1st marks 85 years ago since the start of World War II – the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind. It claimed many dozens of millions of peoples' lives (by some estimates, 80+ mln perished), including over 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union.

▪️ 61 states, with over 80 percent of the world’s population, were drawn into the bloody ordeal unleashed by the Axis powers; hostilities spread to 40 countries.

📖 Read our in-depth retrospective overview in full

The background of the greatest tragedy of the 20th century still remains in the focus of historians’ attention. The entire range of contradictions that provoked the war stemmed from World War I and can be traced back to the Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919.

👉 It was the Versailles system of international relations, drafted by the UK and France, that made the basis for the rise of revanchist sentiments in Europe. The League of Nations, the organization established to settle international disputes within the legal framework, technically became a tool for the Western powers to achieve their political goals.

Not surprising that in Europe, torn by contradictions, fascism rapidly gained popularity. Politicians and extreme right-wing ideologues who were convinced of the superiority of their nation and ethnicities came to power first in Italy (1922) and then in Germany (1933), humiliated by the Versailles Treaty. The political establishment of the Western countries preferred to remain unaware and close their eyes on the danger these new ideologies presented. Their cynical view considered that Nazi aggression could be, in a typical Anglo-Saxon style, redirected towards the east where the young Soviet state was rapidly developing.

The infamous Munich Betrayal of 1938 was the apotheosis of the self-serving “appeasement” policy that the Western countries had preferred to building a collective security system suggested by the Soviet Union. With the tacit consent by the UK and France, Hitler ruthlessly annexed the sovereign state of Czechoslovakia. It was only Moscow that was willing to provide military assistance to the Czechoslovakians, but was unable to do so due to Poland that was playing along with Hitler and taking advantage of Czechoslovakia’s annexation by occupying the Cieszyn region.

🔻 A year later, a similar drama played out in the Far East: the Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed in June 1939, untying Tokyo’s hands in China. The Soviet Union could have become the next victim of militarist Japan. According to recently declassified documents, the Japanese command had been planning a possible attack against the Soviet Union since 1938, with nearly a million-strong Kwantung Army troops deployed along the border and ready to invade of our country at any moment, with its soldiers and officers known to show no aversion to human experiments to develop biological weapons. The Soviet Union had to contain Japan’s potential invasion by keeping substantial forces on its eastern borders until the very end of the war.

❗️ Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 was a direct consequence of the policy of intrigues and manuevers pursued by the West, which did not allow to create an anti-Hitler coalition to jointly resist the Third Reich.

❌ In this context, the assertions of an alleged ‘equivalence’ between Nazism and Communism are unacceptable and blasphemous, as are the attempts to place equal blame for the start of the war on Germany and the Soviet Union in order to downplay the decisive contribution of the Soviet Union on the battlefields of the Great Patriotic War, which crushed Hitler’s war machine, and to diminish the heroism of our soldiers-liberators.

☝️ Defeating the most aggressive reactionary forces was the most important outcome of the Great Victory of May 9, 1945. Our country saved many peoples (considered by the Nazis and their cronies “non-Aryan”), that the Nazis planned to kill in concentration camps or to turn into slaves.