How the Kremlin buries its dark Nazi secret every Victory Day

History is rarely as clean as the monuments built to remember it.

When nations look back at their greatest triumphs, they tend to polish the brightest moments and quietly sweep the messy details under the rug.

Every May, grand parades roll through the heart of Moscow to celebrate the end of the Second World War. The holiday remembers the unimaginable sacrifice of millions who crushed nazism.

This year was no exception, although the parade in Moscow was a very scaled back version of what has previously rolled through the streets of the Russian capital.

Victory Day, as the national holiday is called, celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

But the official narrative skips over a deeply uncomfortable chapter. The modern celebration entirely ignores how the war actually began.

Alliance made the war possible

For the first two years of the war, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany operated as functional allies. That single historical fact shatters the clean moral narrative of the modern holiday.

In August 1939, the two powers signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This was an agreement of mutual non-aggression.

But it was much more than just a simple peace treaty. Secret protocols inside the document allowed them to slice up Eastern Europe between them.

Days later, Hitler marched his armies into Poland from the west. Following the secret playbook, Soviet forces rolled across the eastern border a few weeks later to claim their prize.

For nearly two years, the Soviet government watched as the Nazis conquered Western Europe. They even supplied raw materials to fuel the German war machine, according to historical archives.

The sudden betrayal

That arrangement shattered suddenly. In the summer of 1941, Hitler launched a massive, surprise invasion of the Soviet Union.

That brutal betrayal forced the Soviets into the allied camp. From that day on, the Soviet people fought a horrific war of survival that ultimately destroyed the German army.

The Victory Day celebrations of today focuses exclusively on this heroic struggle.

The bravery of everyday soldiers was very real, but the leadership’s initial collaboration is erased from the story.

Rewriting the past

Putin has used the holiday to project absolute moral clarity for years. State television consistently presents the Soviet Union as an eternal shield against global evil.

Pointing out the early alliance with Hitler is now treated as a political crime in some regions. The messy reality of 1939 simply vanishes behind the victory of 1945.

True history is full of bad decisions and shifting loyalties. A celebration that ignores those first two years is ultimately praising an illusion.

Sources: Reuters, BBC, The Guardian, Holocaust Encyclopedia, Davis Center under Harvard University

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation