THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE IN THE VICTORY AGAINST NAZI-FASCISM
«We reiterate that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly the decisive factor in the defeat of fascism.»
May 7, 2025
On this May 9, which marks the 80th anniversary of the triumph over Nazi-fascism, it is necessary to recognize the decisive role of the Soviet people in this historic feat. In the current political, economic and social circumstances at the global level, this commemoration takes on a special significance since, as never before after the last war, the peoples face the real threat of a new war that, if it occurs, would be the last that humanity would fight. It is therefore imminent to return to the historical experience of the Second World War and to draw the necessary conclusions that will make it possible to fight effectively against the enemies of peace and freedom of our nations. History must be an instrument of struggle and a source of inspiration and reflection on the tactics and strategies of our transformative actions.
In this sense, it is unavoidable to reiterate a historical truth that cannot be hidden: the Second World War is responsible not only for the German, Italian and Japanese fascists, who, desiring a new division of the world, unleashed the most terrible war tragedy recorded in history; It is also necessary to emphasize the manifest responsibility of the British, American and French imperialists in the outbreak of the war. The governments of England, the United States and France encouraged and allowed the rearmament of Germany; they overlapped the dizzying growth of their armed forces and invoked an alleged neutrality in the face of fascist aggressions against Ethiopia in 1935, Spain in 1936, Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Poland in 1939.
We Mexicans feel with special pain the crime that the fascists committed against the Spanish Republic and we remember, with indignation, the Non-Intervention Committee that the governments of England, France and the United States created to cover up their clear complicity in the crime. In Spain, the fascists put their new weapons to the test, their massive methods of extermination and the entire Spanish experience thus constituted the warning of what would be the «fascist order» in Europe. Also, Spain became the clarion call that alerted the fascists about the unyielding fighting spirit of a people and the fraternal combative solidarity of the internationalists of many peoples of the world. We pay tribute to the Spanish patriots who nurtured an entire generation of revolutionary militants who fought in various countries in the detachments of the resistance against Nazi-fascism with an anti-fascist spirit and love for the popular cause.
All the Nazi-fascist aggressions of the pre-war period went unpunished, and with it, the dreams of global expansion of the Axis powers were allowed to become a cruel reality. The British and French governments overrode international agreements of mutual defense with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the will of their peoples, shamelessly allowing the Nazi occupation of these countries:
We highlight these historical events because imperialist historiography has taken it upon itself to propagate a distorted image of the causes that provoked the Second World War, pretending to place the responsibility on the psychopathy of an individual. Resorting, as they often do, to psychologism, they try to make us believe that Hitler and the appetite for power of a clique of unbalanced fanatics were the origin of the war.
Today as yesterday, those responsible for the war are the capitalists, the monopolies that profit from the death of millions, the arms production companies, the joint-stock companies that invest in the fat business of war. German, British, French and American partners benefited equally from the slaughter of the peoples.
«The installations for the gas chambers in the fascist «death factories» were sold by German firms closely linked to Yankee monopolies. The «death cars» were produced in German factories belonging to Ford and General Motors. The Bank of International Settlements in Basel, whose director was the New York banker Thomas Mackitric, bought from the German Reich Bank the gold stolen by the Hitlerites, as well as the gold teeth of the people killed in the concentration camps.» [I. Nicolaev, V. Israelian, The Second World War, Mexico, Editorial Cartago, 1980, p. 104.]
What did the governments of the United States, France and England intend with this veiled complicity with the fascist Germany of the pre-war period? First, it sought to direct the German war machine eastwards, towards the Soviet Union. They wanted to achieve what was not possible in the years following the October Revolution, when all the imperialist powers were besieging the young republic of the soviets: they planned to destroy socialism; overthrow the power of the workers. This was the essential objective sought by the interventionists. They all agreed in their class hatred of socialism. Anti-Sovietism and anti-communism were present throughout the war and were the underlying factor in the unique conduct of the war by the Western allies of the Anti-Hitler Coalition. The delay in the opening of the Second Front until 1944 (when the course of the war had already been decided on the Soviet front) and the systematic policy of small military actions, aimed to achieve the attrition and defeat of the Soviet Union.
Also significant for the current struggle of our peoples is a historical experience that occurred during the Second World War: the national betrayal of the majority of the capitalist governments of Europe in the face of fascist attack and occupation. The surrender that the bourgeoisie makes of its own nations in order to protect its class interests is a constant during the war. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the collaborationist head of government who handed France over to the Germans, fully represents the policy followed by most of the established European governments that, one by one, meekly submitted to the Nazis, installing occupation governments in which these collaborators would play an important role in the repression and domination of their own peoples.
The bourgeois armies offered minimal or symbolic resistance and crumbled in the face of the fascist onslaught. This capitulatory and submissive attitude of the European capitalist regimes clearly shows the historical tendency of our epoch, in the sense that the bourgeoisie has long ceased to represent the national interest and, on the contrary, becomes, as a function of its narrow class interests, an anti-national force that goes against the progress and social well-being of the majority within the Nation.
On the contrary, during the beginning and development of the war, the working classes, in particular the working class, resolutely threw themselves into the anti-fascist struggle. The active participation of the peoples in the national patriotic resistance and the decisive weight of the Soviet Union in the conflict changed the very nature of the war: from imperialist it was transformed into a people’s war, anti-fascist, thus taking on the character of a just and necessary war until the defeat of fascism. In this war of the peoples against fascism, the communists intervene in a resolute and consistent manner; they organize guerrilla and resistance detachments; they carry out sabotage and execution work in the rear of the fascists, they keep alive the national identity and dignity against the invader. Likewise, the communists are part of that other army of anonymous fighters who carried out invaluable information and intelligence work in the same ranks as the enemy.
We pay special tribute to those hundreds of men and women who had to fight on that unique «home front,» in which most fell into the hands of torturers and murderers. We evoke with admiration the memory of the German communist Richard Sorge and that of the Polish communist Leopold Trepper; and that of all those who, like them, were not professional paid spies, mercenaries of the capitalist intelligence and subversion apparatuses, but modest and courageous revolutionaries who fought and died for the cause of the people and socialism. In the heart of our peoples, daily and for many years, the powerful media have been working, and now the social networks, influenced or controlled by the imperialist conception of the world. Movie after movie, series after TV series, is produced in which the U.S. military is portrayed as the military force that defeated Germany.
The military action that began with the Allied landings in Normandy appeared to be the most important event of the Second World War, trying, with these distortions, to ignore the Soviet contribution.
We reiterate that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly the decisive factor in the defeat of fascism. Its armed forces confronted the bulk of the fascist Nazi military apparatus throughout the war and after the victories in Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Leningrad, it can be said that the fascists had been strategically defeated.
The Red Army was undoubtedly an army of a new type, an army of the people, with a strongly organized rearguard and, in Lenin’s words, «with the men most loyal to the cause of the Revolution, but also well armed, well supplied and well trained» Socialism united the peoples and nations of the Soviet Union into a single army of workers and peasants. The bourgeois ideologues predicted the nationalist rupture of the peoples and nations that made up the Soviet Union in the face of the onslaught of the fascists. The victory in the Great Patriotic War proved that a new type of people had been consolidated during the revolutionary experience of the USSR: the Soviet people, a new multinational community united by socialist internationalism, which, despite the disappearance of the USSR, is still a valid programmatic demand in the case of multinational communities unified in a plurinational state.
In the same way, it is important to point out that the Soviet Union not only carried on its shoulders the fundamental weight of the war effort, but that, since the triumph over Nazi-fascism, the correlation of forces has tilted in favor of revolutionary struggles and national liberation. After the end of the war, the colonial system of the imperialists collapsed and dozens of new nations emerged into independent life.
80 years after the victory against fascism, it is necessary to keep alive the memory of those men and women who fought and died for a better world.