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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Visiting the Soviet Union
Message-ID: <3350@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Nov-83 21:26:17 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.3350
Posted: Sat Nov 19 21:26:17 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Nov-83 21:26:17 EST
References: <4133@decwrl.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 41

One minor correction to the "Visiting the Soviet Union" piece posted
by turtle!bennison the other day.  The author states:

    8. World War II is known as the "Great Patriotic War" and you would think
       they had won it all by themselves, whereas we all know that we did that.
       (I'm only joking, if you can't tell.)  The war is very much a part of 
       the fabric of everyday life there, right alongside the Bolshevik
       Revolution.

There is actually a fine distinction here.  The Soviets do call World
War II "World War II", but they distinguish this from the "Great Patriotic
War", which refers specifically to the part of WW2 involving the Germans
and the Soviets.  They consider the G.P.W. to have been the "main event"
of WW2, with everything else just side issues.

There is something to be said for this view.  Throughout the war the
Germans put more effort and resources into the Eastern Front than the
Western Front -- they had no illusions about where the war would be
won or lost.  A numeric example:  the Germans committed more troops to
the Battle of Kursk (even neglecting supporting operations elsewhere)
than they ever committed to the entire Western Front.  And if one *must*
pick a single battle that was the turning point of WW2, the Battle of
Kursk (in which the Germans were so badly routed that they permanently
lost the initiative on the whole Eastern Front) was it.  The Soviets
have a legitimate complaint when they point out that the G.P.W. is almost
ignored in most Western textbooks.  Had it not been part of WW2, it
would have been one of the biggest wars in history in its own right.

On the other hand (so as not to sound like too much of a dirty rotten
Commie pinko :->), the Soviets blow the G.P.W. up more than it deserves.
Important, even crucial, things were happening elsewhere.  And the
general neglect of the G.P.W. in the West is partly because it is just
about impossible to get unbiased information about it from the Soviets.
(Viet Nam was not the first place where official "body counts" exceeded
the total forces existing on the other side...)  Some of the excessive
emphasis on the G.P.W. in the Soviet Union is for an obvious reason:
it's very nice propaganda to claim that the Soviet Union really won
the war but the dirty capitalist historians ignore it.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry