Two nations on earth still treat the Second World War as a sort of moral scripture, remembering it as their greatest and most noble moment. They like to measure their standing in the world by proclaiming their part in it.

Their ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, are measured against it. If at any time they wish to luxuriate in the comforting warmth of past triumph, it is always there to provide this, like an old army greatcoat on a cold night.

These two countries are, rather worryingly for us, Britain and Russia.

It was when I lived in Moscow in the early 1990s that I realised this extraordinary parallel. Parades, black-and-white war films, sentimental songs, reminiscences, all spread the same message. ‘We saved the world’.

Just as we revered our Spitfire pilots, the Soviets worshipped the young tankists who had gone into battle against Hitler’s invading armies. For them it was the ‘Great Fatherland War’. For us it was the Finest Hour.

We knew little of their war and they knew less of ours. The Russians were barely aware of D-Day. Most British people these days have the vaguest idea of the millions who died in the gigantic battles of the Eastern Front which first stopped and then reversed the German tide.

Though neither of us tend to call them Germans. The Russians called them ‘Fascists’, whereas we like to say they are ‘Nazis’. The political name underlines the belief that this was a crusade against evil.

This, of course, is where the two stories part. Until 1941, the Soviets had been the allies of Hitler, under the Nazi-Soviet pact, which is why they prefer the word ‘fascist’ to the word ‘Nazi’.

Just as we revered our Spitfire pilots, the Soviets worshipped the young tankists who had gone into battle against Hitler’s invading armies, Peter Hitchens writes

Just as we revered our Spitfire pilots, the Soviets worshipped the young tankists who had gone into battle against Hitler’s invading armies, Peter Hitchens writes

Whereas after 1945 we, like the rest of Western Europe, needed the Germans to help man the defences against the Soviet menace. So we, and they, preferred to speak of ‘Nazis’ – obviously a different kind of German who was no longer around.

Well, I was brought up on the war and will revere those who fought and suffered in it till I die. My toys and games, my reading and my imagination, were – like most boys of my generation – dominated by it.

My father, a naval officer, went right through it, spending gruelling months on the Murmansk convoy run (where, as he recalled, the Soviets were not anxious to admit they were getting help from us, and treated him and his shipmates coldly). My mother, a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) known as the Wrens, endured the blitzes of London and Liverpool.

I am still reduced to jelly by films such as The Cruel Sea and In Which We Serve. Celia Johnson’s performance as a naval wife, and her little speech about its joys and sorrows, has me weeping every time, especially since she is wearing the Crown of Neptune brooch which my mother used to wear, a sort of secret sign of membership of an exclusive society, to all those women whose husbands went down to the sea in ships, and risked their lives there.

So don’t call me heartless and unpatriotic when I tell you that I have now had about enough of these commemorations. Leave them to the Russians from now on.

Their current state – as a despotic aggressor – is so ignominious that they need all the borrowed glory they can get from the past. Their blighted, declining, poor, grim, unfree country has need of such illusions.

Vladimir Putin, who started a costly war he cannot finish, needs all the morale-boosting he can get as the tanks rumble through Red Square today, though they probably won’t impress his chief guest, China’s despot Xi Jinping. Russia’s past is more inspiring than its present. But while our celebrations have been moving, do we really need to cling so hard to events from 80 years ago?

We really ought to have folded them up, like a garment, and put them aside by now. Honour the dead, but do not live in the past. The other day I looked up the London newspapers for June 18, 1895, the 80th anniversary of the colossal victory of Waterloo, which began, for us, an era of prosperity, power and peace almost unprecedented in history.

While our celebrations have been moving, do we really need to cling so hard to events from 80 years ago?

While our celebrations have been moving, do we really need to cling so hard to events from 80 years ago?

The anniversary was barely mentioned. And why should it have been? The last stragglers of the furious fighting at the Waterloo farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte had almost all marched off into the dark.

Britain in 1895 was immeasurably wealthier and greater than it had been 80 years before. And perhaps this is the point.

The United Kingdom of 2025 is of course in a thousand ways richer, healthier and more comfortable than it was in 1945. But, compared with the mighty imperial nation that went to war in 1939, we are a minnow.

And for many years after 1945, those who lived in the crumbling, smashed-up, unpainted, rubble-infested, rationed world that was this country immediately after the war felt more like the inhabitants of a defeated nation than of a victorious one.

That may be why they welcomed so readily the Churchillian idea that 1940 had been our finest hour in a thousand years of history. Which of course it was. Making peace with Hitler would have been the path to unlimited shame, and who knows what miseries.

But what a price we paid. Within a few years the Empire we had supposedly fought to preserve had melted away, including Burma which William Slim’s superb armies had fought so hard to wrest back from Japan.

And what of Poland, whose independence we had gone to war to save in 1939? On the June 8, 1946, a grand victory parade was held in London to commemorate the courage of those who fought. But Polish soldiers and airmen, ferocious fighters whose bravery had done so much to secure victory, were not allowed even to take part.

This is perhaps the harshest illustration of the way we had become subservient to Stalin, the wicked mass murderer and tyrant whose enormous armies had ensured Allied victory in Europe. Stalin intended to turn Poland into a subject province of his Communist empire and wanted no reminders of pre-Communist Poland’s fighting prowess.

Our victory, preferable as it was to defeat, was not an unmixed triumph for the forces of good. We had beaten one monster by allying with another. There are many lessons to be learned from this if we wish to learn them.

One of them is always to stay strong enough to defend yourself. Another is to be careful what you start, as you do not know how it might end.

Contrary to the standard myths, the Left – which always claims to have been very anti-Nazi – opposed rearmament against Hitler till the very last moment. And what saved us in 1940 were the RAF fighters, the radar and the naval destroyers – all defensive weapons – which the reviled Neville Chamberlain had been busily building against Labour opposition since 1935.

The sad truth was that the Britain of the late 1930s could not afford to be a superpower and, once war came, had to hand a second-hand conflict over to the USA and USSR, who had their own ideas about how it should end.

I say now, God Bless all those who fought on the right side in that war, from my late father to the stocky, humorous Red Army veterans, still surviving, who I used to see drinking a little too much vodka on the streets of Moscow on Victory Day, when I lived there 35 years ago.

But war is still hell, and wrecks lives, and should not be worshipped or glorified. Give thanks that we survived. Concentrate now on surviving the dangers to come, with wisdom and humility.

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