My week in Moscow meeting WW2 veterans with Sasha Goncharov opened my eyes to the country’s role in WW2. I knew that Russia had been our ally but, in recent generations, its contribution had largely been overlooked by the West. Politics moved the Allies apart even as the war was ending. In my youth the Cold War was still underway and nuclear tension was ever-present, down to the pop music we heard, with Sting’s “I hope the Russians love their children too” a particularly memorable title.

So I had never really thought about the fact that while most of Western Europe had been rolled over by Hitler within a matter of weeks, Russia - which, having invaded in June 1941, he had expected to defeat “by Christmas” - held on for nearly four years until its troops marched into a defeated Berlin.

I also had little comprehension of the geographical scale of Russia’s war. During my time in Moscow I spoke with veterans who had trained in the Ural Mountains, some 3,000km from Russia’s western borders, then marched victorious through multiple countries from Ukraine to Poland before arriving at the German capital, itself more than 1800km west of Moscow. Some went on foot, some on horseback. Russia’s involvement had an impact on the war in the Pacific, too. On that front, historians debate which of the atomic bombs or Russia’s advance was more significant for the surrender of Japan.

One thing I had heard - perhaps designed to undermine the fear of the Cold War nuclear arsenal - was of the skills and equipment shortages suffered by Russian troops. Some, but not all, veteran accounts corroborated this. One, Boris Anatolyvich, told me that he had in fact been surprised at how well equipped the heavy artillery divisions were when he joined them in 1944.

Mostly, however, the veterans’ stories were a testament to the courage and patriotism that carried them through the extreme challenges and hardships of invasion and occupation to eventual victory.

Leonid Leonidovich described how, as a machine gun platoon commander, he had taken to the frontline raw recruits who asked him whether they would receive any guns or training. He reassured them that they would be trained in the rear of their company, which was already fighting. He described several engagements which went awry because soldiers had been trained only in the most basic operational necessities. On one occasion, a soldier in Leonid Leonidovich’s command began screaming, seemingly frozen beside his Maxim machine gun. It wasn’t through fear - the man continued to shoot at the Germans with his rifle while others took over the gun he was unable restart. “I knew how to load and shoot the gun, but that was all,” he said. In another incident, some of Leonid’s soldiers found their weapons stopped firing mid-skirmish. He later discovered that they had drunk the cooling liquid (ordinary water) and so their guns had jammed. He took from this that it was his responsibility to ensure that his men were properly led, a lesson which stayed with him through the liberation of countries from Belorussia to Poland to Germany—and into his later life as a military prosecutor.

Another veteran, Nikolai Petrovich, described how he had gone from fighter pilot crew to infantryman to cavalry artillery - mainly because once his plane had been shot down near Stalingrad there were no more planes left to fly. His crew camped for two weeks in a field, waiting for a new aircraft which didn’t exist, before commanders arrived to instruct them to stop brooding and go to where they were needed for the fight. A failed attempt to cross a river under heavy fire to relieve Stalingrad led to Nikolai and the other soldiers without a unit being put on a transport. Much to their disgust they ended up at a training camp in the Western Siberia. Such was their desire to get to the front line they went on strike until again upbraided by commanding officers, who told them that their greatest value would be realised if they were properly trained. Given the cooling liquid incident I had heard of, he was fortunate to be given the time to learn. His commitment to the liberation of Russia eventually took him, too, to Berlin.

No one I met, not even the viably unfit to fight, backed out. Aged just 17, Ilya Alexandrovich was refused entry into the merchant marines in his hometown of Odessa because he had flat feet. Undeterred, he eventually was trained as a mortar artilleryman and then a truck driver. He was so small he had to sit on planks of wood in order to get a good vantage point over the steering wheel. Children even younger also willingly joined the fight. Aged just 11 Nina Mikhailovna became a partisan, eventually living in the woods with her parents and siblings. When her home in Belorussia was among the first on the westernmost border to fall to the German attack, her family hid in the forest the weapons of the retreating Russians, preparing for resistance and the soldiers’ eventual return. Just a child, Nina was involved in combat herself, both firing weapons and, most terrifyingly, carrying with her two sisters through numerous German checkpoints a handgun disguised in a ball of wool. Her parents, waiting at home for the girls to return from their mission, were as prepared for the Nazis to come knocking on their door saying that they had captured them as they were for their daughters’ return. In the end, her whole family did not make it: Nina’s younger sister Larissa was denounced by a collaborator and stabbed through the heart - but not before being tortured for information which she apparently never gave up.

Very few were spared the loss of loved ones. Leonid Ivanovich was marked by the death of his teenage love, Zeena, whose name is still darkly tattooed across his knuckles, 75 years later. Her parents had died at the beginning of the war, and when his family went to live in the forest he begged his own to take her in. They refused, and his lack of insistence still haunts him. Boris Anatolyvich told me of the Immortal Regiment, an annual procession on Victory Day in which people carry portraits of their loved ones lost in the war. Boris carries those of a cousin and two uncles, as well as the father of his wife.

Yet even those with an abiding hatred of the invaders occasionally told stories of unexpected compassion. During the occupation, Nina’s family had frequently hosted a couple of young German soldiers who visited their home and shared their own stories. One, despite legitimate medical reasons for not fighting, had been forced to do so by his mother who coveted the Russian lands that Hitler had promised to victorious German soldiers. Although Nina felt her family was only friendly with them for its own advantage, the day the soldier and his mate came to bid the family farewell because they were being sent to reinforce the front, she admits that she could not help but feel sorry for the young men. “They knew they were going to die.”

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Today, the history of World War Two is frequently manipulated to serve modern day political ends. A more unified approach to the war is perhaps hindered, too, by the fact that we don’t share the same name for it, even among Allies. While in the West it is generally referred to as World War Two - and it did involve the whole world, barring in large part South America - both China and Russia have their own more nationalistic names for it: the War of Resistance Against Japan in the former case and the Great Patriotic War in the latter.

Irrespective of the name, the narrative always gives focus to one’s own national perspective, a narrow view that also does not foster common ground. One British woman of war age whom I interviewed was surprised to learn that China was an Ally; today’s Chinese Communist Party for its part has written out the contribution of America to the liberation of their country from the Japanese. I don’t know how modern Russia deals with the inconvenience of having sided with a contemporary ideological foe, but it seems clear to me that, in all countries, a refusal to acknowledge the efforts of others in the victory over fascism helps to foment resentment at best, and outright enmity at worst.

The veterans do not support this. While China’s and Japan’s governments engage in history wars, encouraging new generations of young people to harbour old grievances, those I have interviewed who actually lived through the war say simply “I like peace”. Some in China even declared that the Japanese were victims of their own system. The Russians with whom I met did not tend to go as far, but most acknowledged that, these days, Germans are quite decent, and that war is a devastation we should avoid at all costs.

It is sad that nations can be so easily divided by propaganda which panders more to the interests of governments than to those of their citizens. As Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-born writer, said: regular people have more in common with each other than they do with their own governments. I hadn’t heard this before I began interviewing veterans, but it sums up why I think their experiences are so important. The war, divisive as it was, was a common experience of suffering for an entire generation. They know how costly war can be. The stories of veterans worldwide - and especially those of former allies-turned-modern day rivals such as China, Russia and the US - remind us not only that we once buried our differences to fight together, but also that national interest is fickle. The sacrifice demanded by governments in its pursuit can be devastating on the individual level.

I asked the Russian veterans what they think of war, and the answer of Boris Anatolyvich struck me the most, given my Cold War memories. He recounted the words of a song from a youth festival convened in Moscow in 1956: “we give birth to our children not for war but for a peaceful life”.

October 2019, Moscow                                    Lucy Colback, Hong Kong