Provides a bold new interpretation of the origins and development of World War II's remembrance in the USSR.

Provides a bold new interpretation of the Soviet myth of World War II from its Stalinist origins to its emergence as arguably the supreme myth of state under Brezhnev. Jonathan Brunstedt offers a timely historical investigation into the roots of the revival of the war's memory in Russia today.

This pioneering monograph - a Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year - asks how a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconciled itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war. Through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II, arguably the central defining event of the Soviet epoch, the book shows that while state historical narratives reinforced a sense of Russian primacy and Russian dominated ethnic hierarchy, the story of the war enabled an alternative, supra-ethnic source of belonging, which subsumed Russian and non-Russian loyalties alike to the Soviet whole. The tension and competition between Russocentric and 'internationalist' conceptions of victory, which burst into the open during the late 1980s, reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space. The book sheds new light on long standing questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the patriotic revival of the war's memory in Russia today.

Some Americans are receptive to a positive interpretation of German military conduct on the Russian front in World War II.

This book in no way claims an ultimate truth and a standard of knowledge of the World War II and the list of these myths is not exhaustive. It is just historical fast-food, its appearance caused by the acute desire to satisfy the hunger for information about this period in terms of the information war.

In the spirit of historians Howard Zinn, Gwynne Dyer, and Noam Chomsky, Jacques Pauwels focuses on the big picture. Like them, he seeks to find the real reasons for the actions of great powers and great leaders. Familiar Second World War figures from Adolf Hitler to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin are portrayed in a new light in this book. The decisions of Hitler and his Nazi government to go to war were not those of madmen. Britain and the US were not allies fighting shoulder to shoulder with no motive except ridding the world of the evils of Nazism. In Pauwels' account, the actions of the United States during the war years were heavily influenced by American corporations -- IBM, GM, Ford, ITT, and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now called Exxon) -- who were having a very profitable war selling oil, armaments, and equipment to both sides, with money gushing everywhere. Rather than analyzing Pearl Harbor as an unprovoked attack, Pauwels notes that US generals boasted of their success in goading Japan into a war the Americans badly wanted. One chilling account describes why President Truman insisted on using nuclear bombs against Japan when there was no military need to do so. Another reveals that Churchill instructed his bombers to flatten Dresden and kill thousands when the war was already won, to demonstrate British-American strength to Stalin. Leaders usually cast in a heroic mould in other books about this war look quite different here. Nations that claimed a higher purpose in going to war are shown to have had far less idealistic motives. The Second World War, as Jacques Pauwels tells it, was a good war only in myth. The reality is far messier -- and far more revealing of the evils that come from conflicts between great powers and great leaders seeking to enrich their countries and dominate the world.