p The Second World War involved sixty-one countries, with eighty per cent of the population of the globe, and lasted six years. The tornado of fire swept over much of Europe, Asia and Africa, across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and even reached Australia. It brought colossal destruction and took millions of lives. The distress and the suffering it caused is impossible to measure.

p The Second World War has been examined in thousands of books and in countless magazine and newspaper articles. It has been widely featured in cinema, TV films and radio broadcasts. And in spite of the fact that forty years have gone by since the end of that war, its history still fascinates many writers, scholars, and military scientists, while the events of those days continue to agitate the minds and hearts of ordinary people throughout the world.

p The past few years have been fruitful ones for Soviet scholars who study the history of the Second World War. In 1978-1980, a six-volume collection of documents (The Soviet Union at International Conferences During the Great Patriotic War) was published under ’the editorship of Andrei Gromyko, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and Minister for Foreign Affairs. In 1982, the last volume of the fundamental 12-volume History of the Second World War, 1939-1945 came out (with Marshal Dmitry Ustinov, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU and Minister of Defence, as chairman of the chief 6 editorial commission). These studies came in for a great deal of attention in the Soviet Union and abroad, and enriched historical science with new important conclusions and with new facts of the heroism of the Soviet people who saved the world from fascist enslavement.

p In 1984, scholars from socialist community countries produced a collective work, The Second World War. An Outline History.

p In the West the history of the Second World War has been a subject of unabating interest. "The Second World War ... continues to attract more interest and to provoke more controversy than any other topic," wrote the British historian Walter Laqueur.  [6•1 

p The events of the past war still have an unremitting hold over the minds of people. Why? Because of the close connection between subsequent international developments and the results and lessons of that war, also the effect it had on people’s lives, and the social and political inferences that can be made-for our own timefrom the study of its history.

p The Second World War was coming to a head in conditions when capitalism had lost its omnipotence, and the first socialist state, the USSR, was already in existence. The division of the world into two systems diametrically opposed to one another, as a result of the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, created the main contradiction of our epoch, that between capitalism and socialism. At the same time the contradictions between the imperialist states continued to deepen, leading to the formation of two rival coalitions: Germany, Italy and Japan, on the one side, and Britain, France and the United States, on the other.

p One of the main features of the Second World War was that it began not only as a struggle for the redivision of the world between the imperialist powers. One coalition (Germany, Italy, and Japan) represented fascist regimes which were an openly terrorist dictatorship of 7 the most aggressive forces of monopoly capital. This coalition set out to conquer the world and establish the domination of the "chosen" races, to exterminate whole nations as "inferior" and to destroy their statehood and their centuries-old culture. Fascism openly proclaimed that its main goal was to wipe out the Marxist-Leninist ideology, and physically destroy its protagonists, the Communists. They also sought to destroy the Soviet Union, the bulwark of socialist revolution. The GermanyItalyjapan axis threatened to make short shrift of its capitalist rivals in Europe and Asia, to rout the United States, and to wipe out even the most elementary bourgeois freedoms.

p When Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet people began their Great Patriotic War which was to play such a decisive role in the Second World War. A socialist state in alliance with the democratic forces of many countries clashed with the aggressive fascist bloc in a battle unparalleled in scale and intensity. This signified the fundamental qualitative change in the socio-political character, in the scale and course of the war and its eventual outcome. The peoples of the world now had a clear-cut programme for routing the aggressor, for destroying fascism, for regaining national independence and democracy.

p The Great Patriotic War was fought by a socialist country against the strike forces of international reaction embodied in fascism. That was a heroic struggle, a struggle in which the spirit of patriotism was fused with that of proletarian internationalism, a struggle in defence of the revolutionary gains of working people, in defence of progress and civilisation. The aims of the Great Patriotic War were humane, and close to the hearts of the peoples of all countries: to defend the motherland, to rout the invaders and to carry out the great mission of liberation of enslaved Europe, including Germany, from the fascist monsters, to enable the peoples themselves to choose their own political and economic system.

p The long, hard road to victory in the Second World War mostly followed the Soviet-German front. This 8 principal theatre of operations saw the biggest battles and the fiercest fighting, which finally exhausted the enemy and drove him out of the Soviet Union. The Red Army liberated in full or in part thirteen countries of Europe and Asia with a total population of 200 million. The Soviet people not only successfully defended its socialist gains but actually saved the world from the fascist barbarians.

p The struggle of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and its allies was headed by the Leninist Party, the militant vanguard of the working class and the entire Soviet nation. Conscious of its historical responsibility for the future of the people and the state, and for the cause of socialism, the Central Committee of the Party exercised its wisdom and courage in overcoming colossal difficulties caused by the war, mobilised all the material and spiritual forces of society, ralHed Soviet people to rout the enemy and win total victory. The advantages of the socialist system, the unity and cohesion of the entire Soviet people under the banner of the Communist Party were the most important sources of the invincibility of the socialist state, of its victory in the Great Patriotic War which was won by the joint efforts of the working class, the collective farmers, the people’s intelligentsia, of all the big and small nations of this country.

p Opposing the fascist-militarist bloc was the anti-Hitler coalition. The coincidence of national interests of a number of states served as the basis for an international front made up of different socio-political forces, the first ever in history. In that coalition only the Soviet Union with the Mongolian People’s Republic were socialist states. Taking part in the struggle against the Nazi invaders and Japanese militarists were the armies of Great Britain, the United States, China, Canada, and several other countries. These armies were made up of workers and farmers, people of different social and religious backgrounds. In capitalist countries which were allied to the Soviet Union in the war, there were some political and military leaders who were fiercely opposed to cooperation with the USSR, but there was also quite a number who 9 favoured concerted action with the Soviet state against the common enemy.

p Fighting heroically against the invaders were the people’s armies of Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and later, in the concluding stages of the war, the people’s armies of Bulgaria and Romania, and the patriotic forces of Hungary. Fighting together against the Nazis lent new strength to their cooperation with their comrades-in-arms in the’ Soviet army.

p Courageous fighters in the resistance movement operating deep in the rear of the occupation troops both in Europe and Asia considerably weakened the combat potential of the invaders. Taking part in this movement were progressive forces in many countries headed by their working class and its vanguard, the communist parties. The peoples of Korea, Vietnam and other countries of Asia were also drawn into the national liberation struggle in the Far East and in Indo-China.

p The Second World War ended in the collapse of the plans for world domination nurtured by German, Italian and Japanese imperialism, and showed that such designs in modern conditions are impossible to &arry out.

p The historv of the Second World War is today the site of scholarly and ideological battles between MarxismLeninism and bourgeois systems of philosophical, economic and socio-political views.

p Some of the better known Western historians have made a signal contribution to the study of the Second World War. Their authoritative works have been published in many countries, including the Soviet Union. These scholars attempt to get down to the roots of the war, to give a fair assessment of the course it took, its results and its lessons, thus helping to resolve the historical argument between the two opposing political systemssocialism and capitalism-on the basis of peaceful coexistence.

p By contrast, Western historians who interpret the events of the war and its origins from positions of anti-communism take a different line, and their bias has a clear-cut direction. These historians are trying in every way to skirt the question of the responsibility of imperialism for 10 the preparation and unleashing of the war, to whitewash fascism and push the responsibility for the world slaughter onto the Soviet Union and other progressive forces. In addition to that they ascribe to the United States and Britain what they call "the dominant role" in the Second World War. By doing so they are trying to belittle the decisive contribution made by the Soviet Union to the defeat of the fascist-militarist bloc, and are deliberately distorting the results and lessons of that war in order to revive and inflate the myth of a "Soviet military threat" and to justify the arms drive let loose by the United States and its NATO allies.

p Now that the confrontation of the forces of war and peace are the key factor in world developments, an objective estimate of the events of the Second World War, a good knowledge of its experience and lessons are vital to prevent a still more destructive nuclear war which would put the very life of humanity at risk.

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