By Xhabir Deralla
I grew up under the “soft” dictatorship of Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia. Soft, at least, in comparison to the Soviet Union’s bloody tyranny and the Warsaw Pact’s occupation of half of Europe.
I never met my real grandfather, Elmas – a Turk born in Skopje – because the communists killed him in 1948 under fabricated accusations that he was “pro-Stalin.” In reality, he hated the Soviets. But in those years, truth meant little once the regime decided someone was disposable. Such accusations often ended in prison or death.
My grandmother Ana, a Croatian from Dalmatia, never forgave the system that murdered him. On the surface, it projected strength, justice, heroism, brotherhood, and unity. Beneath the polished slogans lived fear, lies, brutality, and graves people learned not to speak about.
Ana met Elmas at the Syrmian Front, northwest of Belgrade, where they fought together against Nazi-led forces. Alongside her older brother, she fought as a partisan and even saved my future grandfather’s life on the battlefield. The liberation of those territories came largely through the Yugoslav partisans, while the Red Army – composed heavily of Ukrainians – advanced toward Hungary.
But what stayed with her most was not victory. It was fear.
The fear that Soviet forces gathered beyond the borders of the country she had just helped liberate could become occupiers themselves. Former allies in war had already become a threat in peace.
The history textbooks of socialist Yugoslavia confirmed that fear. So did the communist television broadcasts every evening at 19:30 throughout the 1970s. We grew up knowing what happened in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. We knew what Soviet tanks meant long before today’s Russia rolled them into Ukraine.
And we understood something that much of Western Europe chose to ignore for decades. For millions across Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia was remembered not as a liberator, but as an occupier.
Fast forward through countries that lived, collapsed, renamed themselves, and disappeared, while the geography remained largely the same.
In this part of Europe, history rarely served to explain what happened. More often, it served to dictate what citizens were expected to believe. Under different regimes and flags, history became less a matter of evidence than a weapon of political prosecution, moral manipulation, and collective illusion.
But we know exactly what the Kremlin has been doing since the end of World War II. We know exactly what was erased. Entire occupations were renamed “liberation.” Mass murders became state secrets. Imperial domination became antifascism. And millions were expected not merely to obey the lie, but to inherit it.
Many did. Many no longer do.
Imperial Domination and Historical Erasure
Prague, August 1968
Soviet tanks occupy the Czechoslovak capital. The military intervention was officially propagandized as a “liberation,” effectively institutionalizing a state-sanctioned lie for decades.
On 9 May, Europe celebrates Europe Day – the anniversary of the Schuman Declaration that laid the foundations for the European Union. Moscow celebrates Victory Day.
Victory over what? Nazism? Certainly. Millions died defeating it.
But the Kremlin’s mythology was never built around remembrance alone. It was built around selective memory – the deliberate selection and exclusion of facts, crimes, and entire eras.
German troops during the invasion of Poland, September 1939. Nazi Germany attacked Poland from the west on 1 September 1939. Image: Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons.
Soviet troops enter Poland during the Soviet invasion from the east, September 1939. The attack followed Nazi Germany’s invasion from the west and was carried out under the framework of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocols. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Poland was not defeated by one aggressor alone, but crushed between two totalitarian regimes acting under a shared arrangement.
The blood brotherhood between Hitler and Stalin disappeared from official memory because it made the Soviet Union’s moral monopoly over victory impossible to sustain. The joint invasion of Poland, the coordinated destruction of occupied societies, the terror, deportations, and mass graves – all of it had to be buried beneath military parades, monuments, and orchestrated patriotism.
And for decades, much of the democratic West agreed to live with that distortion because confronting it was geopolitically inconvenient.
Meanwhile, Eastern Europe lived among unresolved tragedies, censored memory, and unburied dead.
During all those years, the Kremlin was not merely preserving a lie about the past. It was building an entire political culture around it – a culture of corruption, fear, cynicism, and moral degradation whose consequences Europe still struggles to confront.
Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow, 1939 — an emblematic image of the Nazi–Soviet pact. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
Beneath the Red Square spectacle lies one gigantic, shameless lie: before Stalin became Hitler’s enemy, he was Hitler’s ally.
World War II did not begin with Soviet resistance to fascism. It began with a blood brotherhood between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia – two totalitarian regimes that jointly invaded Poland and agreed, in secret protocols, to carve Eastern Europe into spheres of domination. Their cooperation unleashed terror on an industrial scale.
Was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact diplomacy? No. It was a gangster agreement between dictators dividing Europe like loot.
Then came Brest-Litovsk. On 22 September 1939, Wehrmacht and Red Army officers stood side by side while German and Soviet troops paraded together through occupied Poland. Swastikas and red stars decorated the same streets. Nazi and Soviet officers toasted one another as allies while German troops marched out and Soviet troops marched in. Brest-Litovsk was not an anomaly. It was one documented scene in a wider machinery of Nazi–Soviet coordination. It was not propaganda. It was history.
Brest-Litovsk, September 22, 1939: German General Heinz Guderian (left) and Soviet Kombrig Semyon Krivoshein (right) during the joint military parade marking the handover of the city to Soviet forces.
Historian Timothy Snyder described the destruction of Poland as a “joint operation” between Hitler and Stalin. The phrase matters because it leaves no space for the Kremlin’s favorite refuge: ambiguity. Two totalitarian powers acted in sync.
Stalin did not break with Hitler out of principle. Hitler broke with Stalin out of ambition.
Until Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Stalin showed no sign of abandoning the alliance voluntarily. Soviet propaganda praised Germany. Soviet exports helped fuel the Nazi war machine. Soviet and Nazi security structures cooperated.
Then came the Katyn massacre. More than 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and members of the elite were murdered by Stalin’s NKVD. For decades, Moscow blamed the crime on the Nazis. The lie survived because authoritarian systems do not require truth. They require control.
And perhaps no phrase captures the moral obscenity of the Nazi–Soviet alliance more clearly than Stalin’s own words, published in Soviet media in December 1939:
“Friendship sealed with blood.”
Pravda, December 25, 1939: Telegrams from Joseph Stalin to Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop. In these messages, Stalin acknowledges birthday greetings from the German leadership and describes the Soviet-Nazi partnership as a “friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood.”
There it is. The sentence contemporary Russia wants buried beneath every military parade and every slogan about “denazification.”
A friendship sealed with blood. A brotherhood of dictators. A shared invasion. A shared destruction of Europe. A lie preserved for generations.
After 1945, this blood brotherhood was not erased by accident. It was buried under an industrial-scale laundering of Soviet complicity.
The central fact is not simply that the Soviet Union cooperated with Hitler. Everyone serious knows that. The central fact is that the Kremlin built an entire postwar moral identity on the erasure of that cooperation, turning omission into ideology and victory into a monopoly over truth.
Western Europe largely remembered 1945 as liberation. Much of Eastern Europe remembered something far darker: one occupation ended, another began. The West celebrated victory over fascism. Eastern Europe inherited another empire.
This is not revisionism. It is the unresolved historical experience of an enormous part of Europe – and it echoed in my grandmother Ana’s stories.
The tragedy of Eastern Europe was not only that it was crushed between Hitler and Stalin. It was that after the war, much of the world accepted Stalin’s version of the story as the price of geopolitical stability. Occupation was renamed liberation. Empire was renamed security. Silence was renamed peace.
The Kremlin does not celebrate victory over fascism. It celebrates victory over memory.
The alliance worked. Poland disappeared. Europe burned. Millions died. And after 1941, history itself was occupied.
Modern Russia cannot tell the truth about 1939 because its present-day imperial identity depends on the lie. The Kremlin’s mythology is not a misunderstanding of history. It is a political survival mechanism. Russia’s rulers need World War II falsified because the myth of eternal antifascist righteousness is the moral cover for today’s aggression.
That is why “denazification” can be used as a slogan for invading Ukraine. That is why a state that bombs cities, destroys borders, deports children, and wages colonial war dares to present itself as the guardian of antifascism. The lie did not remain in textbooks. It returned as artillery.
The problem is not that the Kremlin forgot. The problem is that it remembers perfectly well – and built an empire of propaganda on top of the memory it chose to bury.
The blood brotherhood ended in 1941. The lie built upon it never did.
Ukraine is fighting not only for its freedom, but for its survival. And in doing so, Ukraine has already done something of historic importance for Europe and the world: it has broken the spell. It has forced the buried truth back into the open. It has exposed the imperial lie beneath the Victory Day myth.
Ukraine has not only resisted Russian aggression. It has liberated us from one of the darkest lies of the twentieth century.
The Telegram
Transcript (Russian)
БЕРЛИН ГЛАВЕ ГЕРМАНСКОГО ГОСУДАРСТВА господину АДОЛЬФУ ГИТЛЕРУ.
Прошу Вас принять мою признательность за поздравления и благодарность за Ваши добрые пожелания в отношении народов Советского Союза.
И. СТАЛИН.
БЕРЛИН МИНИСТРУ ИНОСТРАННЫХ ДЕЛ ГЕРМАНИИ господину ИОАХИМ ФОН РИББЕНТРОП.
Благодарю Вас, господин министр, за поздравления. Дружба народов Германии и Советского Союза, скрепленная кровью, имеет все основания быть длительной и прочной.
И. СТАЛИН.
Translation (English)
BERLIN TO THE HEAD OF THE GERMAN STATE Mr. ADOLF HITLER.
I ask you to accept my appreciation for the congratulations and gratitude for your kind wishes regarding the peoples of the Soviet Union.
I. STALIN.
BERLIN TO THE MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF GERMANY Mr. JOACHIM VON RIBBENTROP.
I thank you, Mr. Minister, for the congratulations. The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.
I. STALIN.
Cover photo:
The Architecture of Erasure
Moscow, August 23, 1939
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR. Standing behind him are Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. A public agreement that masked secret protocols to partition Eastern Europe – pivotal moment in the history of Soviet & Nazi cooperation. This alliance set the stage for the renaming of occupations as “liberations” and the transformation of imperial expansion into state-sanctioned truth.
Xhabir Deralla is a journalist, political and hybrid warfare analyst, and President of CIVIL – Center for Freedom.
© Xhabir Deralla / CIVIL – Center for Freedom, 2026.
Republishing permitted with prior written consent.
Support CIVIL’s fight against lies and propaganda
