Thread by @PhillipsPOBrien

I was wondering when these arguments were going to be made, and they are actually interesting. So much of Putin's (and other people's views) of Russian military capabilities have come out of the supposed dominant role played by the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany

https://twitter.com/XSovietNews/status/1498729911107866627

There has even been talk of a law to ban the downgrading of Soviet contribution to victory in the war. This view of Soviet military prowess existed through the Cold War.

One of the key elements of the revisionist critique of the Cold War was that because the USSR did the most to defeat Nazi Germany, Stalin was basically owed a buffer zone in eastern Europe.

I would also argue that alot of the stories (which now look like scare stories) of powerful Soviet armed forces with their masses of tanks emerged directly from this WWII perception--even when it was shown that the USSR was actually far weaker than we assumed.

Something like this seems to be happening before our eyes--with many analysts and Putin himself absolutely convinced that Russian armed forces were more capable than they SEEM to be so far.

People might guess where Im going with this because of my research. I think a close analysis of how the war was won or lost actually shows that the USSR played a much smaller role in Nazi Germany's defeat and the Soviet armed forces were not as effective as portrayed.

Basically the Germans actually sent a relatively small percentage of their production to the Eastern Front, with a far larger percentage destroyed by the Anglo-Americans in the air and on the sea. The Germans generally had less than a third of their production deployed East

This does not even count the large transfer of resources to Stalin through lend-lease, which this first tweet mentions. Indeed, had Germany fought the USSR alone, it would have conquered Russia.

We might be seeing in front of our eyes the effect of a failed historical notion of how effective Soviet armed forces were in World War II--especially for Vladimir Putin.