We’ll see ‘many fake stories’ blaming USSR ahead of WWII anniversary – top official

Information warfare has been deployed against Russia since imperial times so one can expect the WWII anniversary in September to be used to blame Moscow for starting the war, a senior Russian official said.

Sergey Ivanov who chairs the Board of Trustees of the Russian Military Historical Society warned that the 80th anniversary of the start of WWII, which began on September 1, 1939, will be used to attack Moscow’s historical record.

“I’m not a psychic or clairvoyant. But I won’t be wrong to project that, as we move closer to September 1, many publications, falsifications and fake stories will appear, claiming that the Soviet Union is guilty for the outbreak of the WWII.”

Ivanov, President Putin’s former chief of staff, said that the attempts to paint Russia as an instigator of the war are “complete nonsense” but not at all surprising. The “information war” to undermine Moscow had been waged long before WWII even happened, he stressed.

“[They] were containing Imperial Russia as well, running cartoons in newspapers, which depicted her as a bloodthirsty bear that wants to swallow up and subdue the whole of Europe,” Ivanov said.

The official explained that there was a long chain of events in Europe that had led to the war, and some of them can be traced to the very end of WWI.

“The first step in creating the Nazi regime in Germany was the Versailles Treaty, which put an end to the First World War. It was so humiliating to Germany that it raised the atmosphere of extremism, and later fascism, among its population.”

Ivanov also addressed the fact that the Soviet Union often gets criticized for concluding several treaties with Nazi Germany in 1939, including the ‘Non-Aggression Pact’ and the ‘German-Soviet Frontier Treaty’ which in Russian translation had the word ‘friendship’ in its title. He said that the Soviet diplomats were concerned with winning more time for the nation to prepare for a possible conflict with the Nazis.

“If the Soviet government at the time wanted to stress its positive attitude and [was] trying to avoid the war as long as it was possible, then it’s understandable. But the word ‘friendship’ [regarding] Nazi Germany was too much… I don’t like it. I think that was wrong.”

At the same time, “the Soviet Union did most and paid most sacrifices to erase fascism from the face of the Earth,” Ivanov stressed.