[mopsi]

"The Great Patriotic War" is a propagandistic term that selectively frames the war as something that happened between 1941 and 1945, to obscure USSR's role in the first few years of the war. It diverts attention from the joint partition of Poland with Nazi Germany (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the Winter War against Finland, the invasions Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania, and USSR's extensive economic cooperation with Germany in 1939-1941, which helped sustain the German war effort during the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain.

It's widely known that Germany had chronic shortage of oil products through the war (which led to them developing coal-based synthetic fuels, etc), but few know that - for example - USSR supplied crude oil and various petroleum products to Germany during the Battle of Britain, which were processed into fuels and lubricants for Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, which helped them bomb London and sink allied ships in the Atlantic. "The Great Patriotic War" framing helps to hide all of this and uphold the national myth that Russians were merely a victims in the war and liberators of Europe, not chief collaborators with Hitler in the destruction of pre-war Europe.

Under Putin, this winners-liberators narrative has been dialed up to 11 and turned into a state-promoted MAGA-like "victory cult": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pobedobesie

Perhaps the best examples of this are "victory parades" with preschoolers, dressed up by their teachers: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/05/10/russian-preschoole...

[inglor_cz]

"The Great Patriotic War" is a label intended to divert attention from the fact that Stalin was Hitler's peer in almost all attributes, except that his system of concentration camps used hunger and frost instead of gas to exterminate unwanted people by the millions.

[Synaesthesia]

It was the greatest war in history, and made the Western front look small by comparison. 26 million people killed. The Soviet Union fought the Wehrmacht alone from June 1941 until July 1943. They made by far the largest contribution in defeating Nazi Germany.