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Today, with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin strongly promoting patriotism, a new wave of Russian war films has appeared.

The defeat of Nazism was arguably Soviet Communism’s greatest feat, and it featured in multiple Soviet films - few of which gained traction in the West.

Naturally, auteurs from the countries engaged have been more focused.

Enemy at the Gates (2001) covering the exploits of snipers in Stalingrad, boasted Jude Law’s star appeal, but was criticized for inaccuracies. Sam Peckinpah’s blood-spattered Cross of Iron (1977) about a German unit retreating from the Crimea, is beloved of war-movie buffs, but is not considered a top-tier Hollywood war flick. With such a richness of closer-to-home material to draw from - D-Day, Arnhem, the bomber offensive, Pearl Harbor, Midway, etc - the Eastern Front has, perhaps understandably, been largely overlooked by Hollywood. Yet while war films are a popular genre, little of the above has been seen by Western cinema audiences. In a battle to the death between dictator and dictator, the blood price paid by the USSR was massive: 27 million Soviets are believed to have perished in four years of war. The death camps were exclusively established in Poland, and the dark forests and broad steppes of the USSR became slaughter grounds as SS units undertook “counter-insurgency” operations against partisans and civilians, and unleashed their mobile death commandos, the Einstatzgruppen against Soviet Jews. Moreover, it was in the East that the Nazis carried out their worst atrocities. It was on what Germans called “The Russian Front” or “The Eastern Front” (“Ost Front”) that Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht deployed the bulk of its forces, and suffered the bulk of its casualties.Īfter early disasters, Joseph Stalin’s Red Army learned to counter Germany’s innovative mechanized tactics in battles like the offensive against Moscow the nightmarish street fighting at Stalingrad the titanic armored clash at Kursk and the even more colossal “Destruction of Army Group Center” on the Polish border.Īnd eventually, it was not the Union Flag or the Stars and Stripes that was raised over Berlin’s Reichstag, but the Red Banner. Though it is not apparent in the Anglophone popular culture that dominates the cinema, broadcasting and publishing industries globally, the bulk of the combat in the European theater of World War II - which ended 75 years ago - took place in the East.