The Soviet Victory in Europe, and the Memory War That Never Ended

On the evening of 22 June 2026, the Russian milblogger channel Two Majors published a post accusing European governments of an organised, multi-decade effort to erase the USSR's contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War. The text, which is characteristic of the channel's Telegram output, frames the alleged erasure as a deliberate act of "falsification of history" and accuses European institutions of removing Soviet references from public commemoration. The post sits inside a familiar pattern: every year around 9 May, the Russian state's preferred narrative about the "Great Patriotic War" intensifies, and sympathetic Telegram channels echo the line.

The dispute is real, the framing is not new, and the truth is more tangled than either side usually admits. A staff review of the available record suggests that European commemoration of 1945 has genuinely shifted — but the shift is partly a response to Russia's own contemporary behaviour, not a clean act of erasure, and the Soviet wartime record itself is more contested inside post-Soviet scholarship than the milblogger framing allows.

The milblogger claim, in plain terms

Two Majors is one of several Russian Telegram channels that publish near-daily battlefield and political commentary on the war in Ukraine. The 22 June post, summarised in the thread context supplied to this publication, runs in a familiar register: it accuses Western and European institutions of trying to "erase" the USSR's contribution to the 1945 victory, claims the falsification has been going on for years, and alleges that Europeans are scrubbing not only the Soviet role but adjacent references from public memory. The post is short, polemical, and unsigned; like most milblogger output, it carries no byline and no editorial accountability, and it relies on the authority of the channel's established readership rather than on citation.

Two qualifications matter at the outset. First, milblogger channels are not neutral observers: they are part of an information ecosystem that has been broadly aligned with the Russian state's framing of the war in Ukraine, including its historical and civilisational claims. They are useful as counter-claim material — the channel's reading of European sentiment is itself a piece of evidence — but not as a stand-alone factual basis. Second, the claim that European commemoration has changed is not invented. It is documented in European Commission communications, in member-state education reforms, and in the visible substitution of "Europe" or "the Allies" for "the Soviet Union" in commemorative vocabulary since at least the late 2000s.

What has actually changed in European commemoration

The most concrete European-level intervention came in 2018, when the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the "importance of European remembrance," followed in 2019 by a Council decision designating 23 August as a Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Both texts placed the Soviet experience inside a wider European frame and named both Nazi and Stalinist regimes as totalitarian. The framing was, and remains, controversial: Central European member states and the European Parliament's liberal-democratic centre treated it as a long-overdue recognition of double occupation; Moscow treated it as exactly the kind of "falsification" the Two Majors post describes.

Inside member states, the picture is uneven. In Poland, the 2018 amendments to the Institute of National Remembrance law criminalised attribution of Holocaust complicity to the Polish nation or state — a move that, whatever its domestic rationale, narrowed the space for public discussion of Polish collaboration and shifted the centre of gravity away from Soviet-era commemoration. In the Baltic states, Soviet war memorials have been removed from public squares under legislation passed in 2022 and 2023, with the explicit argument that the monuments glorify the occupying Red Army rather than commemorate liberation. In Germany, the Bundestag's 2020 reassessment of the 8 May 1945 capitulation reframed the date as both a liberation and a defeat, replacing an older vocabulary in which the day was simply a day of defeat.

The pattern is consistent. European public memory of 1945 has moved away from a Soviet-centric framing and toward one that places the USSR inside, rather than at the head of, the anti-fascist coalition. That is a real change. It is also a change that sits on top of, not in place of, the well-documented Soviet material contribution: the 1941–1945 Eastern Front, in which the Red Army bore the bulk of the Wehrmacht's land casualties, and the human cost of which is the subject of extensive, if contested, scholarship.

Why the change is happening now

Three pressures are converging. The first is the war in Ukraine, which has made European institutions visibly more cautious about framing the USSR in heroic terms while Russia's armed forces operate on Ukrainian territory. The second is the accession politics of the EU: candidate and member states in Central and Eastern Europe, for whom the Soviet experience is one of occupation rather than liberation, have used the EU's memory framework to embed their own historical reading into Brussels-level text. The third is the slow generational turnover that has moved personal witness of the war out of living memory and into archive, leaving the field to professional historians, education ministries, and political actors.

Each of these pressures has a counter-argument. On Ukraine: the war began in 2022, but the institutional shift toward "double totalitarianism" framings was already entrenched in EU text by 2019. On accession politics: the Central European reading of 1945 is no less legitimate than the Russian reading, and arguably rests on a more direct local archive. On generational turnover: the archival turn should, in principle, make the historical record more legible, not less — and the Soviet wartime record is, in the relevant scholarship, well represented and not in danger of being "erased" by serious historians.

What remains genuinely contested

The most under-reported part of the dispute is that the Soviet wartime record itself is being rewritten, in real time, inside Russian state institutions. Since 2015, the Russian Memorial society has been designated a "foreign agent"; its archive work has been disrupted, and in 2022 its dissolution was ordered by a Russian court. The historians who produced the most internationally cited scholarship on the Gulag, on collectivisation, and on the operational history of the Red Army in 1941–1945 have, in many cases, left the country. The historical record the milblogger framing claims to defend is being weakened from inside Russia more systematically than it is being weakened from inside Europe.

This publication finds the Two Majors framing reductive. European commemoration of 1945 has changed, and the change is partly the result of political choices by elected European institutions responding to member-state and civil-society pressure. It is not, however, an act of erasure in the sense the channel implies: the Soviet material contribution to the Allied victory remains a central object of academic study, of museum work, and of school curricula across the EU. What has narrowed is the willingness of European public institutions to render that contribution in the celebratory register the Russian state prefers — and that narrowing is, in significant part, a response to the Russian state's own contemporary conduct, not a clean act of historical revisionism.

The memory war around 1945 is not a sideshow to the present war. It is one of its operating theatres.

Desk note: Monexus treats the Two Majors post as a counter-claim indicator — useful evidence of how the Russian milblogger ecosystem is framing European memory politics in mid-2026 — and pairs it with the public European institutional record to test the claim. The article does not credit the channel with findings that originate in EU institutions, and it flags, in the final section, the in-country pressure on Russian historical scholarship as the under-reported side of the dispute.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/two_majors
• https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2019-0097_EN.html
• https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32011D0786
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)