We used both terms, the WW term meant the overall event and the other one was for the Soviet part that started June 22, 1941 and ended in 1945, first in Germany, the main victory, the in Far East in the war with Japan. The term itself is taken from to the war of 1812 with Napoleon; that one was The Patriotic War. The Finnish war has its own name. The Poland operation is not counted as a part of the war.
What's the difference? They were involved in what is colloquially known as WWII. They just refer to their specific part differently amongst themselves, but they certainly did have WWII.
I believe the offense is that here, on an English language website with a mostly American and Western European audience, the term used was insufficiently deferential to how Russians would refer to it in Russian.
"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
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.
"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.
It's called a world war in english because everyone and everywhere was at war during that time. Pretty much every group has a name for it in their own language.
It's hyperbolic but mostly right. Wars raged on every continent outside the Americas and millions upon millions died. All those wars started at different times, but ended about the same, so they're all "WWII".
Whoever did the typography for this website went bananas. The pull quotes and block quotes are real pleasing to look at.
Somewhere I think I have a copy of Grossman's A Writer at War.
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We used both terms, the WW term meant the overall event and the other one was for the Soviet part that started June 22, 1941 and ended in 1945, first in Germany, the main victory, the in Far East in the war with Japan. The term itself is taken from to the war of 1812 with Napoleon; that one was The Patriotic War. The Finnish war has its own name. The Poland operation is not counted as a part of the war.
The Soviet Union invaded and annexed half of Poland in 1939 - in partnership with Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
What's the difference? They were involved in what is colloquially known as WWII. They just refer to their specific part differently amongst themselves, but they certainly did have WWII.
I believe the offense is that here, on an English language website with a mostly American and Western European audience, the term used was insufficiently deferential to how Russians would refer to it in Russian.
We should deferentially deny that the Soviet Union invaded Poland and Finland? I will try this when people mention Vietnam, Iraq etc.
"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...
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.
"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.
It's called a world war in english because everyone and everywhere was at war during that time. Pretty much every group has a name for it in their own language.
> because everyone and everywhere was at war during that time.
No, that is incorrect
It's hyperbolic but mostly right. Wars raged on every continent outside the Americas and millions upon millions died. All those wars started at different times, but ended about the same, so they're all "WWII".
> outside the Americas
So very wrong, not "mostly right"
South America is a big place, lots of people live there