From today’s Washington Post:

As troops march past and planes streak overhead, President Bush will assume his place in the reviewing stand on Red Square in front of Lenin’s tomb, marking the 60th anniversary of the Soviet victory (emphasis added) over Nazi Germany…

Nice of the Soviets to win that war for the rest of us, no?To be fair, the sentence above quoted above ends with this:

…an event that also ushered in decades of totalitarianism for half of Europe.

So I guess the Post, while crediting the Soviets with the victory in World War II, isn’t happy they won it.Or something.

Strangely, the rest of the piece is pretty good. (Maybe writer Peter Baker’s simply been listening to too many Russians. Some of them tend to underestimate the contribution of the western allies in defeating the Nazis in World War II.) The article notes, for instance, that the Bush Administration has tried to convince Putin to denounce the Stalin-Hitler Pact, but Putin has declined. Baker writes: “Putin described [the Stalin-Hitler Pact] this year as merely an effort by Moscow ‘to ensure its interests and its security on its western borders,’ and the Kremlin told the Americans he saw no need to renounce it.”

I bet the Poles just love Putin.

Appropos of nothing, I’m wondering how many Czechs liked Hitler in September, 1938.

Addendum: If the topic of this post interests you, check out Peter Baker’s follow-up report in the May 6 Washington Post, which begins: “Russia issued a testy rebuke of President Bush yesterday on the eve of his departure for Europe, denying that Moscow had forcibly occupied the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1940…”