Andrew Osborn, in the London Independent (5-9-5):

In London they danced in the fountains but in Moscow they were too shell-shocked, too exhausted and too battle-weary to manage such high jinks. Up to 30 million soldiers and civilians were dead, the Soviet Union had lost a third of its national wealth, cities such as Stalingrad had been reduced to lunar landscapes, and an entire generation of men had been decimated. ...

Today, 9 May, is the traditional day when first the USSR, and now its principal successor state, Russia, marks 'Victory Day', the most sacred of all public holidays. Moscow celebrates victory over Nazi Germany 24 hours later than the other Allies because the German high command surrendered to the Soviets one day later than they did to the Americans and the British.

They hoped they would get better treatment at the hands of the Western Allies and they were right. But Stalin's ghost is not as disturbing and threatening as some Western observers contend. Though some claim Russia is in the throes of a Stalinist revival, pointing to a handful of towns and cities keen to rename streets after him, or erect a modest bust to a man whose power was built on the bones and blood of the people he ruled the reality is starkly different.

Yes, there is nostalgia among older people for the stability and order he guaranteed at a time when many ordinary Russians are still struggling to make ends meet after the 1991 demise of the USSR. Yes, what is left of the Russian Communist party believes that a new Stalin is now needed to save Russia from money-grubbing oligarchs and corrupt bureaucrats. And yes, opinion polls show a large number of Russians are of the opinion that his wartime role was crucial.

But that is not the same as supporting the orthodoxy of Stalinism, and is countered by a very real understanding among large swaths of the population of the crimes he perpetrated against his own people, the purges, the disappearances in the night, the gulag, the mumbo-jumbo show trials and lunatic conspiracies.

Is Vladimir Putin milking the occasion to bolster his own position, increasingly assailed as he is by the West for his lack of democratic credentials? Yes, of course he is, but even he is ready to publicly call a tyrant a tyrant. Veterans may recall the most tumultuous years of their youth when they fought in Stalin's name but, above all, today for them is about sacrifice, heroism and human suffering devoid of dogma. Mention the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the Blitz or D-Day to a Soviet veteran and they will politely raise an eyebrow and form a wry smile before rattling off the USSR's own finest hours.

The Battle of Stalingrad, the Siege of Leningrad, the Kursk tank battle, the Defence of Moscow, the Battle of Berlin, the Defence of Smolensk and so the list goes on. Then conjure up Britain's iconic images of its own wartime prowess, debonair pipe-smoking fighter pilots, a defiant cigar- toting Churchill, a sand-blasted Montgomery, groups of troops wading ashore at Normandy or a 'plucky' armada of fishing-boats and pleasure craft evacuating the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force and you can bet that the Soviet veteran holds something entirely different in his mind's eye.

A Red Army soldier raising the Soviet Hammer and Sickle flag over the captured Reichstag in Berlin, troops marching straight from Moscow's Red Square to the frontline, the rubble of what used to be Stalingrad, Dmitri Shostakovich composing his seventh symphony in an encircled Leningrad or a self-satisfied Josef Stalin sitting beside Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt at Yalta.

Curiously, the Soviet veteran will not refer to 'the Second World War'. For Russians and the citizens of the former Soviet Union the conflict is known dramatically as 'The Great Patriotic War,' a phrase which in a Russian mind conjures up immediate associations with Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812. Sixty years may have elapsed but victory over Hitler and fascism remains modern-day Russia's proudest moment and still plays a significant role in contemporary life. It may have been a Communist tradition but young newlyweds still visit their local town's war memorial after they have been married to lay flowers and remember those who died so that they could live in peace. It is unquestionable that Soviet history is far from unsullied. The Baltic states and Poland have a point when they argue that the end of the Second World War signified the beginning of almost half a century of Soviet occupation.

Nor, as some of Britain's most eminent historians such as Anthony Beevor have documented, was the behaviour of the victorious Red Army above reproach. Atrocities were perpetrated and German women were raped by a revenge- hungry army on a terrifying scale.

But all that should not prevent us from recognising the Red Army's immense contribution, a contribution that dwarfs that of Britain and, indeed, the United States. The Soviet Union lost more soldiers and civilians during the war than any other country.

It is estimated that between 25 and 30 million died and that the Red Army did more of the fighting than anyone else, single-handedly destroying 80 per cent of the German army. If you were to compile a list of the war's most significant battles, many of them would have been fought and won by the Soviets, notably the Battle of Stalingrad which reached its bloody culmination in 1943 and is widely regarded as one of the key turning-points in the entire conflict.

As historian Norman Davies wrote recently, the Red Army's Marshal Rokossovsky destroyed a collection of Wehrmacht divisions equivalent to the entire German deployment on the western front in one single operation in 1944. To Stalin's delight the Red Army was also the first to reach Berlin.