Rachel is pointing out that the Soviets did defeat the Nazis

[Igel]

51. We are special.

Most Russians aren't aware of the role that the US and Britain or any other country played in WWII.

The usual narrative is that we sat it out until it was obvious that Stalin was going to win the war, then we got back into just to keep Russia in check instead of having its borders at the English Channel and a naval base on Sicily and Sardinia.

In fact, sometimes the war is a Western plot, with the West conspiring with Hitler. And that scurrilous slander about the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty being either (a) a fantasy and utterly denied or (b) something that Stalin had to do to buy time so that when Hitler did invade, the USSR forces would be, as they are said to have been until this bit of creative prose, in top form.

Even lend-lease vanished. From history and literature. On rare occasion if you read an old war novel you'll run into Russian soldiers eaten American tushenka, canned meat (Spam by any other name ...). Or they're using an out-of-place weapon. By "old" I mean "printed a long time ago," not "written a long time ago." If you compare those print runs with print runs a few years later or from last year you find that the tushenka is no longer American, and any identifier that the weapon wasn't a TT or of Soviet make eliminated.

They allowed Bulgakov and Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Klebnikov, even Voinovich and those more vitriolic towards the Soviet state to be printed. All that formerly anti-Soviet stuff was allowed out, even if it is frowned upon at times now. The archives were opened for a while, even if they're again until tight seal--even for studying medieval records you need special permissions and visas.

But the sanctity and pure Russianness of the Soviet war effort was never allowed to lapse, and the formerly American tushenka once stripped of its ethnicity never again reverted to being American.

I've even read that the US and Britain were having troubles in the Pacific against a victorious Japan and the real reason for the Japanese surrender was the realization that with the USSR's entry into the war they would finally be forced to retreat and would lose. Until then, the Japanese were winning. (It goes back to a bit of trauma and humiliation suffered in 1905, of course. And more Russian triumphalism.) In other words, Russians know less about the US/British/Commonwealth role in the Pacific theatre than the Americans know about the Australian war effort.