The decisive contribution of its armed forces to the overall Allied victory was underrated in the West during the Cold War. The Soviet nuclear program, for example, began in 1942. The Soviet effort, and particularly the dramatic reversal of fortunes that occurred in 19, turned a “pariah state” experimenting with a new economic and political system into the successful exponent of the same, and into a space-bound superpower with the revived trappings of its imperial past. On 9 August 1945 the Soviet Union attacked the Japanese Army in Manchuria, which capitulated eight days later. After the defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union entered the Pacific War, which had begun with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Final Soviet battlefield losses were 8.7 million. Even after the Western Allies got ashore in Europe, the Soviet Union was still engaging the majority of German forces. That war, the “War on the Eastern Front,” is known in the Soviet Union and Russia as Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna-the “Great Patriotic War.” It lasted for 1,418 days, and between twenty-six and twenty-seven million Soviet people, mostly civilians, died. Overnight, the Soviet Union became an ally of Britain and a recipient of Lend-Lease aid from the United States. The third war, arguably the largest single component of World War II, began on 22 June 1941, when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. The second war did not involve the Soviet Union and was about control of the Mediterranean.
Hitler determined to conquer the country, in part, to seize its natural resources. However, the Soviet Union expected more technological aid from Germany than it was prepared to give.
During this time it also fought the 1939–1940 “Winter War” with Finland and, in 1940, occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and what is now Moldova. Furthermore, the Soviet Union gave Germany access to the Far East, and especially rubber, which was brought through Siberia. Until 22 June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union provided Nazi Germany with large quantities of strategic raw materials.
Although the Germans did most of the fighting in Poland, the Soviet Union occupied the eastern part.
When World War II started, the Soviet Union was effectively an ally of Nazi Germany in a relatively conventional European interstate war. The Soviet Union in World War II is the story of several wars.
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