“Harsh Soldiers of Justice”: The Red Army’s Liberation Mission in Europe 1944–1945 in Letters and Memoirs of Veterans

Abstract. The article examines the image of the Red Army’s Liberation Mission in Europe in 1944–1945, recorded in letters from the front and in post-war memoirs of participants in the Great Patriotic War in the editorial offices of Soviet newspapers. It shows how the Red Army soldiers met with residents of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, as well as their attitude towards the civilian population of defeated Germany. The article touches upon the problems of falsifying history, the policy of denigrating the USSR and Soviet troops in order to exclude them from the list of winners in World War II and revise its results, as well as the importance of desacralization of the Liberation mission and Victory over Nazism in the context of the information war of the West against modern Russia.

Keywords: The Great Patriotic War, the Liberation Mission of the Red Army, letters of veterans, historical memory, countering falsifications of history, information and
psychological warfare.