War witness: They faced it. They fought it.
WWII through the eyes of veterans.
The Soviet participants had a key part in the Second World War, and going through the interviews and documents on this site, you will have an opportunity to see it for yourself.
In honor of the 65th anniversary of the Soviet Union´s victory in the Great Patriotic War over Nazi Germany in 1945, RT has launched the project "War witness". Rare data, which has never been exposed to the public before, has been collected by RT staff.
Here you can find interviews with more than a hundred witnesses of the war from different countries. There is also a section that features short episodes specially shot for the big date and aired on RT news channel, as well as full-length interviews that can be found only on this site.
Films about the war shot by the RT crew are also available.
In another section one can find news and on-air interviews related to the victory anniversary of May 9 that have been broadcast on RT. Also, for those who want to find more on how the war progressed, there is a brief chronology of WWII and of the Soviet Union´s participation in it, as well as descriptions of the landmark battles with interactive maps.
For discussions and exchanges of views, you're welcome to visit our forum.
Luckily, for most of those reading this text, "war" is only a word. A word from school lectures, history books, newspaper articles; something they would never want to happen to them in life.
But there are those for whom war was a reality. They had no choice. There was only one thing for them to do – go to that war and defend their countries. They did it for people like us to have "war" as nothing more than part of history. They fought so that you could now be reading these words. For them the war was real, and now it is hard and painful for them to remember.
For the Soviet Union, World War II was known as the Great Patriotic War. It was truly patriotic, as the Soviet people were fighting on their own land trying to save their homeland and the whole world from the terrible menace that was the Nazis. And, as we know, they did it, having won that war and forced Nazi Germany capitulate.
65 years after the victory, some of those who brought it to us agreed to share their memories – not for us to savor the inhuman and shocking atrocities of that time, nor to scavenge for naturalistic descriptions of their life, but to try and grasp at least a tiny part of meaning of what the word "war" means for those who took part in it. For us to do all we can never to let it happen again, so that no other person has to go though what those people had to overcome.