A visit to England these days is instructive. It's the 50th anniversary of V-E Day next Monday, and people seem to have little idea of quite how to deal with it. The prime minister, on the one hand, has encouraged the notion of two minutes' silence being observed nationwide for "silent personal tribute to those who sacrificed everything for our country and for the free world."


A Church of England primary school in the south of England, on the other hand, is intending to go ahead, not with a V-E Day celebration at all, but with a "peace party" instead. It has banned all reference on May 8 to either Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill because many of its pupils are from ethnic minorities and because the headmistress is afraid of offending her German music teacher.


Predictably enough, of course, her local Conservative MP is outraged. "It's appalling," he bellowed to the press. "They wouldn't be having a peace party at all if we hadn't defeated the Germans."


Well, there you are -- and there it is again: "We defeated the Germans," and in the process "made the world safe for freedom and democracy" and all those other good things. There's no thought at all in any of this about what the British actually went to war for -- which was over a guarantee of Polish independence -- or about whether in that sense the war was "won" by the British at all.


Nor is any mention made, of course, of the small matter of the contribution of the Soviet Union to what is seen as the crusade against Hitler, since fighting alongside a dictator regarded as being every bit as despotic as Hitler rather lowers the high moral tone.


If the British were to acknowledge that the Soviets (and Stalin) were the real victors of the War against Germany, they would have to acknowledge in the process that they in fact lost it, since Stalin quickly gobbled up the country they went to war for in the first place -- as well as whatever other territory he wanted -- while they floundered in hopeless penury and impotence, up to their eyeballs in debt to the United States.


The truth is, of course, that the Soviets did what neither the British nor the Americans could have done without them and which the British and French had failed to do: which was to smash the power of the Wehrmacht (at appalling cost in Soviet lives). Having effected that, it was plain that Stalin would sooner or later demand on their behalf everything that had been guaranteed by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact -- and more besides.


For many people, then, one tyranny was simply exchanged for another. A war which had been designed to restore the balance of power in Europe in fact further undermined it. Britain was forced to give away its scientific and technological secrets and to open up its empire to American trade. In the end, it simply lost its empire. The British victory, then, if there was one, was Pyrrhic indeed, to say the very least.


Nothing of what I've said is meant at all to diminish the heroism and sacrifice of the Soviet people, whose Russian successors celebrate Victory Day a day after Britain, on May 9. But here too, one could wish that a little reality would finally penetrate the myths and self-congratulatory mist of what has become a kind of national religion. Perhaps a place could one day be found in the collective memory of the war for such things as the pre-war execution of the Red Army's most experienced officers, and for Stalin's refusal to believe that the Germans were on the point of invading -- despite being told so from more than 80 sources.


Perhaps some mention could one day be made of his abandonment and later execution of Russian prisoners-of-war; of his Order 227, which pronounced that retreat, like desertion, meant an automatic sentence of death for any soldier and arrest for his family; of the Polish officers executed at Katyn; of the fate of the Tatars, the Chechens and the Bashkirs deported and killed on the trumped-up charge of collaboration with the Germans; of the murderous partisan war in the Ukraine; the treatment of the Baltics; ... perhaps I shouldn't go on.


The truth is that only in propaganda is war a heroic business. And perhaps John Major, in the end, is right. On May 8 and 9, we should observe a small silence in remembrance of those who gave their lives and limbs in the chaos of World War II, whatever the justice of their cause or its results. We are also allowed, I think -- it is only human -- to rejoice a little that it wasn't we who were duped.