China and Russia are commemorating the 80th anniversary of “their” victory in World War II. In so doing, the two autocracies display a historical revisionism that would inspire their dictatorial forebears, Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin.

China held a massive military parade on Wednesday to celebrate the surrender of Imperial Japan and the end of World War II. Beijing also used the opportunity to showcase its burgeoning military power. But Beijing wanted to highlight its growing anti-Western axis. Accordingly, China’s President, Xi Jinping, invited two dozen foreign leaders and dignitaries. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were among them. 

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But the ceremonies also provide insight into how dictatorships operate. Truth is intolerable to autocracies, which thrive off coercion and misinformation. Indeed, the entire commemoration was predicated on lies and omissions. Because the actual truth is that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t defeat Imperial Japan. And while the Soviet Union played an essential role in the fight against Nazism, enduring unimaginable losses on the battlefield, it also enabled Adolf Hitler’s Germany at the start of the war, signing deals with the German dictator to carve up Europe.

Indeed, the Soviet Union began arming Germany even before Hitler came to power. In 1922, the communist dictatorship, then led by Vladimir Lenin, inked the Treaty of Rapallo with the Weimar Republic, Imperial Germany’s successor. The armistice terms of World War I placed heavy restrictions on German rearmament. The Soviets provided a workaround, offering the use of land for training in exchange for military and technical expertise for the newly formed Red Army. German personnel were provided with training and bases for tanks and aircraft. 

As the historian Ian Johnson observed: “While the Soviet-German military cooperation between 1922 and 1933 is often forgotten, it had a decisive impact on the origins and outbreak of World War II.” The two states, he noted, “built a network of laboratories, workshops, and testing grounds in which they developed what became the major weapons systems of World War II. Without the technical results of this cooperation, Hitler would have been unable to launch his wars of conquest.” 

Hitler ended the cooperation when he came to power in 1933. But in 1938, the two dictatorships inked the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression, fatefully agreeing to establish spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. 

The pact allowed Hitler to launch his invasion of Poland in early September 1939, inaugurating World War II in the West. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland to take its share of the spoils. But in June 1941, Hitler turned on his onetime ally, invading the Soviet Union. The Soviets were forced to contend with an opponent that they had been enabling for years. Fighting on the Eastern Front was savage, and the Soviets lost an estimated 27 million people in the war.

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The Chinese Communist Party’s record is even more mixed. By the late 1930s, China had been mired in internecine conflict for years, with Chinese Communist forces at war with the Chinese Nationalists, led by Kuomintang party head Chiang Kai-shek. While the two technically called a truce to fight the invading Imperial Japanese army, it was Chiang’s forces that did most of the fighting — and the dying. This situation served the strategic aims of CCP leaders such as Mao Zedong. By war’s end, Chiang’s army was depleted — a fact that made the CCP’s victory possible when the civil war resumed.

The considerable sacrifices of the Russian and Chinese people during World War II shouldn’t be forgotten. But history shouldn’t be rewritten either. Then, as now, anti-Western dictatorships help each other —until they don’t.

The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.