… Even though it really stank to be one during WWII.

The first time [Russia] betrayed [her soldiers] was on the battlefield, through ineptitude — when the government, so beloved by the Motherland, did everything it could to lose the war: destroyed the lines of fortifications, set up the whole air force for annihilation; dismantled the tanks and artillery; removed the effective generals; and forbade the armies to resist. And the war prisoners were the men whose bodies took the blow and stopped the Wehrmacht.

The second time they were heartlessly betrayed by the Motherland was when she abandoned them to die in captivity [as prisoners of war of the Germans].

And the third time they were unscrupulously betrayed was when, with motherly love, she coaxed them to return home, with such phrases as “The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland calls you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers.

Very few of the [Russian] war prisoners returned across the Soviet border as free men, and if one happened to get through by accident because of the prevailing chaos, he was seized later on, even as late as 1946 or 1947. Some were arrested at assembly points in Germany. Others weren’t arrested openly right away but were transported from the border in freight cars, under convoy, to one of the numerous Identification and Screening Camps scattered throughout the country. … As always, the interrogation [at these camps] began with the hypothesis that you were obviously guilty. And you, without going outside the barbed wire, had to prove that you were not guilty. Your only available means to this end was to rely on witnesses who were exactly the same kind of POWs as you. Obviously they might not have turned up in your screening camp; they might, in fact, be at the other end of the country; in that case, the Security Officers would send off inquiries, and you yourself would be questioned as a witness in some other case. True, it might take a year or two before your fate was resolved, but after all, the Motherland was losing nothing in the process. You were out mining coal every day.

“Oh, if only I had known!” That was the refrain in the prison cells that spring. If I had only known that this was how I would be greeted! That they would deceive me so! That this would be my fate! Would I have really returned to my Motherland? Not for anything!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, abridged, from pp. 98 – 100

Contrast this to the famous photograph of an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day.