Julia Ioffe: An Awkward Celebration in Moscow
[Julia Ioffe is a writer living in Moscow.]
On Victory Day in Moscow, the city government closed off the main thoroughfares of the city and marched tanks and artillery through the streets. Nearly a million Russians packed in to see the old T-34s and the impossibly massive Iskander missiles trundle past. MiGs and helicopter gunships roared overhead. It was sunny, it was hot; people were happy, orderly. They waved Russian flags and cheered and whistled. The soldiers in the tanks waved back and blew kisses. One of them snapped pictures with his phone.
And then came the armored personnel vehicle carrying the red banner of Lenin. It rolled right past a kid in the crowd waving the old Soviet flag, and it made two pensioners very happy. "We want the Soviet Union to come back," one of them growled at me. She said she was a member of the communist party -- the old one, not the current not-really-communist one. "The former republics are finally realizing what they've gotten themselves into, that they can't live without Russia."
It's hard to capture the strangeness, the confusion of this holiday -- especially this year, when it seems more confused than ever. This is partly because Russian foreign policy, at least on the surface, has shifted under President Dmitry Medvedev, taking a more conciliatory tone toward the West. Whereas parades during Vladimir Putin's presidency had more of a menacing we're-back quality, this parade felt different. For the first time ever, the Kremlin invited British, French, and U.S. troops to march across the Red Square along with soldiers from Russia and the former Soviet Union. (It promptly brought anti-NATO demonstrators into the streets.)
But Medvedev himself was still trying to have it both ways, emphasizing on Sunday morning -- correctly but pointedly -- that "the Soviet Union took the brunt of the fascist attack." And that points to the real bizarreness at the heart of May 9: Its Putin-era elevation to a founding myth of Russian society is starting to run up against a tentative reassessment of the actual facts behind the legend. Medvedev's declaration in his speech that "the war made us a strong nation" rubs up against an anxiety, expressed in new films commemorating the day, that the Russian victory was not quite as pure as the last 65 years of celebrations would have you think.
On May 9, in Moscow, you'd find it easy to assume that Russia defeated Hitler single-handedly in glorious battle. All over the city, posters and billboards declaring victory gave the war's dates the way Soviet and Russian textbooks always had: 1941-1945. It is not World War II, it is the Great Fatherland War, a defensive liberation struggle against an invader. (Russia and its Soviet predecessor have had a hard time acknowledging that they were Hitler's allies for the war's other two years, from 1939 to 1941.) In the Russian mind, the war in Japan had little to do with it; D-Day and the second front, most Russians say (with good reason -- the West certainly did not rush to help the Soviets), was too little, too late. Correspondingly, the British and the Americans are not the Allies, as we know them, but members of the "anti-fascist coalition," a sterile title that implies not partnership but a joint-stock company in which the Russians are the majority stakeholder.
Which is fair. Most of World War II was fought on Soviet territory, and Soviet casualties make up nearly half the war's total. The German invasion ravaged the Soviet Union's most populous, fertile, and industrialized territory. The country lost 170 towns, 17,000 villages, and nearly 12 percent of its population. Everyone has veterans and war dead in the family -- Vladimir Putin lost an older brother he never knew -- and it remains a deeply, genuinely personal Russian holiday.
But it hasn't been one for very long. After the first Victory Day parade rumbled through a rainy Red Square on June 24, 1945, there wasn't another one for 20 years. Stalin, anxious about the growing political capital of the victorious Marshall Zhukov and his fellow generals, wanted to keep the attention they got to a minimum. He shipped Soviet POWs to Siberian camps as traitors and collaborators. Bars popular with returning soldiers, called the Blue Danubes, were shut down because congregating veterans were a threat. Those who were crippled in combat were moved en masse out of Moscow and St. Petersburg because they were unsightly. May 9, now part of a jubilant three-day holiday weekend, was a regular working day until 1965...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
On Victory Day in Moscow, the city government closed off the main thoroughfares of the city and marched tanks and artillery through the streets. Nearly a million Russians packed in to see the old T-34s and the impossibly massive Iskander missiles trundle past. MiGs and helicopter gunships roared overhead. It was sunny, it was hot; people were happy, orderly. They waved Russian flags and cheered and whistled. The soldiers in the tanks waved back and blew kisses. One of them snapped pictures with his phone.
And then came the armored personnel vehicle carrying the red banner of Lenin. It rolled right past a kid in the crowd waving the old Soviet flag, and it made two pensioners very happy. "We want the Soviet Union to come back," one of them growled at me. She said she was a member of the communist party -- the old one, not the current not-really-communist one. "The former republics are finally realizing what they've gotten themselves into, that they can't live without Russia."
It's hard to capture the strangeness, the confusion of this holiday -- especially this year, when it seems more confused than ever. This is partly because Russian foreign policy, at least on the surface, has shifted under President Dmitry Medvedev, taking a more conciliatory tone toward the West. Whereas parades during Vladimir Putin's presidency had more of a menacing we're-back quality, this parade felt different. For the first time ever, the Kremlin invited British, French, and U.S. troops to march across the Red Square along with soldiers from Russia and the former Soviet Union. (It promptly brought anti-NATO demonstrators into the streets.)
But Medvedev himself was still trying to have it both ways, emphasizing on Sunday morning -- correctly but pointedly -- that "the Soviet Union took the brunt of the fascist attack." And that points to the real bizarreness at the heart of May 9: Its Putin-era elevation to a founding myth of Russian society is starting to run up against a tentative reassessment of the actual facts behind the legend. Medvedev's declaration in his speech that "the war made us a strong nation" rubs up against an anxiety, expressed in new films commemorating the day, that the Russian victory was not quite as pure as the last 65 years of celebrations would have you think.
On May 9, in Moscow, you'd find it easy to assume that Russia defeated Hitler single-handedly in glorious battle. All over the city, posters and billboards declaring victory gave the war's dates the way Soviet and Russian textbooks always had: 1941-1945. It is not World War II, it is the Great Fatherland War, a defensive liberation struggle against an invader. (Russia and its Soviet predecessor have had a hard time acknowledging that they were Hitler's allies for the war's other two years, from 1939 to 1941.) In the Russian mind, the war in Japan had little to do with it; D-Day and the second front, most Russians say (with good reason -- the West certainly did not rush to help the Soviets), was too little, too late. Correspondingly, the British and the Americans are not the Allies, as we know them, but members of the "anti-fascist coalition," a sterile title that implies not partnership but a joint-stock company in which the Russians are the majority stakeholder.
Which is fair. Most of World War II was fought on Soviet territory, and Soviet casualties make up nearly half the war's total. The German invasion ravaged the Soviet Union's most populous, fertile, and industrialized territory. The country lost 170 towns, 17,000 villages, and nearly 12 percent of its population. Everyone has veterans and war dead in the family -- Vladimir Putin lost an older brother he never knew -- and it remains a deeply, genuinely personal Russian holiday.
But it hasn't been one for very long. After the first Victory Day parade rumbled through a rainy Red Square on June 24, 1945, there wasn't another one for 20 years. Stalin, anxious about the growing political capital of the victorious Marshall Zhukov and his fellow generals, wanted to keep the attention they got to a minimum. He shipped Soviet POWs to Siberian camps as traitors and collaborators. Bars popular with returning soldiers, called the Blue Danubes, were shut down because congregating veterans were a threat. Those who were crippled in combat were moved en masse out of Moscow and St. Petersburg because they were unsightly. May 9, now part of a jubilant three-day holiday weekend, was a regular working day until 1965...