Victory Day

Neil MacFarquhar has an article in The New York Times about the end of World War Two in Russia:

The Russian version of Hitler’s defeat emphasizes the enormous, unrivaled sacrifices made by the Soviets to end World War Two, so the country has long staged a colossal military parade every 9 May to recognize Victory Day as the most important event in Russian history.
The government of President Vladimir V. Putin has pledged to make the seventieth anniversary celebration the biggest ever. Yet where Russia had also used the day to acknowledge the toppling of Hitler as the high point of its cooperation with the West, this year’s version seems to emphasize their differences.
Putin presided over a thumping parade with sixteen thousand troops marching across Red Square (photo), more than a hundred aircraft streaming overhead, and two hundred armored vehicles rumbling through.
The armaments mixed historical weapons with highlights from the Kremlin’s sweeping military modernization program, including three updated Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as the Armata T-14, a new generation of battle tank making its public debut.
Since Putin has recast what he calls the country’s most important holiday to celebrate the might of the Russian state, the days are over when President George W. Bush and other Western leaders joined Putin on the bleachers along the Kremlin walls.
The nationalistic fervor surrounding the parade and the tensions over the Ukraine mean that the United States and most Western countries will be represented only by their ambassadors. China and India are the only major powers sending their leaders, among about 25 heads of state expected to attend, emphasizing Russia’s quest for friends in Asia. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is scheduled to come to lay a wreath at a memorial for the war dead.
Putin uses Victory Day, which marks the end of the war in Europe, to try to demonstrate that Russia remains a formidable contender, despite its lost superpower status, and to promulgate the idea that the vast country is a besieged fortress surrounded by enemies. Asked recently about the absence of important Western guests, he expressed indifference but could not resist a swipe at the United States. “Some simply do not want to come, but some are not being allowed to come by the ‘Washington apparatchiks,’ who say, ‘No way'", Putin said during his nationally televised call-in show last month. “Although many would like to come.”
Russia lost nearly thirty million people in the war, more than any other country. Because virtually every family lost someone, Russians revere the day as a tribute to fallen relatives.
Zakhar Prilepin, a bad-boy novelist with a strong nationalistic streak, said that he was typical of many Russians, in that he was raised with a tangible sense of the magnitude of the conflict, because both his grandfathers fought. He struggles to keep that tactile quality alive for his own children, he said in an interview. “This is not simply a day in history for me, but an event in the life of my family,” he said. When he was growing up, every holiday feast began with a toast about the war, he said, and all who were present were conscious that they owed their lives to the fact that their grandparents survived. Prilepin said he could recall the scar tissue from war wounds on one grandfather’s shoulder and palm, and could visualize the grueling trek one grandmother made at the age of fourteen across the war-ravaged landscape to the relative safety of the Russian city of Voronezh from the then-German-occupied Ukraine. Memorial days in Europe lack the same visceral feeling, he said. “The difference,” he said, “is that here in this country it affected everybody.”
Russian historians argue about Victory Day, with some maintaining that the Soviet Union resurrected the holiday in 1965 to try to gloss over the fact that Communism was stagnating with no clear future vision. Some accuse Putin of doing the same, trying to build legitimacy on history rather than elections.
“For the authority, and for some parts of Russian society, it is important to represent history as a long train of beautiful events, one victory following another,” said Arseny B. Roginsky, the director of Memorial, an organization founded to document Stalin’s crimes. Memorial and others try to show both the good and the “terrible things”, he said.
Those who try to oppose the glorified version of Russia, including the new Ukrainian government, are often smeared with the “fascist” label.
When gay rights activists participated in a May Day parade in St. Petersburg this month, for example, Vitaly V. Milonov, the city councilman behind a law banning “gay propaganda” aimed at children, likened the activists to the Nazi “fascists” who besieged St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) during the war. “Leningrad stood up to the fascists for nine hundred days, and now here they are walking quietly through our streets,” he was quoted as saying by the news website Meduza.io.
Russians’ sense of grievance over the war extends to the entire Western attitude toward the war, which they say consistently understates the magnitude of the Russian role. In his brief remarks on Red Square during last year’s parade, for example, Putin said that it was Russia that “saved Europe from slavery”.
The tension is partly rooted in different interpretations of the war by countries that fell under Soviet control, like Poland or the Baltic States. They emphasize that Stalin initially forged the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact (a stalling tactic by the Russians, to buy time to rebuild their forces) with Germany in 1939 to divide Eastern Europe, and that their “liberation” by the Red Army led to a long Russian occupation.
Russian support for separatists fighting in the Ukraine has resurrected old fears about Moscow. The Kremlin, in turn, has accused its immediate neighbors of seeking to undermine Russia’s security by bringing NATO forces to its very borders.
The Ukraine infuriated Moscow anew by replacing the Soviet-inspired celebrations this year. Although the Ukraine will hold parades on 9 May to honor war veterans, President Petro O. Poroshenko signed a law last month designating 8 May their national holiday, aligning the Ukrainian calendar with Europe, and also, like Europe, making the poppy the holiday symbol.
Poland has also jabbed at the Kremlin, twice drawing sharp rebukes for remarks this year by its senior officials about Victory Day. President Bronislaw Komorowski described the 9 May parade in Moscow as a “demonstration of force” that illustrated global instability. The foreign minister, Grzegorz Schetyna, said that the end of World War Two should not be celebrated in Russia, because it was among the countries where it originated, given the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Officially, Russia rejects any comparison between the two despots. Putin recently called such comparisons “groundless”, while acknowledging the “ugly nature of the Stalin regime”.
Vladimir Medinsky, the culture minister, said in a speech commemorating Victory Day that trying to discuss such interpretations of history was like “arguing with crazy people”. The civilized world exists only because Russia saved it in 1945, he said, emphasizing that it was time for Russians to be proud of their own, unique history.
Professor Mariusz Sielski, a Polish sociologist teaching in Russia who specializes in historical memory, said that the Kremlin was trying to transform the World War Two victory into a triumph of the Russian state, and that it wants other countries to acknowledge that version. “Russia is trying to create a utopia based on past achievements,” he said.
Roginsky of Memorial said that the Kremlin exploits the large celebration to try to strengthen the nationalistic, patriotic version of history to sell the idea that Russians consolidated themselves around the Stalin government in order to win. “They mean that, in order to win, it is always necessary to consolidate around the authority,” he said. “It was true yesterday, it was true today, and it will be true tomorrow. The fight for history is also the fight for the present day.”

Rico says the Russians lost a lot of people, and did the hard word of defeating the Germans.