Earlier we waited for May 9 with complex feelings of sadness, happiness, and gratitude to the winners.
But this year for the first time many of us waited for this day with trepidation if not horror.
For the last few weeks there were a lot of theories that Putin might announce official warfare with Ukraine during his speech on the parade or announce annexation of DNR and LNR,
or – this option was the most expected – announce nation-wide or partial mobilization.
I told you earlier that it was not likely and it was really hard to make a mistake here.
We all know Putin for more than two decades, and we can say for sure – he is not a man of grand political gestures.
You can’t imagine Putin saying something to the crowd from the tank or turning the plane around in the Atlantic.
Putin has never done anything so theatrically with loud announcements from the stand.
On the contrary, his style is pretending nothing has happened and then silently signing some mysterious document in his office
which is called “On measures to increase the amount of military people who serve under the contract”.
So that you won’t be able to understand anything from it and he himself could avoid any responsibility.
Anyway, there were no serious announcements in his speech on the parade.
The whole speech was not dedicated to the Great Patriotic War but to the wicked plots of NATO which attacked courageous Russian army by the hands of the Ukrainian Nazis.
It was the same bundle of propagandist cliches about their preventive attack to avoid attacking Donbas and Crimea.
On Victory Day, which happened not only because of Russia, and not even just because of the USSR – it was the effort of the whole of humanity and not over Germany
but over the idea of Nazism – those speculations of an elderly person who lost connection with the reality sounded as wild as ever.
What we can say about Putin’s speech is that it was another self-revealing statement that everything is going on according to the plan.
Yes, that’s what people say when everything is according to the plan – they keep insisting on it.
As soon as there is nothing to discuss in his speech it’s time for us to talk about the place of the Victory Day in our regime.
History is the only source of ideology and traditional legitimacy.
Most political regimes use it – either hopeless dictators or liberal democracies.
We are not good with history in Russia. Russia itself is 40 years old. It’s been created in front of not-so-old people like me.
Our current government and propaganda hate contemporary Russia's history.
For them it’s a story of a downfall.
It’s a story when a great empire which possessed half of the world drowned in chaos and cut itself to this nonsense size (of modern Russian Federation) because of deceit and treachery.
The 90s, the period when the new Russian government was born, was officially announced as a stagnation period which didn’t end with our death just because of a happy event –
Putin came to power.
No tradition, no memorable day, no hero of that time is accepted or promoted on the official level.
Perestroika, the August coup of 1991, the confrontation of the President and the Supreme Soviet in 1993, privatization, the presidential elections drama in 1996,
the default in 1998 – all that is covered by thick fog of mystery for our country citizens who are not specially interested in this topic.
And if someone does talk about it, they tell such outrageous tales like it’s the Middle Ages
we are talking about and we have one or two written sources and not the events most of the citizens witnessed.
At this point I’d like to remind you that I’ve got a book. Me and our editorial team published it – “The History of Contemporary Russia”.
It’s the whole period our current government is trying to forget. It’s very well depicted in pictures and, of course, in the text.
Recently, we’ve published a small number of copies and it was sold in a half of a day. And now we are printing a larger amount.
Of course, it won’t be sent to you tomorrow if you order it right now, but you will surely get it in a month, I think
when the book comes out from the printing house if everything is fine. So, you can order it now. Let’s proceed.
A tiny and almost extinguished part of people can remember both big days in the history of new Russia.
It’s just two faceless holidays in summer just accountants and HR managers know about.
Because new Russian history is short and it’s discredited on purpose.
Because Putin’s rule is not based on the continuation of history but on its denial.
The question is which history it is – the Soviet or the imperial one.
We are not good with imperial history.
The Soviet government severed all the previous traditions, and all previous history was depicted as one big caricature.
All those emperors, great princes, state councilors, valet de chambre, chamberlains – all that is so far away from us now like the Roman legions.
We can’t imagine how this society was built or how people lived.
There is nothing left from them – no traditions, mode of living, religion, or even national cuisine.
Any reference to that Russia looks like some caricature in the style of Nikita Mikhalkov’s “The Barber of Siberia”
with black caviar on the French brioche and a bear (there must be a bear).
The only history which is an acknowledged legacy is a Soviet one.
All the highest members of the Russian government are former middle-level Soviet officials.
They grew up under Soviet logic, they were nourished by it and they made a career in it.
Changes came when they were not really young, and they haven’t seen any other reality.
But it’s not possible to lean just on the Soviet past.
The Soviet project is a modernist one, it was born during the revolution, and the day of this revolution is its greatest memory day.
Streets, squares, cities, universities, and plants are named after terrorists and the Civil war heroes.
The whole history of the Soviet state birth, which was known by several generations, and all the heroes of the revolutionary movement look horrible
in the doctrine of the contemporary Russian government.
Because the whole Soviet mythology is pure extremism.
All of that is a work to disrupt the monarchy.
Underground printing offices, labor unions and strikes, meetings and demonstrations, murder attempts (often successful) of the government representatives,
foreign schools for new revolutionaries, robberies and assaults for the sake of revolution.
Criminal code comments could be based on thebiographies of the Fathers of the Soviet state (Lenin, Sverdlov, Stalin or Dzerzhinsky).
You can find there nice examples of extremist and terrorist attacks.
Yes, the ideology kept fading away while the USSR grew older but the film “The Elusive Avengers” wasn’t created in the 20s, it was created in 1967 under Brezhnev
and there was no ambiguity there – the Whites (monarchy supporters) are clearly the villains, and the Reds (the Bolshevists) are definitely the heroes.
That’s why they turn towards Soviet history just when it comes to social equality and tasty ice-cream.
November 7, 2017, was the 100th anniversary of the Great October Revolution and the Soviet government would have been preparing itself for this day for 10 years.
But this anniversary was completely forgotten, no state money was spent to shoot films about revolution and civil war.
Because they want to behave like the Romanovs and the General Secretaries at the same time.
They want to combine orthodoxy, autocracy and nationalism with the red (pioneer) necktie and the Komsomol membership card.
But those two regimes didn’t support each other, they denied each other.
The attempts to unite them and calculate some average number between them are always crazy.
Then we get the situation when the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the head of the Communist party exchange medals,
or someone calls Putin “Your High Excellency, Comrade Supreme Commander”, or they display the Soviet flag during the ceremony at the church at the place of execution of the royal family.
And there is no wonder, because the church in Yekaterinburg is on Tsarskaya Street which is crossed by Dzerzhinsky Street.
It's clear that all those attempts to unite the victims and the executioners, the monarchists, and the revolutionaries,
to make some common sequence of events, and unite them in one-century logic is just ridiculous.
The culmination of those experiments is a new emblem of Penza region which was approved recently.
According to the official description, “the shield of the emblem is crowned by the golden imperial crown and surrounded by the ribbon of the order of Lenin”.
And nobody cares that the authors would be in great trouble for such a combination of symbols both in Imperial and Soviet Russia.
This exploitation of Victory Day we’ve witnessed for the last 10-15 years didn’t come from good life.
The victory in the Great Patriotic War is the only pillar we can lean on without any ambiguity.
It’s because during World War II the whole developed world fought against obvious evil.
The Soviet Union – which was the same totalitarian and human-hating regime as Hitler’s Germany
and which was getting ready for the world’s war and made a lot of effort to start it and which was Hitler’s ally for the first two years of the war –
was very lucky in the end to find itself on the right side of the history, on the side of humanity.
It became one of the winning states and the architect of a new world’s order.
The whole country – quite literally – worked for this.
This war in one way or another touched every family – someone was fighting, someone was working hard in the rear, someone experienced a seizure or occupation.
May 9 is a very clear, uniting, governmental and at the same time family celebration.
It’s also clear and uniting for the whole former-Soviet area.
They started to use May 9 for political purposes almost immediately after Putin came to power.
From year to year, especially after 2005 – it was the 60th anniversary of Victory – this family celebration when people had a humble parade in the morning,
a concert of military songs in the afternoon and a film “Only “Old Men” Are Going Into Battle” in the evening – this quiet celebration started looking more and more like a carnival.
And the more witnesses of war died with time, the more expensive and pompous were the government’s celebrations of May 9.
A humble parade turned into a display of the newest samples of military equipment. Salutes and concerts are held everywhere, and all the pro-Kremlin artists are dressed in military tunics.
Another military blockbuster is filmed for the governmental money.
Those films are usually even more pompous and falsely dramatic than the worst Soviet examples.
Those movies also usually fail in cinemas.
That time, in the second half of 2000s, an ideological cleaning of war history began.
Gradually the only right doctrine emerged, and all the attempts to look beyond it were explained by “the wish to take our victory away from us”.
War memorials, any symbols of victory were acknowledged as new relics. And if you doubt it – even if you say something – it is a grave sin..
The whole religion was created around World War II.
But before the first half of 2010s all those processes were just inside Russia.
Inside Russia the idea that the USSR was the only one who fought against the whole world became strong and unquestionable.
And the whole world is foul and trying to rewrite history without giving us the honors.
In the beginning of 2010s, the Russian government took credit for the win in World War II to fight the opposition.
Since then, since winter protests of 2011 and 2012, this manner, which will blossom later, started –
the manner to call themselves the direct successors of the victory and all the opponents –
traitors, Vlasov’s supporters (Soviet military prisoners who changed their loyalty in favor of Wehrmacht), and fascists.
Since then, any government’s conflict with anyone is a new Kursk battle, no less, and white ribbons the protesters wear are the Polizei arm bands.
With Crimea annexation and the war in Donbas, this esthetics and the victory ownership became known to the public outside Russia too.
The official symbol of separatist forces in the East of Ukraine became the brown-and-black ribbon of St. George,
the Armed Forces of Ukraine were called the banderites, Ukrainian fascists and Nazis,
and the Russian propaganda is celebrating when it finds any swastika on the territory of the neighbor country or any symbol which could be attributed to Hitler’s regime.
That’s why Victory Day and its aesthetics will end badly in the whole former Soviet area.
It’s not a uniting holiday or common symbols anymore, it’s an ideology and excuse for external aggression.
Victory Day rhetoric and its symbols doesn’t mean what they meant initially.
They became symbols of hired guns and gangsters who come to a foreign land with weapons and call themselves a new power.
But why this Nazism topic, which is 80 years old now, was reborn to justify the intrusion into the neighboring country?
I’ve already explained the first reason – there is nothing else you can take as a uniting ideology.
The second reason – it’s an attempt to work for the public outside Russia. The war against Nazism is an important part of the world’s history.
Everybody knows what the words “fascist” and “a Nazi” mean. It is evil the whole world worked hard to defeat.
No one among the Western politicians and opinion leaders in their right mind could side with people who were called Hitler’s successors.
It looks like all of this makes sense – for inside and outside of Russia, to find its legitimacy and justify the aggression,
such a vivid image like the victory in the world’s war over absolute evil should work quite well. But there are a couple of problems.
First, the Russian government exploited this topic too hard. You can’t recall an event every minute when almost all its witnesses, leave alone participants, are already dead.
You can’t call everyone a Nazi or his allies. You can’t wrap all your political wishes with a St. George’s ribbon if you want people to take you seriously, of course.
You can’t wrap all your political wishes with a St. George’s ribbon if you want people to take you seriously, of course. Moreover, when it’s obvious for everyone that you speculate on this topic.
Second, during the years of aggression against Ukraine it’s not the aggressor who is associated with the celebration anymore, it’s all the way around – the celebration is associated with aggression.
St. George’s ribbon, the red banner, the Immortal Regiment initiative (people walk with their relatives’ photos who died during World War II), wherever it took place, were marked by the Kremlin.
Its carriers and participators express predictable views.
Third, one more problem is that the Russian government itself turned the Great Patriotic War into a new religion. And now, the established symbolics of this religion confronts new reality.
Who can bomb Kyiv in 4 o’clock in the morning? Just fascists can.
Who can launch missiles towards Odessa on May 9? Again, only fascists can.
After the parade Putin visited the Alexander’s Garden and put flowers on the memorials of the Ukrainian hero-cities.
But they received their titles for their fight against the fascists and Putin sent his army to attack those cities.
Z letter is a half of swastika, V letter was on the sleeve of the most respected members of National Socialist German Workers' Party.
It can’t help but cause unpleasant associations, and the further we go the harder it is to hide those associations.
When people are arrested by the police and fined for the banners like “Peace for the World”, it doesn’t go well together with the symbols of the Great Patriotic War.
The Brezhnev USSR, which is some kind of an example for our current political elite, advocated for the peace in the whole world and peaceful sky above our heads.
And it wasn’t just words – veterans and people who survived the horrors of the war were the majority of the population in the 60s and 70s.
They published newspapers, managed plants, and collective farms.
And Brezhnev himself despite all the myths about his great deeds on the “Small Land” smelled some powder in the front.
It didn’t stop the leaders of the Political Bureau from sending its troops to Prague or invading Afghanistan, but they took seriously the words “never ever again”
and avoided new worldwide conflicts though they had as many opportunities as Putin.
The whole Soviet propaganda was anti-war oriented. It is shown in songs, films and books. And now this cultural layer is in conflict with Putin’s militarism.
It’s clear that bureaucracy always tries to satisfy its chiefs.
That’s why we can see kindergarteners in military uniform and other signs of what we usually call “victorious hysteria”.
I’m absolutely sure that people want to celebrate this day for a very different reason. This wish gave birth to the Immortal Regiment which was designed initially as a completely anti-war event.
It was supposed to be an opposite to the roar of guns and the clatter of tanks’ caterpillars. The government took the Immortal Regiment and befouled it too.
But people’s wish to remember their relatives with love is still here. It’s not about running and shouting “We can repeat it!”.
Therefore, the celebration of May 9 will definitely change.
Once again Victory Day will be a memory day for the heroism of the whole humankind (not just the USSR) which won over human-hating ideology.
There will be no military parades, no speeches about NATO threats and the necessity to confront someone sending troops to another country.
Probably, it will happen even sooner than we expect it now. Perhaps, even next year there will be no tanks on the squares of our cities.
We should believe in the victory of our common sense and make it closer like our fellow citizens and other people all over the world did, making their win over Nazism closer.
Till tomorrow!