Day of Victory

May 9, 1945 – War in Europe ends

One of the most vivid memories from my childhood dates to a May 9th. I was watching television, which tells me that it must have been after 1964 – my parents bought a television in 1964 to watch the Tokyo Olympics, the first Olympics to be broadcast in our country.

There was a parade on the screen. My parents and grandparents were not particularly looking at the screen, which surprised me, since what was being shown struck me as highly entertaining. Soldiers stood in formation on Red Square. Silence reigned. A man in uniform was riding in an open car. He would stop before one group and then another. “Hail, Tankman Comrades!” “Good health to you, Comrade Marshal!” “I congratulate you on Victory Day!” “Hurray!”

At least that is how I remember it.

I haven’t watched any parades in a long time, not for lack of opportunity. This particular parade must have taken place in 1965, when May 9 was first made into a national holiday (a day off, in other words) and tanks and missiles began to be paraded across Red Square as party leaders displayed themselves before the toiling masses from atop Lenin’s Mausoleum. It seemed wonderful, fun, and interesting. Spring had arrived, it was warm, it was a holiday, and everyone was in a great mood.

Today, looking back from an entirely different era, I understand that there was a reason that this holiday, which everyone loves so much, was introduced specifically in 1965.

The first Victory Parade took place on Red Square on June 24, 1945. Every Russian has seen the footage dozens of times showing soldiers in gloves (to protect themselves from touching Nazi filth) piling captured standards at the foot of the Mausoleum. Marshal Zhukov, who presided over the parade, was rarely shown (when I was growing up he was almost always out of favor).

Stalin, who stood atop the mausoleum as the pile of standards grew, was also often edited out of the footage. Nevertheless, the Victory Parade, however disturbing it might sound today, was not only a celebration of the end of the war, but a celebration of Stalin. This helped to feed a myth that is incredibly widely believed to this day and is generally expressed like this: “Well, sure, there was repression, but Stalin won the war.”

The bloody tyrant who spent the 1930s killing off his most talented military officers and for the first twelve days after the German invasion was in a state of incapacitated shock, but who finally rallied only to commit one blunder after another at the cost of countless lives, was hailed as our country’s savior. The image of Stalin standing on the Mausoleum, looking down at Hitler’s vanquished standards, was a source and symbol of this myth. After 1945, May 9 went back to being a regular work day. People recalled the end of the war, but otherwise went about their business.

By 1965, when we again began to celebrate Victory Day, Stalin – now dead some twelve years and knocked off his pedestal by Khrushchev and his Secret Speech – was not often mentioned. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the subtle, “creeping” rehabilitation of Stalin that took place after Khrushchev’s 1964 overthrow relied heavily on a depiction of the war fed to us by wartime generals, who produced torrents of memoirs around that time, and by filmmakers, who created the “epic” film series Liberation («Освобождение», 1970-1971), which portrayed Stalin, played by Bukhuti Zakariadze, giving the very sage counsel the troops needed to push forward.

It was sad to see this joyous holiday, Victory Day, serving to promote Stalin’s image.

But at the same time, something interesting began to happen: with time, this holiday began to be shaped by ordinary people. In Moscow, for instance, people started gathering in the square in front of the Bolshoi Theater or in Gorky Park – spontaneously, without being told where to go or what to do – hoping to reconnect with fellow veterans or long-lost friends, hoping to find anyone who knew a lost loved one. It became a personal, very human holiday. When David Tukhmanov wrote his song about “this holiday with tears in our eyes,” that image was shamelessly exploited, but it was true. The moment of silence we shared through our radios and television sets to some extent truly unified the entire country in collective grief.

For a time, during perestroika, the Victory Day parades were suspended, which helped along the trend of making this a day for personal connection and reflection, a moment of remembrance.

But within a decade, the state had reinvigorated efforts (that continue to this day) to appropriate the holiday for itself. The parades resumed in 1995. Our country cannot adequately fund hospitals or schools, yet each year the Victory Day parade becomes more extravagant. This extravagance begins to seem even more out of proportion against the backdrop of stories about the few surviving veterans of the Great Patriotic War and the meager gifts bestowed upon them. Meanwhile, at Victory Day celebrations, the name of Stalin rings out ever louder and is met with ovations.

In recent years, May 9 has been celebrated with Kremlin-inspired flash mobs, featuring patriotic wartime songs. In other highly orchestrated, “spontaneous” stunts, people hand out orange and black striped ribbons – the same ribbons from which hung the medal “For Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” awarded to everyone who fought in the war. People started decorating themselves with these “George ribbons” («георгиевские ленточки» – so named because they were also used for the tsarist era Cross of St. George), not pausing to wonder about the propriety of wearing a ribbon that symbolized one of Russia’s most revered medals on their purse, their car, their jeans. Signs with the nice little rhyme «Спасибо деду за победу» (Thanks for the victory, Grandpa) appeared on the windows of Mercedes and BMWs, and nobody seems to notice the irony.

Discussion of which world leaders will come to Moscow to celebrate this May’s seventieth anniversary of the European war’s conclusion and which will stay away is being treated in the media as a matter of national importance.

On May 9, the Victory Park on Poklonnaya Hill, a rather tasteless exhibition of military hardware and memorials set atop one of Moscow’s highest summits, is besieged by thousands of people who do not seem to have a clear understanding of why they have come: is it to remember the dead or to register their devotion to the state and its leader?

The state is once again taking Victory Day away from the people. But the pain of loss that still lives in countless families is too great. This is why I believe that, in a few years, Victory Day will again become a holiday of the people. Stalin did not win the war; the war was won despite him. I hope that someday this is what people will talk about on May 9.