Sasha Lensky
The Spectator, May 3, 2022
“It’s clear Putin was planning this return to militarism for a long time.”
The Victory Day celebrations on 9 May have been, under Vladimir Putin, through a dramatic mutation. In my childhood, in the late eighties and early nineties, it was, apart from the New Year, by far the best holiday of the year. You normally spent it outside, in excellent May weather with lilac blooming all over and war songs – like ‘Victory Day’ or ‘Katyusha’ – booming out from loudspeakers in the streets. We children presented flowers to the veterans, whose chests were sparkling with medals and decorations.
This day connected three generations: the veterans, their kids (our parents) and the grandkids – us. We regarded our grandparents as the ultimate heroes, demigods even, whose self-sacrifice and courage had laid the groundwork for our very existence. The guiding emotion of the event was ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,’ and of course ‘Never again.’ No aggressive international agenda was ever promoted: surviving veterans would probably never allow it. A good part of the Soviet government were veterans themselves. They knew what a real war was like from actual experience, not from state-funded movies or propaganda cartoons.
But since Putin’s 2007 speech in Munich when he excoriated the US for its ‘hyper-use of force’ and Nato for expanding into Eastern Europe, everything has changed. The following Victory Day, for the first time since 1990, there was not sober remembrance but pulverising military might. The parade in Red Square was awash with military hardware: tanks, rocket launchers, jet fighters and strategic bombers – the gamut of modern murder machinery. This year, despite the calamitous war in Ukraine, will be no different: 11,000 servicemen and women plus 62 airplanes and 15 helicopters will take part. 9 May has become cult-of-war day, glorifying the nation as Ultimate Victors, while hinting at forthcoming revenge for the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as issuing dark threats to unnamed enemies (now, in 2022, they are no longer mere threats, the enemies no longer unnamed).
Sasha Lensky is a pseudonym of a Russian Citizen
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