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In Russia's cities on Monday morning, May 9, tanks and rocket trucks will "roar" through the main streets. Soldiers will march in central squares. Fighter jets will "roar" overhead.
Victory Day, when Russians celebrate the end point of what they still call the "Great Patriotic War" in 1945, has gradually become the focus of Vladimir Putin's conception of Russian identity over his two decades in power, the Guardian writes.
This year, as the Russian army's offensive in Ukraine continues, the day has particular resonance, with some expecting a dramatic announcement from Putin, either declaring victory in Ukraine or further raising the stakes.
Across Russia, some families will silently remember ancestors who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism or toast the few veterans still alive. Others will take a more pompous approach in line with official messages, perhaps adding a paper tower to their child's pram to make it look like a tank or writing "In Berlin" on their cars.
A more ominous slogan, which has gained popularity in recent years for Victory Day, is "We can do it again."
According to Russian state messages, this is exactly what Russia has been doing in Ukraine since the day of the invasion on February 24. From the beginning, the Kremlin has used the language and imagery of World War II to describe the attack on its neighboring country.
Putin, when he launched the invasion, described one of its main goals as the "denazification" of the country. In mid-March, when he addressed a flag-waving crowd at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium, the banners promised a "world without fascism". His soldiers often wear the orange and black St. George's ribbon, which has become the symbol of both the victory of World War II and the war in Ukraine.
Many see this talk of "denazification" as pure propaganda. Certainly, other convincing explanations have been offered for Russia's invasion of Ukraine: fear of NATO expansion, post-imperialist disdain for Ukrainian language and culture, and an isolated leader who spent the pandemic in a bunker contemplating his legacy.
But the rhetoric of victory and fighting the Nazis, which has gradually become more perverse over the past two decades, also plays a role.
Of course, it takes a particular mindset to see Russia's expansionist war, with its executions, targeting of civilians, camps and oppression of dissidents at home, and still conclude that the Ukrainians are the Nazis.
But already for some years, the cult of victory has been referred to by critics as "pobedobesie", a pejorative play on the Russian words for victory and obscurantism - "victorymania" is an approximate English translation (mania for victory).
As "pobedobesie" continued year after year, the phenomenon took on increasingly grotesque forms: schools put on performances in which children dressed up as Soviet soldiers - people posing as Nazi prisoners marched in the streets.
More and more opponents of modern Russia were branded as Nazis, neo-Nazis or Nazi collaborators.
These days, almost every current-events interview with a Russian official will contain references to World War II. The State Department makes almost daily tweets about the conflict. Putin's trusted hawk, Nikolai Patrushev, recently blamed the West for the rise of Hitler and suggested that today's Western world - and their Ukrainian "puppets" - are the true heirs of the Nazis.
"Don't be fooled by Anglo-Saxon decency. Even a tight-fitting suit cannot hide the hatred, anger and inhumanity," he said angrily.
In contemporary Russian accounts of the Soviet war effort, disturbing elements, such as the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 and the subsequent dismemberment of Europe, or the internal displacements of entire ethnic groups by Stalin's regime during the war, are silently ignored.
The image of the Nazis has also become increasingly blurred. Russian history textbooks say little about Hitler's policies, his rise to power, his anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. Instead, the main characteristic of the Nazis is that they attacked the Soviet Union.
By this logic, all those who threaten modern Russia are also Nazis...
This process has evolved gradually over the many years of Putin's rule. In 2000, Victory Day came just two days after Putin was sworn in as president for the first time. Addressing a group of veterans, Russia's new leader explained the significance of the historic victory: "Through you, we got used to being victorious. This is in our blood. It was not only responsible for military victories, but it will also help our generation in peaceful times, help us build a strong and prosperous country."
There was hardly a family in Russia that did not have relatives who fought in World War II, and the enormous losses suffered by the Soviet Union in its victory over Germany dwarfed the losses of all other allies combined. But the legacy of winning the war and Putin's speech that we were "victorious" was also a rare historical bright spot, for a population traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic chaos of the 1990s.
Of course, Russia is not the only country trapped in its narratives about World War II. Britain has a prime minister who is - currently - making a transparent and largely unsuccessful attempt to channel the spirit of Winston Churchill, while the Polish government is working frantically to minimize instances of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
Germany's reluctance to provide arms to Ukraine is widely attributed to a sense of historical guilt over the country's Nazi past and, in some parts of Ukraine, many people are indeed reluctant to consider the complicity of Ukrainian nationalists in wartime crimes.
But both the level of distortion and the pervasiveness of discourse in Russia are unmatched by any other country in modern Europe. Gradually, Victory Day is being celebrated less to remember the past and more to showcase the power of Putin's new Russia.
In 2008, the Victory Day parade featured heavy weaponry for the first time since the Soviet collapse. Three months later, Russia invaded Georgia.
The process accelerated in 2014, when Russia's propaganda machine began claiming it was fighting real Nazis in Ukraine, focusing on a minority of fighters who held far-right views.
The tragic death of 48 people, mostly pro-Russian, in a fire in Odessa in May 2014 was upgraded by Russian television from a crime to a premeditated fascist massacre.
When Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed puppet leader of Crimea, appeared on stage at a rally in Red Square immediately after the annexation of the peninsula, he wore the orange and black St. George's ribbon on his lapel instead of the Russian tricolor. He spoke of saving the peninsula from massacres by supposed hordes of Ukrainian fascists.
"Only Russians are capable of sacrificing themselves to save humanity, just as Jesus did," a priest said during a tour of the cathedral in 2020.
Next to the church is a brand new World War II museum. A tour guide named Victoria moved quickly through the halls, talking about Soviet feats and sacrifices. The immersive screens and loud bangs created an impressive effect, but the feeling was more like being inside a computer game than an educational experience.
There was an almost complete lack of context for both the nasty elements of the Stalinist political system and the Nazis. The Holocaust was barely mentioned, and when it was mentioned, it was subsumed into the general Soviet war effort.
"Hitler wanted to destroy two-thirds of all Slavs using concentration camps, the most famous of which was Auschwitz," Victoria said. Asked why there was no specific reference to the Holocaust, she replied, "We decided to put them all together, because we should not separate victims according to nationality."
By then, the concept of "Nazi" in Russian discourse had been stripped of all context, except for the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union. And with Russian television peddling an endless "diet" of scaremongering about Western plans against Russia, it is not a huge leap of imagination for many to transfer the same narrative to today's events.
Ivan Fyodorov, the mayor of Melitopol, said that when Russian soldiers kidnapped him in March, a few weeks after taking the city, one of the reasons they gave was that World War II veterans in Melitopol were disrespected and beaten.
Fyodorov said he tried to explain to his captors that there were 34 veterans living in Melitopol, that he knew them all personally and that he went with them to commemorate the victory and liberation of Melitopol on October 23.
"I could not understand them. They just kept repeating their 'mantras', they were like zombies," he said.
If Russia holds a victory parade in the charred ruins of Mariupol on Monday, many watching on TV at home may actually believe in the idea that their country "liberated" the city from the Ukrainian "Nazis" and their American supporters. But few outside the country will agree, even among those who were sympathetic to the Kremlin's messages before February.
For their part, Ukrainians responded to Russia's cries of "Nazis" by holding up a mirror.
Rather than deny the significance or importance of the Soviet victory, Zelensky sought to wrest control of its symbols and legends from the Russians, calling the current Kremlin the "ideological heirs of the Nazis."
Through his aggression, Putin helped create a unified national pride in Ukraine, a country that for three decades has had many competing ideas about national identity and history. Now, Ukrainians have rallied around their flag, just as many Soviet citizens fought to the death to defend their country, even if they previously had doubts about their leaders.
Russian soldiers are now widely referred to in Ukraine as "Rashisty" (a mix of the words "Russians" and "fascists"). Their associates who agree to work for the Russians are called "Gauleiters", the term for the top Nazi officials in the occupied territories during World War II. And Kiev is littered with posters comparing 1941 and 2022, two years in which the city was attacked by a malevolent outside force.
Zelensky awarded the title of "hero city," a Soviet custom, to places that put up the most shocking resistance to Russian aggression. An American aid program was called "lend-lease," after the wartime aid program to the Soviet Union.
In short, the Russians have become the "Nazis" in their own narrative.
Russia's claims about how it is fighting the Nazis in Ukraine are becoming more and more absurd every week, as evidenced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's claim that Adolf Hitler had Jewish roots when asked how Ukraine can be a Nazi state when its president is Jewish.
The Foreign Ministry then hardened its rhetoric, issuing a statement detailing "tragic examples of cooperation between Jews and Nazis," angering Israel, which has so far been largely neutral in the conflict, in the process. Several days later, Putin apologized to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
"I have no words... The Russian leadership has forgotten all the lessons of World War II," Zelensky said, commenting on Lavrov's words in his late-night video message. "Or maybe he never learned them."
Source: in.gr
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