Victory Day

On our recent trip to the city of Vladimir, I noticed that nearly every large public building in the city center had a plaque like the one above on it. It reads that during the Great Patriotic War, the building served as a hospital. I suppose that as the nearest big city on a major rail line from Moscow and the front, it was a natural place to send the wounded. But walking around this medieval city, you realize that for awhile, it was a gigantic hospital ward.

Victory Day is probably the most important Russian holiday these days, much much more than anything like Memorial Day or what we have in the West. It manifests itself in clear ways -- the orange and black ribbons people started wearing a few years ago -- and it serves as the sort of unofficial start of the warmer months, when everyone starts getting their dacha into habitable condition again. It also happens to be when television seems to show nonstop for two weeks old Soviet war movies (and, I would dare to hope not coincidentally, a few American ones two. This week I saw Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Saving Private Ryan on national t.v. This is a big deal considering that in the popular understanding is that Russia defeated Nazi Germany, but Westerners insist on taking all the credit).

There was a big parade this morning on Red Square, which made quite a fuss because Russia decided once again to include tanks and ICBMs and other hardware in what is assumed to be a throwback to Soviet military showing-off. I watched the parade, and it was honestly not as impressive as in the old days, in large part because they closed off one of the main entrances to the Square. I hate to say it, but compared to what we see from North Korea, it wasn't that scary (what are scary are these redesigned uniforms by Valentin Yudashkin. Sorry to beat this again, but this jackass' great improvements are to add gold arm tassles and to make the clownishly oversized "halo" hats even taller and pointier. More proof that as a nation and a culture, Russia may have completely lost any sense of taste it may have had).

Anyway, there is something very unsettling about Victory Day. Selective history at work on this scale is never pretty, but the degree to which Russia self-edits can't be good. There is no mention now of the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler, the invasion of Finland, how the incompetence of Soviet leadership frequently compounded the misery for everyone, and about what the Red Army did to the civilian population when it finally reached Germany.

Part of it seems to be out of respect for the remaining veterans and their memory, but it is hypocritical. Young Russian proudly wear their ribbons, and indulge in some patriotic self-congratulation, and then on May 10 return to ignoring the pensioners in their midst, who continue to live on meagre pensions, in inadequate housing, with incredibly poor health care.

Everything I've seen of this country suggests to me that these willful myths are destined to become core components of the national character. The unimpeachable heroism of the war will go right up there with the "Tartar yoke," the murderous treachery of Poles, the insistence that Russia must be whipped into shape by a "strong hand."

The simple fact is that the fight against fascism is one of the most heroic and important moments in human history. The sad fact is that the Soviet Union at the time was perhaps the only society sufficiently familiar with hardship, cruelty, and injustice to make the sacrifices demanded to defeat the Nazi war machine.