Once, Victory Day was one of my favourite holidays. My grandmother and I would go to the main square of Vladikavkaz for the parade, where entire columns of veterans marched — it must have been around 1995.
On Victory Day I was not given presents, and there was no festive table laid at home. But I was filled with joy and pride for my country, which had survived five terrible years, crushed by concentration camps and blockades, yet ultimately defeated fascism.
With each passing year, the holiday became sadder. The veterans, whose long interviews I recorded, were passing away. Each year there were fewer and fewer of them. Meanwhile, in Russia, a cult of ‘victory mania’ was developing. More and more cars bore stickers saying ‘We can do it again’, and instead of remembering the dead, only the victors were being celebrated.
I began to travel more and study history. Soon, Victory Day ceased to be, for me, the day of the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism and instead became the day of the Allies’ victory over fascism.
Since 2022, there has been no such holiday as Victory Day in my calendar. Patriotism in Russia has taken on monstrous forms, becoming a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. Instead of learning lessons and drawing conclusions from the experience of the most terrible war of the twentieth century, we have been given a new war in which thousands of people are once again dying. And many of them are not soldiers, but civilians. No one can feel safe.
Against this backdrop, the ‘victory over fascism’ has taken on a distorted meaning. Victory Day has become a feast during a plague.
And sometimes, I so wish that this holiday could once again become what it was in my childhood…
