Then Putin’s time began, in which the Victory has been well and truly taken over by the state. In the era of the redesigning of the vertical of power, the Victory has been employed to legitimize the ruling regime. Putin considers himself to be the direct descendant of Stalin’s USSR circa 1945, which held a thirteen-million-strong army in Europe, redrew the map of the world and decided the fate of countries and peoples. The same myth becomes embedded in the consciousness of the population, which feels the burden of post-Soviet ressentiment and experiences the phantom pains of lost empire. The myth about the Victory gives them the opportunity to feel the illusion of greatness, to give themselves a merit to which today’s Russia bears no relation. This is where the endless ‘T-34’ signs come from in honour of the legendary wartime tank, the order of Victory and the slogan in the windows of cars, ‘On to Berlin!’ These are magical runes, which call up the ghosts of the past and give an illusion of strength.
Despite Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which does not allow for any state ideology, the Victory has in reality become just such an ideology, the thought axis of the Putin regime. It is the universal lens that justifies any actions by the state, from repressive laws about ‘the falsification of history’ and ‘insult to the memory’, which block out any public discussion on the topic of the Second World War, to the granting of budgetary resources under the excuse of the anniversary. The seventieth anniversary of the Victory became a repressive mechanism for the state, a means of fighting anyone who has different opinions, a way of mobilizing and indoctrinating the population. This holiday has become its own logic of sovereignty in its higher, exclusive appearance: it is done not for the people but for the state; or, to be more accurate, for a solitary individual.
An even more surprising transformation of the holiday is that the Russian aggression in Ukraine is justified in the name of the Victory: the annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donbass, and now the Cold War with the West, right up to nuclear threats – in other words, everything against which the Soviet Union fought in 1945. From a symbol of sorrow and memory, the St George ribbon has become the symbol of a fratricidal war, the sign by which the separatists in the East of Ukraine can be recognized. Propaganda has created in peoples’ minds a virtual continuation of the Great Patriotic War in the shape of the war in the Donbass, where the Ukrainians have been given the role of ‘the fascists’; crooks like the field commander nicknamed ‘Motorola’ play the part of the hero-liberators wearing their medals; and the ‘taking’ of the town of Debaltsevo in the Donetsk Region in April 2015 is compared to military operations of the Second World War. Fighters in Donetsk now carry out their own victory parade. The Victory has changed its sign to the opposite side: now it brings not ploughshares but the sword; the incantation, ‘As long as there’s no war’ no longer applies, and the answer to Yevtushenko’s question, ‘do the Russians want war?’ is now affirmative: yes, they do, with Ukraine, America, the West – and to the finish. Thousands of cars are now driving around Russia with a sickening sticker in their rear windows, where the hammer and sickle is assaulting the swastika and with the slogan: ‘1941–1945: Let’s repeat it.’
But behind all these rituals there is emptiness. The principal virtue of Putin’s era is not even the vertical of power, it is not in the repressions or the corruption or the Orthodox renaissance; it is in the imitation of all the institutions, history, memory, power itself. It is in the symbolic order over reality and the individual. And the 9 May holiday has also become a victim of this gigantic falsification. False veterans with fake medals parade the streets – some of them are not war veterans, but veterans of the Communist Party or the NKVD-KGB. The average age of the ‘veterans’ who were invited to Moscow from all over Russia to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Victory was – seventy-three! False posters gaze down from the walls and the billboards, where ignorant designers have illustrated slogans marking Victory Day with pictures from photo collections showing American soldiers, Israeli tanks and even Luftwaffe pilots. On television, they showed coloured-in war films; on the radio, they played songs of the war years being sung under a recording of Russian pop music. The mincing-machine of Putin’s postmodern society has ground down 9 May and produced a sad, half-finished product.
Even the main symbol of victory, the St George ribbon, has become a universal trade mark, which they stick on anything that comes to hand, from sandals to underpants, from bottles of vodka to German beer. The St George ribbon has today become something like New Year tinsel, which decorates everything you can think of in December because the soul simply wants a holiday. Now people also want a holiday, but all they get is an empty gesture, the place for memory becomes a place of contempt. This is probably the harshest accusation one can make against the current regime, which produces only simulations – of democracy, of modernization, of empire, and now a simulation of the Victory. We wanted a historical policy and an imperial myth, but we got banality and pop songs, the slogan ‘On to Berlin’ in the rear window of a Mercedes and ‘veterans of the Donbass’ on the TV screen.
But here’s the paradox: my 9 May hasn’t gone away; it’s always with me. Behind the noise of the holiday, everything becomes clearer: that the Victory is greater than Stalin, Putin, the Kremlin, the Soviet Union; that this huge existential act of suffering and triumph cannot be privatized, neither by the state, nor by its lying propagandists. It belongs to the people, not the state; it’s no wonder that Stalin was so scared of it. We should return the Victory to ourselves as a people’s holiday, a secular Easter – a day of spring and freedom, of pride and dignity, a day to remember the victims and despise those who sent them to the slaughter. This is our day, which nobody has the right to take from us, nor spoil, because it takes place not on Red Square but in the hearts of the people.
WALTZ OF THE URALS CHEKISTS
The corporate New Year party was in full swing. The ‘Soviet champagne’ corks were popping, on the tables there were bottles of Georgian ‘Saperavi’ wine and vintage Armenian brandy, dishes of roast suckling pig and stuffed pike, red caviar in crystal bowls, bunches of grapes hung in baroque fashion over the sides of fruit bowls. From the gramophone came the voice of the legendary 1930s singer Pyotr Leshchenko, and couples swung round the floor in the pre-war dance, the Rio-Rita foxtrot. The Kronos-M creative agency was holding a retro ‘New Year 1937’ themed party in the club on Tverskaya Street in the centre of Moscow. On the invitation, printed on rough cardboard, there were portraits of Stalin and the Chairman of the Soviet government Mikhail Kalinin, a steam engine with a red star, the Spassky Tower in the Kremlin, and four skaters, each with one of four numbers emblazoned on their chest: 1, 9, 3 and 7.
The dress code matched the occasion: the women, with permed curly hair, were in tight-waisted dresses with puffed sleeves; the men had short haircuts, formal jackets and bell-bottom trousers with turn-ups, or they wore the stylized 1930s military uniform. The young account manager, Gennady, looked particularly dashing as an NKVD major: in navy blue jodhpurs with a maroon stripe, his soldier’s shirt with its collar-tabs, and cap with navy blue cap-band, pulled down tightly on his shaven head. With his squeaky Sam Browne belt and his new box calf boots, Gena was the centre of attention. He proposed jokey toasts to ‘vigilance’ and sang in karaoke the popular song ‘The Waltz of the Urals Chekists’; when he popped out for a smoke, he opened his cigarette case and offered everyone genuine ‘Belomorkanal’ papirosi, in a packet the design of which hadn’t changed since the 1930s.