Despite the passage of time and the various political seasons, in Russia one of the most celebrated and heartfelt holidays still today is undoubtedly the Victory over Nazism Day, celebrated on May 9th since 1945. Although the country has undergone considerable transformations since the end of the Second World War, the population still feels this holiday very much as their own, so much so that it can almost be considered a concrete representation of the common feeling of Russians. Through the rites and ways in which this important anniversary is celebrated we can build a glimpse of how the perception towards the outside world, and also towards themselves, has changed over the decades.
Let’s start from the first peculiarity. In fact, unlike most of Europe, where Victory Day is held on May 8th, in Russia it is celebrated on the 9th. The time lag is due to the signing of two surrender treaties. The first was signed on May 7 by Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht, in the presence of a representative of the Soviet forces and one Anglo-American allied forces. However, since the text was not approved by the Soviet High Command and since the signature was not placed by a general, Stalin immediately wanted the signature to be repeated. The signature was therefore redone on May 8th in Berlin, when in Moscow it was already the 9th due to the time difference, signed in black and white by Wilhelm Keitel, among the leaders of the Wehrmacht, and Marshal Georgy Zhukovamong the brightest Soviet generals during the war.
In 1945 itself, the first military parade was held in Moscow on June 24, among the most glorious ever held in memory of the victory over the Nazis. It was on this occasion that Marshal Zhukov paraded on the back of a white horse trampling all the captured Nazi flags. Since the first year, the Soviet national holiday was proclaimed for May 9th and the tradition of the 30 cannon shots was inaugurated, Moscow, St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and other cities considered “heroic cities”. In the first years immediately following the end of the war, May 9 remained a working day, where however in the evening it was celebrated with musical concerts in various cities dedicated to veterans as well as meetings of veterans and in general tributes from the Russian community to the surviving fighters. May 9th was experienced with enormous collective pathos accompanied by a sense of gratitude towards the soldiers who had contributed to the conclusion of the war. In fact, the vast majority of Soviet citizens had suffered at least one loss in their family due to the war (out of 60 million who died in the conflict, 25 million were Russians, of which 17 million were civilians killed deliberately by the Nazi invaders), with a large portion of European Union of the country still undergoing reconstruction following the destruction caused by fascist forces.
Over the years, numerous memorials were erected throughout the Soviet Union, such as the eternal fires, flames that would never go out as they were in memory of the war dead, still present today in numerous cities in Russia. All these architectural works would have become real places of pilgrimage during the Victory Day celebrations, but also mausoleums which the relatives of the fallen would have visited regularly. In 1965 a second military parade was held in Moscow and it was from this year onwards that the minute of silence in memory of the victims just as May 9 officially became a non-working day in the Soviet Union. In these years the anniversary of Victory Day was perceived by Soviet citizens as a popular holiday, an occasion for family reunion that served as a bond of society like other important holidays during the year such as New Year’s Eve or similar.
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A third parade was held in 1985, a fourth in 1990 and, from 1995 onwards, it would take place regularly every year. The main parade has always been held in Moscow, while parades were held in other cities, albeit smaller ones, where Russian military schools are located, such as St. Petersburg. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the enormous collective trauma experienced during the 1990s, Russian citizens continued to live May 9th holiday with great pride. Seen as one of the most insecure periods in Russian history, the Victory celebrations served the country to cement that patriotic feeling that was so present during the Soviet years, especially in such a moment without an ideological matrix anymore. In practice, they tried to counter the enormous economic difficulties brought about by the Soviet collapse by reminding the whole world, and even themselves, how important it was to belong to the great Russian nation and its traditional holidays.
After 2000, May 9th began to see an increasing lack of war veterans, who had by now been seen less and less in the decades since that distant 1945. This led to the various Putin governments to promote the initiative of parading through Russian cities with photos of relatives fallen in war. And it was also in these years that the Moscow parade once again became an opportunity to demonstrate Russian military power, with parades of new military vehicles produced by the Moscow war industry. Despite the generational change, even today May 9th is seen as one of the most heartfelt celebrations among the population. Between processions in places of memory and transmission of the symbols of the festival to the new generations (you can often see on television children dressed in vintage military uniforms during the anniversaries), the Victory Day is still used today as a unifier of the country, especially in these last years of ever-increasing international fronts culminating in the invasion of Ukraine.
Just these last two years photos of the fallen in Ukraine they have been compared to those of the fallen during the Second World War. A clear reference to the “de-Nazification” declared by President Putin in the hours preceding the invasion. Even in symbols like these one can perceive how the Ukrainian campaign was experienced by the Russian population, beyond all the government directives that could affect the various demonstrations. Because no matter how many decades pass, the celebration of May 9th always remains served the Russians to unite in the memory of a shared past and in the hope of a better future, even if this future today seems to still have to pass through the bloody Ukrainian battlefields for an indefinite time.
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