\u201cSdem pobedy\u201d, \u201cHappy Victory Day\u201d, used to be a joyful wish for the May holidays in Russia.<\/p>\n
It meant that Moscow was remembering the victory over Nazi Germany and that Russians had a family story to tell.<\/p>\n
A story of heroism or of sorrow or of escape or of miracle or of death: May 9 was a date on which it was rare to meet someone who didn\u2019t have an anecdote.<\/p>\n
In recent years it would have been enough to observe how the Russian capital transformed on the date that bears the name of Victory Day, to grasp the features of the plan Vladimir Putin was choosing for the future of the nation and of Europe.\u00a0This year, a brutalized, militarized, embittered and violent Russia celebrates the eightieth anniversary of the victory over Nazism and does so with the usual parade, organized to show the world all the military power of Moscow.\u00a0Before 2022, in Red Square, the entire arsenal of the Russian army marched: Soviet-era and modern tanks, planes, cannons, missiles, drones, soldiers.\u00a0After, the parade became more sparse: the equipment is needed at the front.\u00a0Even before the aggression against Ukraine, Putin\u2019s objective was not to remember the victory, it was to show the capacities for war.<\/p>\n
The Kremlin chief carefully transformed May 9, a date always important, but that before Putin did not have the same value and indeed, many leaders before him even concealed it, because to build a national myth takes time and many of the soldiers who had been heroes in the Second World War, once the conflict ended, found themselves outcasts and never saw the promises of glory fulfilled.\u00a0Putin, from his arrival at the Kremlin, made it a fixed appointment, he took history and distorted it, he placed on the timeline the facts of yesterday and today and tied them together as if they were linked.\u00a0It is no coincidence that when he attacked Ukraine he decided to declare its denazification: in his narrative, the invasion had to be consequential to the Second World War, it had to be an uninterrupted story, a tale that had never ended and that was always and in any case born from a wrong.\u00a0For Putin it is important to have foreign leaders in the stands; today he will enjoy the presence of Xi Jinping, but in the past he had at his side American presidents, European heads of state and government, who saw parade before their eyes the signals of a threat, and did not realize they had shaken the hand of the Russian president precisely while he was showing them the proof of an enmity.\u00a0After February 24, the meaning of the parade has radicalized, it contains a message of anger and power, designed to infect the entire Russian people.<\/p>\n
May 9 used to be a shared date, a family celebration, but the unifying myth of a war of liberation turned into the justification of an aggression against a neighboring country, from which came many soldiers who helped save the Soviet Union from Hitler\u2019s invasion.\u00a0May 9 has marked the rhythm of Putin\u2019s ambitions of greed and violence, it was used as an instrument for the progressive militarization of Russia, to change the face of the country, and it would have been enough to observe how the parade lost the traits of commemoration and took on those of threat to realize that Putin\u2019s plan was long-term, began with the distortion of history and continued with a real war.\u00a0Already with the illegitimate annexation of Crimea, in 2014, Victory Day was subcontracted to the narrative of the first act of the aggression against Ukraine: the streets of Moscow were full of signals that referred to Crimea, torn from Ukraine with an illegitimate referendum, but in Russia it was told as a homecoming.\u00a0In 2020, Putin wanted to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany with a grand parade, instead the pandemic forced him to hold a reduced event, during which, however, he inaugurated the opening of a new cathedral: the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, with inside a mosaic that portrays him together with the former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov.\u00a0All three protagonists of the mosaic already had the aggression plan, everything was decided and written, his men were working inside the occupied peninsula and the agents of the SVR secret services had already begun sending their dispatches about the Ukrainian population and its willingness to welcome the Russians as saviors: never was a prediction so mistaken.<\/p>\n
May 9 was overturned by the arrival of the Z and the V, the two Latin letters that have become the symbol of the invasion, which the Kremlin uses as a desecration and which by now are indelible in the legacy of Putinism.\u00a0In 2012, in the Siberian city of Tomsk, a large group of citizens began to march holding in their hands the photo of a relative who had died, whose memory was tied to the Second World War.\u00a0The initiative was a way to keep alive the memory of a declining generation, to say that through memory, those who are alive continue to bear witness.<\/p>\n
The initiative took the name of the Immortal Regiment and very soon the Kremlin noticed it, saw it as a dangerous independent movement, but recognized its symbolic strength.\u00a0It appropriated it, took it away from Tomsk, Putin began to march among the Immortals in Moscow holding the photo of his father and in 2022 came the request to the participants to place the letter Z on the portraits of the deceased: some accepted, many saw it as a stain in their family history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cSdem pobedy\u201d, \u201cHappy Victory Day\u201d, used to be a joyful wish for the May holidays in Russia. It meant that Moscow was remembering the victory over Nazi Germany and that Russians had a family story to tell. A story of heroism or of sorrow or of escape or of miracle or of death: May 9 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4253,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":25,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4095"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4257,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions\/4257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}