With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this picture underwent a drastic revision. In this telling, the Party was presented as the leader of the masses as they struggled to rout class enemies in the form of fascist murderers. Textbooks of that era also encouraged students to visit history museums where they could see Communist Party members’ cards pierced by bullet holes and soaked in blood. A 1964 Soviet history textbook, for example, told of how troops going on the most dangerous missions said their greatest wish was to be considered a Communist. During the Soviet era, Party members were presented as dedicated, courageous, and selfless fighters at the vanguard of the effort to liberate the USSR and the rest of the world from German fascism. These transitions were much in evidence in how the Communist Party was depicted in the Great Patriotic War.
Among other things, this required a new usable past, giving new meaning to the aphorism: “nothing is so unpredictable as Russia’s past.” But by the end of the 1980s, the declining legitimacy of Communist ideology led authorities to search for other ways to mobilize the population and, in this context, they turned increasingly to Russian nationalism. The country was busy pursuing its global ideological mission of Marxism-Leninism and also in repairing the massive damage it had sustained. In years immediately following 1945, 9 May received scant attention. It is also about national identity in the present, and as this identity project has changed, so has the memory of the war. A few surviving veterans attend the event as a reminder that the Red Army inflicted nearly 90% of all Germany’s combat losses, and civilians across the country solemnly commemorate the 27 million Soviet citizens who died in the conflagration (compared, for example, to about 420,000 Americans deaths).īut Victory Day is not just about the past. This holiday is designed above all to remind the world of the enormous contributions Russia made in the Great Patriotic War. In 2021, the performance in Moscow included 12,000 Russian troops marching through Red Square, followed by tanks and missile launchers, and it concluded with an aerial show of 76 jets and helicopters-one for every year since the victory over Nazi Germany. It celebrates the end of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) by staging events that dwarf those of any other country.
Every year on 9 May, Russia observes Victory Day as its most important national holiday.
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