In 2005, a state news agency for the first time distributed the orange- black St George's ribbons, as a symbol of victory, ahead of 9 May. The
practice took off, and with each subsequent year, the orange-and-black colour palette became ever more widespread in the weeks before Victory Day. The holiday took on more and more importance, as the iconography of victory dominated the city for weeks and months before the date itself.
In 2008, the parade featured heavy weaponry, for the first time since the Soviet collapse. 'This is not sabre rattling,' Putin told a cabinet meeting on the eve of the holiday. 'We threaten no one and do not intend to do so. We have everything we need. This is a simple display of our growing defence capability, the fact that we are now able to protect our citizens, our country, and our riches, which we have in great quantity.'3 Exactly three months later, Russian tanks rolled into neighbouring Georgia.
As time passed, the victory rhetoric became more and more explicitly linked to contemporary Russia. Every year on Victory Day, surviving veterans still donned their uniforms and strolled proudly through the streets, to be showered with affection and flowers. But with each passing year, the tone of the day continued to change. Under Putin, gradually but inexorably, the day became less about remembering the war dead and honouring the survivors, and more about projecting the military might of contemporary Russia. The message was one of unity, around the idea of a resurgent, victorious nation.
IV
As the focus on the glory of victory intensified, the sense that it was 'unpatriotic' to dwell on the darker pages of the war history became more pronounced. The war was meant to be a unifying memory, not a controversial and divisive one. Modern Russian school textbooks contained just a single line about the deportation of two million of the country's own citizens during the war.
According to Putin's logic, the war victory underpinned the strength of modern Russia, and it thus stood to reason that anyone trying to undermine or complicate the narrative was also attempting to undermine Russia itself. This applied both to 'unpatriotic' Russians at home, and other nations abroad who had ambiguous feelings towards the Soviet war effort because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact and Soviet actions in the eastern half of Europe after the war. 'Today we see not only attempts at distorting the events of the war, but also cynical lies and impudent defamation of an entire generation of people who gave up everything for this victory, who defended peace on earth,' Putin complained at one point. The goal of such distortions was obvious, he said: 'to undermine Russia's power and moral authority, to deprive it of its status of a victorious nation, with all the ensuing international legal consequences, to divide peoples and set them against each other, and to use historical speculations in their geopolitical games.'
The Russians did have legitimate questions about the veneration of Nazi-allied wartime formations in the Baltic States or Ukraine, but 'cynical lies' in Putin's terminology was code for anything that questioned a black-and-white narrative of the triumph of good over evil. There was something epic, almost religious, about the victory narrative: of suffering, triumph, redemption. The Soviet Union had been a Christ-like martyr, undergoing immense torment for the sins of all mankind. And along with pride, there was anger when others refused to see the Soviet victory in these terms too, and show gratitude for the sacrifice.
The horrific price the Soviet nation paid for the war victory became something to be brandished aggressively, rather than sombrely reflected upon. People often played the numbers game, pointing out that the numbers of British or Americans killed were a fraction of the millions of Soviet citizens who perished fighting the Nazis. Russia, having lost so many, had earned a moral right to be respected, went the narrative.
It became a mantra of Putin and other top Russian officials that 'it is unacceptable to rewrite history'. But history is always being rewritten, as new sources and new interpretations come to the fore. In a country that for decades had lived with a politicized and proscribed study of history, rewriting the history books should have been not only acceptable, but a matter of the first importance. In fact, history in Russia was rewritten, but rewritten so as to excise the difficult questions and grey areas that had been raised by the historiography of perestroika and the 1990s. The central archive of the defence ministry held ten million documents about the war, but only two million of them were available
to researchers; the rest remained classified, including almost everything about wartime repressions.19
In 2009, the Kremlin set up a 'Commission to Prevent the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests', focussed mainly on countering Baltic and Central European narratives about Soviet occupation and wartime collaboration. The implication in the commission's name was as disturbing as it was obvious: falsifying history to the benefit of Russian interests would be quite acceptable. The same year, the Kremlin-connected historian Natalia Narochnitskaya said Russia should demand respect for its view of the Second World War by 'putting the issue side by side with the issue our Western partners are really interested in—the energy sector'.20 The idea, destined to remain unim- plemented, was to calibrate oil and gas prices in line with the level of respect accorded to the Russian war narrative.
Inside the country too, subjecting the sanitized version of the war to proper scrutiny became a moral outrage, something akin to Holocaust denial in the West. When the independent television station TV Rain asked its viewers for their thoughts on whether Leningrad should have been surrendered in order to avoid the horrific starvation and attrition during the 872-day siege, which cost over a million lives, it faced a political and legal backlash so strong that the channel was almost closed down.21 There were, perhaps, strong and convincing arguments that Stalin was right to decide it was not worth surrendering the city at any price, but it at least seemed a question worthy of discussion and debate.
Sometimes, there was a curious doublethink at play, a tacit admission that maybe the war myth was not as clear-cut as the official narrative made it out to be, but that the topic was too sensitive to be subjected to questioning. Back in 2002, the British historian Antony Beevor wrote an account of the Red Army's march on Berlin, which concluded that Soviet soldiers conducted the worst episode of mass rape in human history as they moved through Germany in the final months of the war, with around two million German women raped,22 many of them multiple times.
On the publication of Beevor's book, the Russian ambassador to the UK, Grigory Karasin, penned a furious letter to the Daily Telegraph decrying the allegations as 'lies and insinuations', despite a wide body of evidence from Russian and German archives provided by Beevor. 'It is a disgrace to have anything to do with this clear case of slander against the people who saved the world from Nazism,' wrote the ambassador. But separately, and privately, Karasin invited Beevor to lunch. The ambassador told Beevor that given the horrors of the past century of Russian history—the revolution, civil war, famines, purges, and then the brutality of the Nazi invasion, the victory had to be seen as 'sacred'. He said Russia would only be able to face up to these pages of its history when all the veterans had passed away, by implication admitting that what Beevor had written may indeed have been true.23 Dredging it up now was inappropriate and unseemly; it was better to leave the Victory as a sacred myth.