Russia is far from the only country that has simplified its war narrative and excised the darker moments. In 1992, a monument was erected in London to Sir Arthur Harris, otherwise known as 'Bomber' Harris and responsible for the saturation bombing of German cities, most notoriously Dresden, at the end of the war. In perhaps the closest parallel to the Soviet deportations among the Allied nations, the US rounded up and interned over 100,000 Japanese Americans, more than half of them US citizens, during the Second World War, deeming them untrustworthy. It was the 1980s before the government issued an apology and paid reparations.24
But in Russia, the obsession with 'remembering history' in fact masked a desire to wilfully forget, or at least distort it. Popular pseudo- history books on sale at the biggest Moscow bookshops spun tales about a Western plot against Russia that had gone on not for years but for centuries, with Adolf Hitler in fact part of a Western project to attack Russia. On occasions, people even angrily claimed to me that Britain had joined with the Nazis and both had been fought off by the Soviets. This all made it much easier to transpose the historical events onto the present-day situation. As the Soviet people had once won the ultimate struggle against fascists, so today's Russians could be called upon to fight in echoes of the same battles, against those who currently opposed Russia. The 2014 conflict in Ukraine, which is dealt with later in this book, borrowed much of the rhetoric and symbolism from the Second World War narrative. It was in many ways the logical culmination of the steady increase of the importance of Victory in Putin's narrative: the flames of a new conflict were fanned by the memories of an old one.
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As the seventieth anniversary of victory approached in 2015, Moscow oozed victory from every pore. At the airports and train stations, screens flashed up congratulatory messages. Muscovites, with orange-black victory ribbons pinned to their lapels, scurried about their business along boulevards lined with 'Our Victory' billboards. Hammer-and- sickle flags fluttered from the streetlights throughout the city centre; far below ground, trains repainted with orange and black sashes pulled into the elegant marbled stations of the Moscow metro.
Murals of heroic wartime images, five stories high and bearing the legend WE ARE PROUD, appeared on the facades of apartment blocks, while government agencies got a makeover for the occasion: the hulking ministry of defence headquarters was wrapped up like an oversized orange-and-black gift. On Aeroflot planes, repainted in victory livery, the stewardesses intoned 'velkam to hero city of Moscow,' on every descent into the Russian capital.
On television, there were war films and military documentaries all day long. Shops promised victory discounts and advertisements offered special VICTORY IS OURS bank accounts. Some people daubed slogans onto their cars: 'Thanks Grandad for victory!' or 'To Berlin!' One popular graphic showed a man whose head had been replaced with a Soviet hammer and sickle pushing down a man with a Swastika head, and penetrating him from behind. The caption read: '1941-1945. We can do it again if necessary.'
In the month preceding the date, traffic was frequently diverted to allow tanks and other heavy equipment to roll down Tverskaya, Moscow's central thoroughfare, and rehearse their display on Red Square ahead of the big day. The military hardware growling through everyday urban scenes made for an unnerving sight.
On New Arbat, a multi-lane avenue of Brutalist high-rises, huge neon hoardings the length of several tennis courts flashed up statistics about the Soviet war effort. As I walked home from a bar late one Friday night, the screens glowed with information about the Battle of
Stalingrad, relayed in block letters so large that the street below was bathed in light each time new text appeared.
201 DAYS!
3,280 DEAD EVERY DAY! 284,000 GERMANS SURROUNDED! 86,000 GERMANS TAKEN PRISONER! ONWARDS TO VICTORY!
When 9 May finally came around, it was a warm morning in Moscow, and crowds lined the streets hours before the parade was due. People jostled for position and held Soviet and Russian flags in eager expectation, as I weaved my way through the metal barriers and police cordons in the direction of Red Square, the asphalt of the traffic-free streets glowing in the early morning sunlight. I had secured an invite to the VIP viewing stand, and passed through multiple security perimeters, a passport check each time, before I finally reached the square itself. The elite of Vladimir Putin s Russia was assembled in the tribune—ministers and parliamentarians, Orthodox priests and military officers, patriotic bikers and Kremlin-friendly journalists. I sat next to an FSB general, who was chatty until he found out I was a Western journalist. A few rows in front of me, a four-year-old wore a child- sized vintage Red Army outfit; when the national anthem played, his father repeatedly elbowed him, making sure he held a military salute the whole way through. As the day went on, I saw dozens of these army children. One couple had transformed their child's pushchair into a tank; the uniformed baby peered out curiously over the papier-mache gun turret extending in front of him.
'In spring 1945, the Red Army brought freedom to Europe,' boomed a baritone voice straight from the wartime Soviet newsreels, the words reverberating around the vast square. A military march struck up, and eight soldiers goose-stepped the length of the square, holding aloft the Russian flag and the Victory banner, melding the two concepts into one. The rest of the troops, sixteen thousand of them, looked on saluting. The defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, stood in an open-top limousine, and held a long salute as he was driven the length of the square past the rows of troops assembled before him.
"Greetings Comrades!"
"Greetings Comrade Minister of Defence!"
"Congratulations on seventy years of Victory!" "URAAAAAAAAAA!"
The loudspeakers crackled with the best known of the Russian war marches, Sacred War, piping it across the square at top volume. Just hearing the strains of the rousing minor-key tune conjured grainy black-and- white images of brave Red Army soldiers charging in slow-motion at the enemy. The tone of the ceremony was overbearing, but it was impossible not to be moved, in the same way a splendorous religious service elicits an emotional response even in an atheist. I found myself inadvertently humming the march on a daily basis for months afterwards.
Arise, vast country,
Arise for the deadly battle
With the dark fascist forces,
With the cursed horde.
Let our noble rage
Rise up like a wave.
This is the people's war;
The sacred war.
When the music finished, Putin took to the podium and addressed the assembled soldiers and veterans: As we mark this sacred date, we again take stock of the full importance of the victory over Nazism. We are proud that it was our fathers and grandfathers who were able to overcome and crush that dark force.'
Putin paid lip service to the other Allied nations, but also made a thinly veiled comparison between the Nazi threat of yore and American hegemony in the modern world. 'Back then, in the 1930s, enlightened Europe failed immediately to see the deathly threat of Nazi ideology. Seventy years later, history calls on us to be aware and alert once again,' said Putin. 'We have seen an effort to create a unipolar world, and we are seeing force-oriented thinking gain traction.' Putin said Russia should not repeat the 'mistakes of the 1930s': it was necessary to fight attempts to gain world domination before it was too late. He never once named the United States explicitly, but he did not have to.