Alexei Bayer: Not Much Victory on Victory Day
[Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.]
Russia is a divided nation, bitterly split in a variety of ways: rich and poor, rulers and ruled, nationalists and Westernizers, modern Moscow and the dreary, Stone Age provinces. But even 65 years after World War II, most of its 140 million citizens come together on May 9 to mark victory over Adolf Hitler. As a friend observed, it is the only true national holiday left.
This is why Russians of all political stripes bristle whenever their country’s sacrifice is questioned or when a more nuanced alternative to the black vs. white official interpretation of the war is offered.
Russians were outraged when U.S. President Barack Obama in his inaugural address referred to the earlier generations of Americans who helped defeat fascism. To them, Obama’s phrase, designed to rally Americans to meet the challenges of the future, seemed another attempt to diminish Russia’s role in the past.
But what is really being celebrated on May 9? A military victory should benefit the winner, but in the Soviet Union it was by no means true. Soldiers who fought their way into Germany were given a carte blanche to loot. I remember the numerous “trophy” vacuum cleaners and record players that I saw while growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Moscow’s consignment stores were filled with prewar luxury items of German provenance.
But that was the only prize for the victors. In the United States, those who fought in World War II and worked on the home front are called “the Greatest Generation.” Their Soviet contemporaries were, by contrast, “the Miserable Generation.” Born in the meager years after the Bolshevik Revolution, they came of age during the brutal collectivization and famine of the early 1930s and spent their youth under Josef Stalin’s terror. Hitler’s invasion then mowed down their entire generation.
The postwar years were no picnic, either...
Read entire article at Moscow Times
Russia is a divided nation, bitterly split in a variety of ways: rich and poor, rulers and ruled, nationalists and Westernizers, modern Moscow and the dreary, Stone Age provinces. But even 65 years after World War II, most of its 140 million citizens come together on May 9 to mark victory over Adolf Hitler. As a friend observed, it is the only true national holiday left.
This is why Russians of all political stripes bristle whenever their country’s sacrifice is questioned or when a more nuanced alternative to the black vs. white official interpretation of the war is offered.
Russians were outraged when U.S. President Barack Obama in his inaugural address referred to the earlier generations of Americans who helped defeat fascism. To them, Obama’s phrase, designed to rally Americans to meet the challenges of the future, seemed another attempt to diminish Russia’s role in the past.
But what is really being celebrated on May 9? A military victory should benefit the winner, but in the Soviet Union it was by no means true. Soldiers who fought their way into Germany were given a carte blanche to loot. I remember the numerous “trophy” vacuum cleaners and record players that I saw while growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Moscow’s consignment stores were filled with prewar luxury items of German provenance.
But that was the only prize for the victors. In the United States, those who fought in World War II and worked on the home front are called “the Greatest Generation.” Their Soviet contemporaries were, by contrast, “the Miserable Generation.” Born in the meager years after the Bolshevik Revolution, they came of age during the brutal collectivization and famine of the early 1930s and spent their youth under Josef Stalin’s terror. Hitler’s invasion then mowed down their entire generation.
The postwar years were no picnic, either...