Read more: Chancellor Olaf Scholz Wants to Transform Germany’s Place in the World. “The Stalin regime was almost as criminal as the Hitler regime,” scholar Nikolay Koposov stated in a Wilson Center webcast in 2020, “and most Russians do not realize that the war was not for their freedoms but was largely a battle between the two dictators.” Petersburg, told the New York Times in 2018 that acknowledgement of family sacrifices during the war “is probably the only social glue to form a single society” in Russia.īut scholars say that often lost in the Victory Day celebrations are hard truths about what Russia’s victory in the war really meant. Kurilla, a professor at the European University of St. Tens of millions of Russian citizens have marched in Moscow carrying portraits of relatives who died in World War II. Billboards and buses have featured posters of Stalin for Victory Day. Russia’s first post-Soviet President Boris Yeltsin turned those into an annual tradition under Putin, hundreds of thousands of spectators have gathered to watch military personnel march alongside tanks and missiles. By the time the text was signed late at night, it was already May 9 on Moscow time.Īs TIME has previously reported, in the 1960s Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev made May 9 a national holiday, complete with military parades. While the Allies marked May 7 as “V-E Day”-Victory in Europe Day-to commemorate the Nazis surrendering in Reims, France, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted to wait to celebrate until the Nazis surrendered in Soviet-controlled Berlin the next day. World War II has always been central to the Russian state’s approach to telling the country’s history.
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