Masha Gessen writes:

By the measure of the past decade, this year’s celebration of Victory Day in Moscow, on May 9th, was subdued. Vladimir Putin met with a group of surviving veterans of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War—the four years of the Second World War when the Soviet Union was at war with Germany—and raised a toast. The Russian President is not much of a drinker, so this was an indication of the importance of the occasion. Separately, Putin took part in a procession in which people carried portraits of their relatives who fought in the war—he marched with a picture of his father—and he oversaw a military parade in Red Square. Thirteen thousand troops participated, but there was no air show, because of inclement weather; the parade was over the top, but no more so than parades of recent years.

Victory Day is undoubtedly Russia’s most important, most grandly celebrated, and most political holiday. It was not observed in the years immediately following the Second World War, in which the Soviet Union lost an estimated twenty-seven million people; it became a holiday a generation later and gained in prominence as the U.S.S.R. unleashed less righteous battles abroad, one after another. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia stopped commemorating Victory Day with a military parade. The sabre-rattling resumed in 1999, the year of the American-led NATO bombing of Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslavia. Under Putin, Victory Day has ballooned. Months before the holiday, people start wearing—on their clothes, on their bags, on their cars—an orange-and-black ribbon designed to emulate a Second World War–era military decoration. This year, a mammoth likeness of this ribbon, measuring more than twenty thousand square feet, was laid on the ground in front of the Ostankino television tower, in Moscow, the tallest free-standing structure in Europe. Victory Day is a festival of superlatives. [Continue reading…]