WASHINGTON, May 5 (UPI) -- Russia launched a week of celebrations Monday to commemorate the 59th anniversary of its great victory over Nazi Germany. But victory in World War II is still very important in President Vladimir Putin's 21st century Russia.
The celebrations this week reflect the president's drives to reverse the process of disintegration and inculcate a proud popular nationalism.
The four-year conflict from June 1941 to May 1945 is known by Russians as the Great Patriotic War. Some 27 million citizens of what was then the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of them Russians and Ukrainians, died during it.
This year, the ceremonies and celebrations kicked off when aging war vets gathered for a traditional meeting in Moscow's Alexandrovsky Garden. According to an Itar-Tass news agency report, "They laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the monument to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and tombs by the Kremlin wall."
During the long Soviet twilight from the death of dictator Josef Stalin in 1953 to the collapse of the Soviet system 38 years later at the end of 1991, the achievement of tearing the guts out of the Nazi war machine, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, was acclaimed every year as one of the greatest triumphs of the communist system. But now the message, and the symbolism are different. As the simple but significant act of focusing on Zhukov as the key historical figure to be honored and associated with the victory shows, Marxism is out, but Russian nationalism is way back in.
Zhukov was the outstanding Russian general of the war, responsible for the defense of Stalingrad, Moscow and Leningrad. In 1945, he commanded the forces that took Berlin. These achievements, and many others made the old soldier a great popular hero. But after allowing him to lead the victory parade through the streets of Moscow riding a white horse, Stalin sidelined him and tried to make him a non-person.
After the tyrant's death, Zhukov made a startling political comeback. He rose to the rank of minister of defense and saved reforming Premier Nikita Khrushchev from being toppled in a 1950s Politburo plot by using Red Army aircraft to fly pro-Khrushchev Central Committee members to Moscow for an emergency session to uphold him. Then Khrushchev, fearing Zhukov's power as well as his enduring popularity, got rid of him too.
But in Putin's 21st century Russia, Zhukov is back in fashion. The love of the "rodina," or "motherland," that he symbolizes plays well with the resurgence of nationalist anti-American and anti-European sentiments. These growing developments across the vast Russian Federation have followed the expansion of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include most of the Soviet Union's old Central European satellite states and even three former Soviet republics: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
World War II would probably have been won by Nazi Germany but for the amazing struggle of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples and their allies even under the wasteful incompetence of Stalin's totalitarian communist regime.
Even on the brink of D-Day, three times as many Nazi Wehrmacht divisions were committed to fighting the advancing Red Army in the East as were awaiting the Anglo-American invasion in France or holding back the Allied armies in Italy. More Russians died storming Berlin at the end of the war than the entire U.S. combat dead in the European Theater of Operations from D-Day to victory.
The unbelievable human cost of the war casts its dark pall over the Russian people to this day. Just this month, boy scouts found the remains of 500 soldiers killed defending Leningrad more than 60 years ago, Itar-Tass news agency reported Monday. The boys "found the remains of 500 Red Army soldiers and officers" in the Novgorod region, Itar-Tass said. "The remains will be reburied at war memorials."
The Novgorod region was an area of heavy fighting from 1941 to 1944 as Russian supply convoys sought to push supplies through to besieged Leningrad, which is today again known by its original name St. Petersburg. Over a million people died during the long siege, the worst in recorded history.
The scouts' effort is part of a nationwide drive launched by Putin to find the remains of hundreds of thousands of dead Russian soldiers from the war who were never properly buried. "A similar search has begun in Sakhalin's Smirnykhovsky district" on an island in the Russian Far East, Itar-Tass said.
Far from fading in importance as Russia's post-communist might has evaporated, Victory Day has become an occasion for the Russian people to wrap themselves in cherished glories. As respected commentator Paul Goble wrote for United Press International on the 2001 anniversary, "Victory Day serves as a bittersweet occasion to recall Russia's lost power in the world. No country that has suffered the kind of decline Russians have experienced over the past two decades can view such a process with dispassion. Victory Day thus becomes the occasion for remembering a more glorious past."
The celebration of Victory Day this week testifies to the grimly enduring power of Russian nationalism. And Putin is happy to encourage it because it chimes so well with his own remarkably successful drive to revive and reestablish a powerful, quasi-authoritarian, centralized governing structure.
The Russian and Ukrainian people were counted down and out in the months after the Nazi invasion, but they astonished the world by their endurance and extraordinary bravery. That lesson has renewed emotional power to a grimly battered, still suffering Russia slowly recovering from the hardships its people endured after the collapse of communism.
As Goble observed, Russians had not fought for Stalin or communism, "They had fought for Russia and themselves. And because they could do so then, celebrations now suggest, they may be able to do so again."
