Putin Is Trying to Take Over #Russia's Memories of WWII

From Julia Ioffe, at the New Republic:

This year, once again, the center of Moscow will be shut down as a military parade rumbles through Red Square and past a very serious Vladimir Putin. Ostensibly, it is to celebrate the 69th anniversary of the day when the Germans formally surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin. But the parade, now an annual affair, with its planes and its tanks and its trucks pulling intercontinental ballistic missiles through the city has become a cornerstone of Putinism, a way to bind the country with the only thing that its citizens still have in common.

This year, the day has become even more politicized. The orange and black ribbons that once held the medal commemorating victory in the war are now a symbol of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine and of Putinists in Russia. There will be a victory parade in freshly annexed Crimea, too. Victory in the Great Patriotic War, as it’s known in Russia, has been used to justify the annexation of Crimea and to fight opposition to Putin at home. The war has somehow become Putin’s personal possession, the victory—his personal achievement.

This year, the holiday is even harder to celebrate for those that support neither Putin nor his foreign policy, but, unlike Putin, lived through it all. It is, after all, their memories of the war that make up the history of those bloody, hungry years; they are the bright and morbid pixels in the larger, increasingly manipulated picture.

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