Victim for Victory Day

Writer Sergei Medvedev - about how on May 9 it turned into a festival of the worship of the war

I caught myself on a strange feeling - for ten years now, as I am afraid of public holidays and other official dates, knowing that the authorities are dedicated to them by especially large -scale cleansing. First of all, these are elections and referendums. For them, the third electoral cycle has been strengthened before the persecution of the media, observers, opposition candidates and activists to add repressive to the administrative resource and hold elections in the atmosphere of total control. The New Year is also a risk zone - before leaving the holidays, on the pre -holiday bustle, the State Duma, preventing us from recovering, usually adopts the most odious laws - such as the “Dima Yakovlev Law” on December 28, 2012.

In the era of war, the holidays become particularly ominous. This year, I waited with an unkind foreboding on February 23, assuming that on this day Russia would begin an offensive, turning the day of the defender of the Fatherland on the day of the invader of Ukraine. I was mistaken for only a day. On April 12, I was afraid that Russia would celebrate Cosmonautics Day with one gulp from Grad and Iskander in Ukrainian cities.

Now I am waiting for fear of May 9, believing that Putin would want to arrange a Victory Parade on the imaginary Nazism on this day, maybe even conducting the prisoners of the Bandera’s prisoners in the Red Square of the prisoners of the Ukrainian prisoners of war in the Red Square, and after them, washing off the traces, the irrigation of the irrigation machine rode, like in Moscow in 1944. And today, the whole world looks at the date of May 9, realizing that Putin needs to present his bloodthirsty audience “Victory”, even if she appears in the eating of a nuclear explosion.

Religion of victory

Victory Day underwent a dizzying evolution in Putin's Russia. From the "holiday with tears in his eyes", which he still remained at the beginning of the century, he was reborn into a military-patriotic show-a giant symbolic machine that subjugated the country.

In fact, the Putin state found its reference point, the history of the foundation-it was born not in 1917, not in 1991 and not in 1999 (although why not take the explosions of houses in September 1999 at the starting point?)-and in 1945, in Yalta and Potsdam, when Stalin with a pencil stood over the world map. Putin most likely imagines himself to be Generalissimo from the picture of Fedor Reshetnikov - although in fact he is more likely like a great dictator from the film of the same name Charlie Chaplin in the famous stage, when he, having seen, shoots the globe from the stand and begins to twirl it on his finger.

Since the mid-2000s of May 9, it began to fill all the historical time, turn into a memorial cult and into a project of the future at the same time: it was no coincidence that at the same time boasted stickers appeared on the cars “We can repeat”, equipped with obscene pictures of how the sickle and the hammer rape the swastika. (Is it worth it to say what this rape cult turned into Buch and Irpen?)

Victory Day became the optics through which Russia looks at the world, presenting him with insults, complexes, desires, aggression, and resentification. The holiday turned into a permanent liturgy, into an ecstatic and mystical experience of the past, which replaced people not very successful present.

Over the past twenty years, Victory Day has overgrown with all the features of a religious cult. In the center of this symbolic Universe, a monstrous temple of Victory in Kubinka rises, as if drawn from the scenery of Star Wars or settled from the pages of Gothic comics - a dark, threatening, standing in a clean field in the middle of a frighteningly symmetric lawn, penetrated by magic numerical ratios, like a Masonic hall: the diameter of the main dome - 19,45 meters, the diameter of the dome itself is 22.43 meters (at 22.43 on May 8, an act of surrender of Germany was signed), the mosaic area in the interior of 2644 square meters. meters, according to the number of full cavaliers of the Order of Glory, etc. Its metal steps are cast from the trophy German weapons taken from the Museum of the Armed Forces, and Hitler’s cap is stored among the “relics” in the temple: in its zeal to depict the victory over fascism, this Militarian edition of Orthodoxy falls into pathos, comicism and kitch.

In honor of the worship of the Victory, the processions of the "Immortal Regiment" resembling the processions are held. The Tomsk TV2 of the Tomsk TV channel, which arose as the lower civil initiative of the Tomsk television channel, was soon assigned propaganda, perverted and turned into a bureaucratic action of state patriotism, which is driven by the state employees in order to carry the template portraits of unfamiliar heroes. The outputs of individual individuals with portraits of their ancestors are lost against the backdrop of official lies and performances of frank freaks: Stalinists drag the portraits of their idol, and on one of the processions Natalya Poklonskaya went with the icon of Nikolai Second.

And in fact, portraits of heroes acquire features of icons. A few years ago, a propaganda cartoon ordered by a movement against abortions was walking over the network: in it, a girl on the phone tells her young man that she is pregnant, he in response invites her to be an abortion. The girl thinks, and at that moment with her, exactly in the genre of the “Talking Icon”, the military nurse begins to talk from the portrait of the “Immortal Regiment” hanging on the wall: “Do not abortion, you will give birth to a son, a soldier!” In the future, a man, which is characteristic, disappears from the plot, the girl gives birth, becoming a single mother, and a few years later she goes with her son to the Victory Parade.

The mythology of victory heroes is not obliged to correspond to reality - it is the subject of blind faith, its function is to convince. The case of Soviet martyrs, 28 heroes-pantilians, who allegedly stopped the division of German tanks at the Dubosekovo junction near Moscow, is well known. As the investigation of the Kharkov military prosecutor’s office in November 1947 showed that one of the “dead” heroes in the spring of 1942 surrendered and served with the Germans, the whole story was fabricated by the Red Star correspondent, Alexander Krivitsky, who invented this legend against the backdrop of real battles that took place in that area. Nevertheless, the myth gained his own logic, entered the Soviet patriotic canon, and when the director of Gosarkhiv Sergey Mironenko spoke about falsification in 2015, he was immediately accused of Russophobia, and then Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky said that the myth who inspired the generations of Soviet people was more important than historical facts, and Mironenko was soon dismissed from the post.

The cult goes into the masses, distinguished by the rituals of “victory” - the decoration of cars and windows, historical reconstruction and cosplay of wartime, travesty and rituals of children in tunics, coloring strollers and cribs in the likeness of military vehicles: it is obvious that children play a special role here, giving the higher moral sanction for violations and death.

At the same time, this enters the cult of victory in the spring ritual cycles, as the appearance of a young overgrown on a dead, scorched earth: here we can talk about the biopolitics of victory, the reproduction of human mass: children are the same “new soldiers” “laveled women”, following the apocryphal phrase attributed to the George Zhukov. It is no coincidence that in that Lifov cartoon, the child, saved from abortion, goes to the Victory Parade, and on the advertising shield of the “For Life” movement, the embryo on one part of the poster broadcasts from the womb of the mother: “Protect me today, and I will protect you tomorrow”-and on the other part he grows in a five-year-old boy in a helmet and with an automaton.

In fact, from the subject of collective memory (not only the state, but also the family, local, private), from the living history of the people, the victory turned into an indisputable moral absolute, into a sacred object, into an ethical exclusion space, where the criticism of the Soviet Union, the “victorious people”, Stalin and Zhukov, where the right of power is consecrated and the isolationist consciousness is formed “we are against everything against everything. peace ". The cult of victory has become a full -fledged state ideology, which, in theory, is prohibited by Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, but who is concerned about in Russia today?

The ethical exception turns into a legal one: the victory forms a state of emergency, on behalf of its moral authority, laws are adopted - the whole series of amendments regulating historical memory, all hysterical prohibitions on “likening”, “denial” and “revision of the results”. On behalf of the victory, repressions are carried out: Alexei Navalny in 2021 was judged by the fabricated case of the “insult of the veteran”. On behalf of the Victory, foreign policy demarches are undertaken: we recall the diplomatic wars of Russia with Poland and the Czech Republic about the monuments of World War II, the lengthy articles of the best friend of Russian historians containing attacks on Eastern European countries, and his insults against Polish wartime politicians. And now, on behalf of the victory of Russia, an aggressive, aggressive war is unleashed.

And the eternal battle

And this is the main, terrible result of the militaristic religion on May 9: instead of honoring Victory, the act of ending the war (a good illustration is the sculpture of Wuchetich “We will overwhelm the swords of the UN” before the UN headquarters in New York), instead of celebrating the world-Russia began to glorify the war itself. The victory was replaced by a permanent battle, instead of the exhalation of Nie Wieder , Never AGain , Nikoli Snow , instead of the spell “if only there was no war”, which the post -war generations insisted, Russia repelled the re -residential slogan “We can repeat” and began to repeat it as a magical incantation. From the idea of ​​the world, a bloodthirsty cult of war was born, which demanded human sacrifices.

This is exactly what happened on February 24, 2022: under the fictional pretext of “denacing” of Ukraine, written off from history textbooks and propaganda cliches, Russia unleashed the largest war in Europe from the time of World War II. But, having decided to repeat the 1945th, Russia missed the role in this bloody historical reconstruction-the Irony of Fate, it began to play not Soviet warriors, but the Nazi invaders.

The story made a full circle and closed it. The snake bites its tail, the winners of the Nazis turned into their miserable likeness. The true heirs of 1945 today are Ukrainians who bravely protecting their homeland, and not Russian invaders who came to someone else's land to rape, rob and burn. Anyone who honors the memory of the Great Victory cannot but wish Russia defeat in this criminal, shameful, meaningless war.

The author’s opinion may not coincide with the opinion of the editorial office .

The author is a professor of a free university (Moscow), the host of the programs of Radio "Freedom", the writer, author of the books "Park of the Crimean period" and "Runner Man"