Festive Moscow, May 2026. A drone that flew into a skyscraper on Mosfilmovskaya, internet restrictions, cancellations of flights and arrivals at airports, changing the meaning of the very concept of "arrival," diminishing public safety as Kremlin security grows, increasing anxiety, fatigue, and a sense of helplessness. Police on every corner. Is this what a victor's celebration looks like?
Festive Moscow, May 1965, just when the 9th was declared a holiday, like March 8th. A scene of veterans meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre, the ending of Marlen Khutsiev's film "July Rain." Genuine joy of real, not exhibition, veterans, no danger to anyone, literally a peaceful sky overhead. Faces of a new generation, heirs of Victory — 20-year-olds, and even younger, boys and girls born in the second half of the 1940s. A happy generation, they truly were heirs of the victors and felt like it. And this reconciled them with Soviet power. Many of them are alive, among them many of my friends, and I am from the generation born in that very 1965. Shortly before my birth, my paternal grandfather, a front-line soldier who liberated Riga, died. Now we have to find justification for this word — "liberated." There was no such need before, the problem was artificially created.
My heart aches when I watch the frames of this Khutsiev masterpiece again and again — this is my Moscow, my true Homeland, so distorted by Putin's "security." And I think of my parents — my father was 17 in 1945, my mother — 16. They were on Red Square on Victory Day, as they lived nearby, my father — in Degtyarny Lane, my mother — in Staropimenovsky, in the house from which my grandfather was taken in 1938 and from which the "Last Address" plaque has now disappeared — it was demolished along with the house. Victory Day was their main holiday.
Here's another Khutsiev masterpiece — "Ilyich's Gate." The famous monologue of Sergey, possibly according to the script, peers of my parents, but more likely he was a few years younger. A monologue about serious things. About potatoes that helped to survive.
"... — If there is nothing in your life to take seriously, then why live.
— And what do you personally take seriously?
— The revolution, the song "The Internationale," the year 1937, the war, the potatoes..."
My parents took all this seriously too. And I envy them because I could no longer take the revolution and its romance seriously, which illuminated the thaw, all the 1960s, and reconciled ordinary people with power to a certain extent. And now what reconciles? The same May 9th, which Putin privatized, which he equated, finally and irrevocably, with the Special Military Operation. He celebrates the holiday not with the heirs of the allies, but in the company of a sultan, three people from the Republika Srpska, Lukashenko's son Kolya, and "other comrades." What a misfortune, what a mental and spiritual decline of a nation forced to share their holiday with the Kremlin and Lubyanka, losing their own holiday — personal, once uniting the nation with a sense of historical rightness and justice.
In Sergey's monologue, two words, two things are important to take seriously — the year 1937 and the war. The war was profaned, overwhelmed by the entire propaganda, but also repressive machine in the interests of maintaining their power, by people from the entourage of one KGB officer who became an autocrat, ruling the country much longer than the Kremlin leaders (except for one — Stalin, but even his record of political longevity is within reach). The year 1937 was excluded not only from national mourning, let alone repentance, but also from national memory. "People who shot our fathers are making plans for our children." And fathers who perished in camps are now as much enemies as today's dissenters. By trampling "Memorial" into the ground, starting to destroy places of memory, they repressed the repressed a second time. They opposed the victims of the war to the victims of the Gulag — the most terrible thing that could happen to a nation. The list of serious things has collapsed.
Just as it is necessary to distinguish between the country and the regime, Russians and the ruling clan, it is also necessary to separate the Great Patriotic War from the Special Military Operation. Without this separation, Russia indeed seems toxic and hopeless. But we have our own May 9th, personal, private, as it is reflected (not artificially depicted) in Khutsiev. But the victims of the war and the Gulag cannot be separated — they are one people. As Vysotsky said:
"...You are also victims, which means you have become Russified. Mine — missing in action, yours — innocently imprisoned..."
Putin emphasizes the unity of the people, even for the first time giving a name to those not in the trenches — it is now called "the rear." People didn't realize they now have such an elevated mission for the procrastination of one person's power and his entourage. He borrows all possible concepts from the past, although the phrase "rear workers" is unlikely to mean anything to today's generations. Even if they absentmindedly flip through Medinsky's textbooks.
Distortion of history, theft of history — this is what the ideology of the regime and the regime itself are based on. The victims of the war are displayed as a living historical shield. Putin insists on the concept of "genocide of the Soviet people" — to introduce the term, it was necessary to criminalize its "denial," as if someone denies the victims and sacrifice. A fine national unity, held together by criminal sanction... In his speech on Red Square, he emphasized that the Nazis wanted to destroy all the peoples of the Soviet Union. And that means Ukrainians too. What then is the logic of today's confrontation, threats of strikes on Kyiv, the mother of Russian cities? It has not become clear over the past four years.
Victory has never been associated with injustice. With the need in a spiteful, resentful tone to prove that we are better than everyone, that we "made the decisive contribution." We already knew this, it didn't need to be proven — neither to ourselves nor to others. Why do we have to shout about it now, when there was no such need before? Because then there was unconditional moral rightness, and now there is none. Victory, its Day, has never been associated with fear and lack of security. It was a peaceful day of pure joy and sorrow. Now something has to be proven to ourselves, to shrink the parade, to march with the North Koreans, to reproach Europe for helping the Nazis, to reproach with "returned" sovereignty. As Stalin "returned" sovereignty, so he took it away — took everything he could take.
Once the parade was welcomed by the leaders of world powers, now not even all satellites deemed it possible to appear on Red Square. So what is this — the whole world against "us"? Many in this world are uncomfortable sharing a holiday that now looks like a personal Putin holiday for many. Around the world, it is celebrated separately from Putin. We used to do it together — and nothing, no NATO scared anyone. And it couldn't scare anyone because in a bad dream no one could imagine a military confrontation after 1991.
Our holiday remained somewhere there, on Khutsiev's film. "Ilyich's Gate" was breached — by those who seemed to be "our own." The combat brotherhood of Andrey Smirnov's "Belorussky Station" remained, already then not very much gifted by power and only used by it veterans. They also had their own, deeply personal, holiday. And the song of Bulat Okudzhava, which is now used against his will in a marching rhythm.
The generation of parents was happy — they left in peace with themselves and the country. And they didn't see what happened to the Victory parade. They didn't see the cars rushing along the deserted Garden Ring on May 9, 2026, with mock-ups of rockets and the inscription "To Washington." How unlike the cheerful and all-conquering Utyosov's "To Berli-i-in!" from Dolmatovsky-Fradkin's song. So, where are we headed?
* The Russian Ministry of Justice considers Andrey Kolesnikov a "foreign agent."
Photo: "Red Spring."