V-day in Moscow
by Israel Shamir
The
earth shook as the mighty salvo signalled the start. Gracefully, heavy
armour proceeded along Red Square, passing by the stepped pyramid of
Lenin’s Tomb, by the multi-coloured domes of St Basil, and descending to
the embankment of the Moscow River; huge green trucks pulled the most
obvious phallic symbols of all -- the intercontinental missiles Topol-M
or SS-27, heirs to the fearsome Satan SS-18. Soldiers did their
goose step march; Russia celebrated V-day (one day later than the West)
with this traditional military parade, a somewhat archaic show, despite
the shiny new hardware, and curiously out of tune with this peaceful,
prosperous and vivacious city.
The tanks and missiles did convey the sheer brutal
might of another geological period: they'd fit right into Jurassic Park
and could mate there with tyrannosaurs. The procession passed by the
Mausoleum, the heart of the old Communist state; built in the 1920s by
the great church-builder Alexey Shchusev, it is now screened by large
makeshift construction as it undergoes repairs and restoration. The GUM
department store facing the Mausoleum across Red Square bursts with the
fanciest and most expensive goods brought from overseas –- they are
quickly snatched up by bright young things obviously belonging to a
different generation.
Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites and visitors
throng the route to glimpse the rolling Juggernauts. V-day was the first
balmy sleeveless day after straight seven months of grime and cold;
after the parade, the multitudes thronged parks, listened to concerts,
or went off to their dachas. Amazingly, so many working-class Muscovites
have their summer houses, another Soviet heritage (often just modest
shacks, but still a nice place to go on weekends). Still, millions went
out to see the fireworks that concluded the celebration of V-day.
The military parade is the visible symbol of a
compromise between Lenin’s Tomb and GUM, between the veteran generation
and the younger generation. It has been reinvented and reinterpreted.
The holiday was created by Leonid Brezhnev in 1965 in the spirit of
friendship with the Allies: the US, Britain and France; it was in the
spirit of détente, or peaceful coexistence doctrine. The military parade
added a hint that the USSR had retained its might.
Yeltsin’s reformers almost banned V-day, together
with May Day and Revolution Day. They teased the vets saying: “Pity you
won the war; if we’d lost it, we’d now live as well as the Germans”.
They adopted the “Communism was worse than Nazism”
doctrine, affirmed by President Bush who habitually compared Nazis
and Commies in order to encourage the East Europeans to join NATO. The
reformers used it to justify their mass privatisation of public
property.
Putin revived the parade as well as the patriotic
rhetoric: it was easier to restore than privatised industries. After the
defeatist mood of Gorbachev's and Yeltsin’s days, this was balm for
Russian souls. And the war has been recast from a
Russian-American-British-French struggle against the Nazi beast to a
doomsday battle between Russia and the forces of the united Europe. It
is a possible reading for every continental European state (Spain,
France, Italy, Czechs, you name it) contributed its soldiers and war
effort to the assault against Russia.
Now, however, a new interpretation has been offered:
a magnificent, beautifully written new book on the war by Russian
painter-turned-writer Maxim Kantor, The Red Light, was published
right before V-day: it is being compared to War and Peace. It
presents a whole panorama of the war through the eyes of many
participants: a Russian cavalry officer, the son of executed Red
commander, a SMERSH counter-intelligence operative, a freewheeling
robber, and, from the German side, the narrator is
Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard-educated German-American, secretary and
confidant of Adolf Hitler.
For Kantor, this was a war of paradigms, of Equality
vs. Inequality, with the Soviet Union, warts and all, standing for
equality of man, while the rest, Hitler and Churchill alike, stand for
inequality. Kantor preserves some of his choicest venom for Hannah
Arendt, the inventor of “Totalitarianism,” who concocted the equivalence
of Stalin and Hitler regimes long before Ernst Nolte. Kantor compares
the fates of POW's: in Russian captivity, 350 thousand Germans perished,
13% of the total. In German captivity, over three million perished, over
60%, ten times more. Killings of civilians were on quite a different
scale. Kantor ascribes the horror stories of Soviet cruelty to
capitalists’ hatred of Communism. If Arendt equates Stalin and Hitler,
he considers her a Hitler apologist. As the bottom line, this son
of a Jewish Argentine philosopher calls for Christian Communism as the
way of compassion and equality.
The Russians are upset that the West does not
recognise their crucial share in winning the war; they are even more
upset by “Stalin and Hitler are the same” line. And here they are being
cossetted by Israel. Israelis are ready to say that Nazis were much
worse, and that Russians were wonderful; they invariably add a request
to bomb Iran. So this is not a theoretical question: wily Jews
have some leverage on Russia due to Western denial of the Russian role.
The battle of interpretations still goes on. A few
days before the V-day there was a string of holidays and demos: first,
Mayday, with hundreds of thousands marching under the red banners of the
Communist Party and trade unions, and then, on May 6, there was the
latest demo of the defeated
White Fronde, the anti-Putin right-wing forces who've managed to
mobilise between ten to fifteen thousand citizens. In a way, it was an
anti-V-day rally, for the Frondeurs, the heirs to Yeltsin’s reformers,
consider Communism as evil as Nazism, as they stand for more
privatisation. An opposition writer Michael Berg stated that
clearly: “It would be better if we, the Soviets, would be defeated.
Eventually we would be liberated by the Americans and become a normal
European state. The Jews would suffer, but we suffered anyway”. It was
universally detested.
The White Fronde is done for; it became hugely
detested, mainly due to the silly behaviour of its leaders. Some of them
had been filmed taking money from Western sources and promising in
return to riot in Moscow and other cities, and even to sabotage the
Trans-Siberian railway. Other leaders expressed their arrogance and
scorn for ordinary people too obviously. They nicknamed ordinary people
“sardines”, or “the herd”, and naturally the people turned away from
them. The rightist Frondeurs never had mass support for their slogans
anyway: less tax for the rich, longer working hours for the workers, no
welfare for the poor, full privatisation, strong anticlericalism, and
acceptance of the US model were just not that attractive to begin with.
The leftist rally on Mayday was huge and peaceful,
partly because Moscow has an incredible 0.3% unemployment rate --
practically no unemployment at all. People are pleased with Putin’s
offensive against the oligarchs and against corrupt officials. A new law
forbids officials to own property and bank accounts abroad, as demanded
by the Communists. Salaries are quite low but steadily rising, and this
prosperity allows Russian single mothers to spend their harsh winters in
warm Goa, India; restaurants are expensive but full. Many expats from
all over the world are moving to this newly-found oasis of prosperity.
The slogans of the Russian Communists could never be
mouthed at leftist rallies in the West: beside demanding
nationalisation, an eight-hour working day, free education and health
care, they also call for an end to immigration (for immigrants lower
workers’ incomes and bring criminality), and for banning gay propaganda
and other anti-family activities like the child-free movement.
I wonder how Western Rightists and our Leftist
friends will explain that combination? They are used to conflating
Marxism with immigration and gender issues, but here the most authentic
Communist movement of all actively opposes such side issues and sticks
to the main question: ownership of the means of production and
distributive justice. This was always the line of Russian Communists:
they did not promote immigration, and they are not keen on sexual
proclivities.
Lenin was shocked when
Clara Zetkin, the German Communist leader, told him that they
discuss gender with their female comrades. Stop this nonsense, he told
her. “Is now the time to amuse proletarian women with discussions on how
one loves and is loved, how one marries and is married? Now all the
thoughts of women comrades, of the women of the working people, must be
directed towards the proletarian revolution, [dealing with]
unemployment, falling wages, taxes, and a great deal more.” “The
promiscuous can’t be good revolutionaries”, he said. Stalin went
further: he banned abortions, criminalised homosexuality, made divorces
hard to get. An extra-marital affair could cost one's job. A typical
Republican view, yes, but against the rich and for the workers.
Gingerly, the awesome name of Josef Stalin is given
honourable mention here and there. It became a battle cry against
neoliberalism. Far from prosperous Moscow, in the cities devastated by
neoliberal reforms, people dream of putting the guys with big offshore
accounts up against the wall, Stalin-style. Parliament mulls over
restoring the glorious name of Stalingrad to the city that Khrushchev
renamed Volgograd in a fit of de-Stalinisation. A new statue paying
tribute to the late ruler was even erected recently in far-away Yakutsk.
Stalin is far from coming into vogue, but
anti-Stalinists are definitely out of favour. They overworked his name.
Whenever one complains about thieving privatisation, and fat cats who
steal public property, one is reminded that, on the other hand, “Stalin
was a bloody tyrant”. Indeed one does not have to be a fascist to
dislike the Israeli-flag-waving Antifa, one does not have to be a
Communist to dislike McCarthy, and one does not have to be a Stalinist
to dislike the anti-Stalinists who foisted Thatcherism on us.
For Russians, however, Stalin is first and foremost a
war leader, the Supreme Commander, who led Russia to victory on V-day.
He won against impossible odds, he was involved in every decision on
every front, he did not contemplate surrender even with German tanks
poised one hour's drive from his capital. He mobilised all the willpower
of Russia to withstand the onslaught and crush the enemy. This is how he
is remembered in Moscow on V-day.
Israel Shamir reports from Moscow; he can be reached
at
adam@israelshamir.net
English-language editing by Ken Freeland