The Memory of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

The Memory of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

Today is Saturday, May 9th, 2:30 PM, and as usual we are standing in front of the Russian Embassy in Lisbon.

May 9th marks the end of an immense calamity that cost tens of millions of lives, and so any talk of Victory calls not for a triumphant parade march, but for preserving memory and reflecting on its consequences. Many front-line soldiers never told their children or grandchildren about the war—not because they had nothing to say, but because what they would have had to say was too terrible. They remembered not parades but trenches. Not marches but the wounded. Not slogans but the faces of those left lying in the ground. The truest way to honor the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Second World War would be to prevent new wars of aggression.

Dmitry Zorin, the grandson of a front-line soldier who earned the Order of the Red Star, two Orders of the Patriotic War, and got four wounds, wrote that even after 1965, when Brezhnev revived parades and ceremonial festivities, his grandfather had no taste for talking about the war or celebrating it. He would sit at a table in the courtyard, pour himself a glass of vodka, and quietly, in his own way, remember his fallen comrades.
cxid.info/194406.html

In one family's testimonies, the front-line soldier Alexander Smirnov never attended the public festivities or parades. At home, he silently put on his uniform with his awards, drink his hundred grams of vodka, and weep as he remembered the fallen.
ura.news/articles/1053090981

Viktor Astafyev, a private signalman twice wounded at the front, hated military parades for the rest of his life. His granddaughter Polina recalled that on May 9th, friends would gather at the house, but the mood was never festive—too many had not come back.
eksmo.ru/articles/5-faktov-o-viktore-astafeve-04-24-ID15679037/

Vasil Bykov, a platoon commander twice wounded, who fought in Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Austria, laid out his principle in an interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta: however hard the war had been, one must write the truth about it, and the whole truth. In his journalism, he wrote of a particular fear at the front—not only of the Germans, but a fear that came from behind: from one's own superiors and from the Soviet punitive organs.
lgz.ru/article/posledniy-rubezh-vasilya-bykova/
monocler.ru/vse-taki-mnogoe-v-mire-svyazano-prochnoy-bechevoy-vasil-byikov-o-voyne-i-nevyiuchennyih-urokah/

Nikolai Nikulin, an art historian at the Hermitage who served on the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts, was wounded four times, and reached Berlin, wrote not about how the Red Army won, but about the inhuman cost did it come at for ordinary soldiers—and about how the command had no regard for that cost.
militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/nikulin_nn01/index.html

He also warned that, in time, sham veterans would readily talk about their heroism, while real front-line soldiers would stay silent.
www.lib.ru/MEMUARY/1939-1945/PEHOTA/nikulin.txt

The poet and bard Bulat Okudzhava, who volunteered for the front at 17 and was wounded near Mozdok, admitted that all his poems and songs were not so much about the war as against it.
song-story.ru/do-svidaniya-malchiki-bulat-okudzhava/

The Soviet writer and front-line soldier Vyacheslav Kondratyev lived through the heaviest fighting of the Battle of Rzhev—one of the bloodiest sectors of the entire war—and was severely wounded there. In his novella "Sashka," he showed what soldiers want most: to live without war.
militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/kondratyev1/01.html

These voices are the main argument against turning the memory of the war into a state spectacle and a license for a new one. May 9th is not a day for the slogan "we can do it again." It is a day for the words "never again."

May peaceful skies be with you.