World Socialist Web Site, MI
May 11 2005
Victory Day celebration in Russia reveals deepening political and
social tensions
By Andrea Peters
While Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had intended the 60th
anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany as an occasion to
boost Russia’s standing in world affairs, the day’s events largely
served to reveal the depth of the political and social tensions
wracking the country.
In the week leading up to the Victory Day celebrations, the capital
was transformed into an armed camp, with the center of Moscow placed
under virtual lockdown. Foot and automobile traffic was banned except
by special pass, major subway stations were closed, and roads leading
to the city were cleared of private vehicles.
Those working in downtown office buildings were told to stay off
balconies lest they become targets for the hundreds of snipers placed
on nearby rooftops. According to one report, government officials
promised to expel the homeless and anyone found without a Moscow
residence permit from the city.
This extraordinary security was publicly justified by the attendance
of 50 foreign heads of state and the threat posed by Chechen
terrorists. Last year’s Victory Day celebrations in Grozny were
bombed, killing 32 people, including the pro-Moscow president of the
Caucasian republic, Akhmad Kadyrov.
Moscow’s residents were encouraged not to venture out of their homes,
and if possible, to leave the city. Attendance at the festivities in
Red Square – which included a military parade replete with marching
bands from various countries, Soviet-era tanks, and an air show – was
by special invitation only.
The Moscow public, which usually celebrates the holiday on the city’s
central streets, was relegated to marking the anniversary in the
parks and fairgrounds on the outskirts of the city. This geographic
separation served as a telling reflection of the growth of social
inequality and the vast gulf separating working people from the new
ruling elite.
While the official ceremony included the participation of dozens of
veterans, many survivors of the hostilities were denied access to Red
Square even to observe the event. `I didn’t need an invitation to go
to the front,’ said one 79-year old veteran in disgust after being
turned away from the parade area because he lacked the necessary
document.
The Putin administration is widely disliked by pensioners and those
who served in World War II because of recent changes in social
welfare policy implemented by his government. Earlier this year,
thousands of pensioners took to the streets of Moscow, St.
Petersburg, and other cities across the country to protest the
drastic cuts in welfare payments resulting from a new law that
transformed social benefits-in-kind – such as free public
transportation – into monetary compensation of a significantly lower
value.
The celebration of the USSR’s victory in the Great Patriotic War (as
World War II is known in Russia) has a different significance for the
millions of ordinary people whose families made tremendous sacrifices
to defeat the Nazis than it does for the section of Russian
capitalists and ex-bureaucrats grouped around Putin.
The Putin Administration carefully choreographed the Victory Day
events to pay homage to the Soviet Union and the Russian nation. The
May 9 ceremony was replete with hammer and sickle flags, displays of
Soviet military machinery, portraits of Lenin, and veterans waving
red flowers.
While ordinary people may have viewed these symbols as a
commemoration of the efforts made by the Soviet people to defeat
Hitler, for the Putin administration they are a vehicle for promoting
Russian nationalism. An opponent of the socialist traditions of the
1917 revolution and an outspoken anti-communist, Putin correctly
understands the Soviet patriotism of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a
form of Russian nationalism.
This was the spirit embodied in Stalin’s policy of building
`socialism in one country.’ The Kremlin designed the May 9
celebrations to pay tribute to these traditions, while at the same
time tapping into the pride and nostalgia that many ordinary Russians
feel for the accomplishments of the Soviet period.
Although not on display at the Victory Day celebrations in Red
Square, the lead-up to the anniversary was accompanied by a
government-backed attempt to resurrect the image of Stalin. In the
weeks prior to May 9, commemorative posters appeared with his
picture. The `Victory Train’ that arrived in Moscow’s Belarussky
train station, which retraced the route traveled by victorious Soviet
soldiers returning from the front, was outfitted with a giant
portrait of the dictator on its engine. A statue of Stalin,
Roosevelt, and Churchill had been set for unveiling in time for the
May 9 celebrations in Moscow, but, concerned over the opposition it
might unleash, city officials decided to scrap the plans.
The city of Volgograd, previously known as Stalingrad, had a new
statue of the three signatories of the Yalta agreement created to
mark this week’s anniversary. The local Communist Party has proposed
changing the city’s name back to Stalingrad. In Mirny, a city in the
eastern Siberian republic of Yakutia-Sakha, a new Stalin statue was
one of the centerpieces of the day’s festivities. Leaders of the city
of Oryol, a few hundred miles outside of Moscow, recently called for
the restoration of Stalin memorials previously removed from the city
and the return of Stalin’s name to streets that had been renamed
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Putin himself has been careful not to praise Stalin too directly,
most recently describing him as a `tyrant’ in an interview with a
German newspaper. An open move by the Kremlin itself to resurrect
Stalin would only provide ammunition for the Bush Administration’s
attacks on the Putin administration, which it regularly criticizes
for eroding Russia’s limited democratic institutions.
These efforts to rehabilitate Stalin in conjunction with the 60th
anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis are based on a complete
falsification of the role the dictator played in World War II. The
Soviet Union triumphed over fascism in spite of Stalin’s crimes. His
extermination campaign against those most closely identified with the
October 1917 revolution – including the murder of the Soviet Union’s
best military generals – his betrayals of the German and Spanish
working class in the period leading up the war, and his efforts to
reach an accommodation with Nazi Germany, left the USSR completely
unprepared for Hitler’s assault.
Putin speaks in the interests of that section of the Russia’s ruling
oligarchy that feels the pro-US orientation of the Kremlin during the
1990s undermined the country’s national interests and their own power
and privileges. The evocation of Soviet imagery surrounding the Great
Patriotic War and the resurrection of Stalin are aimed at cultivating
nationalism within the population and convincing people that the
social collapse that Russia has experienced over the past 15 years is
a result of the loss of the country’s great power status, rather than
the restoration of capitalism.
Despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, the 60th anniversary celebrations
revealed the increasingly precarious position of Putin’s government,
both at home and abroad.
They were partially upstaged by Bush’s stop in the Latvian capital,
where he delivered a speech repudiating the entire post-war agreement
hammered out by Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at Yalta in 1945 as
an appeasement of tyranny.
Coming on the heels of months of criticism by the US administration
of the anti-democratic character of Putin’s regime, Bush’s comments
were an open provocation. The Russian president responded by
defending the actions of the Soviet army in the Baltic region. `Our
people not only defended their homeland, they liberated 11 countries
in Europe,’ said Putin. The same day, in an interview with the
Russian president aired on the CBS weekly news program 60 Minutes,
Putin rebuffed American criticisms of his regime by pointing to the
anti-democratic character of the US electoral college system and the
way in which Bush was installed in office by the Supreme Court in
2000.
In another affront to the Putin administration, after the May 9
ceremonies and prior to leaving Russia for a visit with the
pro-American government of Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, Bush met
with so-called democracy advocates and opponents of the Kremlin
regime.
The 60th anniversary was also marred by a series of diplomatic
failures for the Russian government, pointing to the political
fracturing of Moscow’s post-Soviet sphere of influence. The
Presidents of Estonia and Lithuania boycotted the festivities in
order to demonstrate their orientation to the West and to promote
anti-Russian nationalism at home.
Georgian President Saakashvili likewise declined the Kremlin’s
invitation in protest over Moscow’s failure to set a deadline for the
agreed-upon closure of Russian military bases on Georgian territory.
The leader of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, also failed to show up, as a
result of his country’s ongoing dispute with Armenia over control of
the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The troubled state of political relations in Russia’s traditional
sphere of influence found clearest expression in the summit held May
8 between the leaders of the countries of the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), the political bloc created out of the
former Soviet countries in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.
The fate of the organization has been thrown into question by the
growth of American influence over the countries on Russia’s western
border and in Central Asia.
On Sunday, Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-US president of Ukraine, who
recently rose to power as the result of the US-backed `Orange
Revolution,’ described the CIS as being of `little use’ without
significant reforms reflecting the divergent political trajectories
of the organization’s member countries. The Ukraine, as well as CIS
member states Georgia and Moldova, are seeking entry into NATO and
the European Union. While Moscow has indicated that it is willing to
take the lead in crafting changes to the CIS in an attempt to boost
the economic integration of the region, the bloc is increasingly
regarded as a largely decorative institution.