Russia's Victory Day looms large over Europe Day

The ninth of May will be celebrated in Moscow as usual, but in a very particular way this year. It marks the eightieth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, celebrated in Russia not on the eighth as in the rest of Europe but on the ninth, because of the time-zone difference.¹ In 1945, Field Marshal Keitel signed the document of surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst shortly after midnight, at 00:16 Moscow time, following Major General Jodl’s signature on 7 May in Reims. The Second World War was not yet over; fighting was still going on in the Far East, and Japan did not surrender until September 1945. But the war in Europe, ‘a war like no other’, was at an end. It would, however, have different outcomes: in East and Central Europe liberation by the Red Army was followed by an occupation that ended only with the demise of the USSR. In the West, under US protection, a prosperous Western Europe developed within two generations – a Europe that, until the fall of the Berlin Wall, had almost forgotten that an entirely other Europe existed beyond the Iron Curtain, as described in Milan Kundera’s 1983 essay ‘Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale’ (A kidnapped West or the tragedy of Central Europe).²

The parades on Red Square are iconic military images of grand state ritual. Every year, the world gazes at Red Square, studying the details, the rhetorical nuances of the speeches. The Kremlin leaders, standing on the balustrade of Lenin's Mausoleum, etched themselves in the memory of entire generations during the Cold War. Even now we all watch closely for Vladimir Putin's appearance, surrounded by veterans and guests of state.

Is it really conceivable that the US president, or at least his vice president, will be present on ‘Victory Day’, as it is called in Russia, as speculation in some sections of the press suggests? The US president, the ‘Leader of the Free World’, at the centre of the power long considered the ‘Evil Empire’, which has unleashed the war against Ukraine? For years Putin denied that the Red Army's victory over Hitler had been made possible with the help of American lend-lease supplies. Now, Russian propaganda flatters Donald Trump and incites hatred against Europe, which is demonstrably on Ukraine's side. Recently Ursula von der Leyen was even vilified as a leader of ‘Eurofascism’. Could Trump stand at Putin's side, eighty years after the end of the war, when Russian drones and missiles are still raining down on Ukrainian cities? It is frightening to have to admit that, after the lessons of Munich in 1938, the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, and the victory over Hitler, the US might be prepared to hand Ukraine, a sovereign European state and a nation fighting for its survival, over to the Russian dictator.

Shocked by the Trump administration's policy of appeasement and capitulation, and in view of the triumphal orchestration of the parade on Red Square, another event also celebrated on 9 May is in danger of being overshadowed. Seventy-five years ago, another historic event took place that remains little celebrated in European consciousness, one that has since been described as the founding act of what was to become the European Union. At a press conference in the Salon de l'Horloge of the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, France’s Foreign Minister Robert Schuman presented a plan for merging the French and German coal and steel industries: the future European Coal and Steel Community.

This union provided the basis for the integration of post-war Western Europe, taking shape in institutions, but above all in the everyday reality, of a continent that now has a population of around 450 million. We remember and celebrate the ninth of May as ‘Europe Day’, but today we do so in the shadow of events that, since the Russian occupation of Crimea, have called into question everything achieved in the long peace since 1945. Can we be sure that what we have taken for granted is truly secure? Will Europe – or what was once called ‘the West’ – assert itself in the shadow of war?

It is important to take into account the evolution of the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow over the years. What was, immediately after the end of the war, an act commemorating the immense sacrifices made by the peoples of the Soviet Union in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ against Hitler's fascism is now being used to justify Russia’s war to destroy Ukraine. Since the occupation of Crimea in February 2014, and even more so since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops on 24 February 2022, the Russian war against Ukraine has been described as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War, with a reversal of perpetrator and victim. The Russian mass media talks of the fight against the ‘fascist junta in Kyiv’. The bombing of Ukrainian cities, the destruction of the Ukrainian nation’s livelihood, the terror in the occupied territories, the massacres and war crimes committed by Russian troops – all of these are supposedly a continuation of the ‘heroic struggle against fascism’. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, who is from a Russian-speaking Jewish family that fought against the German fascists and saw several of its members murdered by the Germans, is being branded a fascist by the megalomaniac Russian dictator, while the perpetrators of the Russian massacres in the streets of Bucha and Irpin are awarded the highest state medals as heroes of the anti-fascist struggle. There is perhaps no greater insult to the members of the Soviet army who fell in the fight against Hitler than their exploitation for Putin's war crimes today.

Nothing could be more understandable than the joy, the fireworks, the pride when hundreds of thousands of Muscovites gathered on Red Square on the night of 9 May 1945: the war that had claimed 27 million Soviet citizens, the thousands upon thousands of villages and cities that had been reduced to rubble and ashes, the devastation of the country by the German scorched earth policy – all this was finally over. There was hardly a Soviet family that had not suffered a loss. Nothing could be more understandable than the great Victory Parade that took place on Red Square on 24 June 1945, with Marshal Zhukov riding on a white horse and the standards of the German Wehrmacht thrown down onto the paving stones of the square. But just two years after the end of the war there were no more parades, no more days off work. The watchword had become: labour to rebuild the devastated country. During the Khrushchev era, Victory Day was celebrated as a day of commemoration, of private remembrance and a gathering of war veterans, perhaps with a glass of vodka and dancing in the Culture and Recreation Park. In the 1950s and early 1960s, moving and world-famous anti-war films like ‘When the Cranes Fly’ were released in Soviet cinemas, a rejection of false heroism and the cult of war.

The introduction in 1965 of Victory Day with its grand parade was the brainchild of Leonid Brezhnev, who himself belonged to the war generation. It was the same period in which the monumental memorials in Volgograd, as Stalingrad was known from 1961 onwards, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Kremlin Wall were created. Victory Day gained central importance in the Russian holiday calendar only after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the previously most important holidays – 1 May as the Day of Struggle of the Working Class and 7 November as the Day of the Great Socialist October Revolution – were abolished. Victory Day returned under President Yeltsin as a way of providing support for the identity and traditions shattered by the crisis of the 1990s, a substitute for the loss of the socialist utopia. Victory Day was not reintroduced as a grand-scale military parade until 2008, under Putin, and the cult of warriorhood, the sacralization of war and militarism, was first fully developed with the invasion of Ukraine, which was presented as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War. Since then, it has once again become central to the demonstration of power, the display of the latest weapons, and the threat of the Russian nuclear arsenal.

What is unfolding on Red Square, however, is only a fragment of a general militarization of social life. In northwest Moscow, a vast memorial complex with museums and churches has been constructed on Poklonnaya Gora (Prayer Hill), and a Heroes' Cemetery has been built outside Moscow. Celebrations and parades are also taking place in the provinces of the Russian Federation. In parallel with the Russian war, the ideological synchronization of public opinion from the top of the central mass media is taking place. This began with a ban on the word ‘war’ – the war against Ukraine is described as a ‘special military operation’. Thousands of people have been denounced and prosecuted simply for using the word ‘war’, not to mention the harsh prison and camp sentences imposed for the slightest protest against the war. Hundreds of thousands of young able-bodied men fled across the border after mobilization in the autumn of 2022 because they did not want to be drawn into the meat grinder on the Ukrainian front. Academic study and critical examination of the Great Patriotic War are subject to censorship and punishment. Any critical analysis of the catastrophic course of the war and Stalin's responsibility for it, any demythologization of false hero mythology, is branded as ‘unpatriotic’ and punished as a crime, while robbers and murderers are released from prisons and camps, sent to the front and rewarded with high decorations for their proven war crimes. Military service has now become one of the most important means to social upward mobility; the new elite of Putin's Russia is to be recruited from among its warriors, so frontline soldiers are becoming governors or taking on leadership positions in universities and cultural institutions. Militarization has gripped the economy as well as the education system. Talk shows discuss the use of atomic bombs in Europe as a matter of course, and the only question that seems to be at stake is whether they should be dropped on Poznan or on Berlin.

Eighty years after the end of the war and 75 years after its ‘birth’, Europe is confronted with a situation for which it was unprepared, for which it has not even found words. The integration process has almost always moved forward: Europe was perceived as a ‘work in progress’, and it has weathered various crises and even grown during them. Despite these critical situations, the checks and balances of its institutions have somehow remained intact. But the return of war has revealed the fundamental weakness of a continent that, while extraordinarily successful economically and attractive worldwide with its diverse culture, is weak and vulnerable in the face of brute force and a power that relies on the conviction that might is right and that despises the rule of law. For too long, Europe has been lulled into the false security of an external, American-guaranteed peace, a security that now no longer exists as the US reorients itself within the new world order. A Europe accustomed to peace is compelled to take care of its own security, something that is not possible without great sacrifice. It has declared its solidarity with Ukraine; it has committed itself politically, financially and symbolically, and understood that the invasion is not aimed just at Ukraine, a distant periphery, but at Europe as a whole. The burdens facing Europe will be extraordinary, and it is quite unclear how it will deal with them. Putin, the master choreographer of fear, has an easy game to play. He knows the contradictions between and within the member states; he has his allies and potential fifth columns within the European Union. He knows how to exploit for his own advantage the contradictions within individual states, the pacifist tendencies and the ‘peace at any price’ spirit. He has long been expert at waging information warfare and subversion. Democracies are slow and take time; dictators can decide on war and peace overnight. But we must not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed and disarmed by the speed and seeming efficiency of dictators making decisions. A new front runs through the heart of Europe. It is not the Iron Curtain of the past, nor the Iron Curtain that Putin's Russia has lowered around itself, but the front line between those who are ready and determined to assert themselves and defend themselves, and those who bow to the pressure of blackmail. It runs through the heart of Europe and through European societies. Europe can bring the forces at its disposal into play; the only question is how long it will take and what price those on the front lines of Europe's defence currently and in the near future will have to pay: the Ukrainian people. It is not a rhetorical trick to say that overcoming the Ukrainian challenge is Europe's last chance. Today, with its founding fathers no longer here, Europeans must come to terms with the new situation at the end of a long post-war period and the beginning of a pre-war period on their own and decide: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!