Not Much Victory on Victory Day

Russia is a divided nation, bitterly split in a variety of ways: rich and poor, rulers and ruled, nationalists and Westernizers, modern Moscow and the dreary, Stone Age provinces. But even 65 years after World War II, most of its 140 million citizens come together on May 9 to mark victory over Adolf Hitler. As a friend observed, it is the only true national holiday left.

This is why Russians of all political stripes bristle whenever their country’s sacrifice is questioned or when a more nuanced alternative to the black vs. white official interpretation of the war is offered.

Russians were outraged when U.S. President Barack Obama in his inaugural address referred to the earlier generations of Americans who helped defeat fascism. To them, Obama’s phrase, designed to rally Americans to meet the challenges of the future, seemed another attempt to diminish Russia’s role in the past.

But what is really being celebrated on May 9? A military victory should benefit the winner, but in the Soviet Union it was by no means true. Soldiers who fought their way into Germany were given a carte blanche to loot. I remember the numerous “trophy” vacuum cleaners and record players that I saw while growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Moscow’s consignment stores were filled with prewar luxury items of German provenance.

But that was the only prize for the victors. In the United States, those who fought in World War II and worked on the home front are called “the Greatest Generation.” Their Soviet contemporaries were, by contrast, “the Miserable Generation.” Born in the meager years after the Bolshevik Revolution, they came of age during the brutal collectivization and famine of the early 1930s and spent their youth under Josef Stalin’s terror. Hitler’s invasion then mowed down their entire generation.

The postwar years were no picnic, either. Hopes that victory abroad would bring greater freedom at home were promptly dashed. Russian prisoners of war were not greeted as heroes but sent to labor camps. Civilians who had been under German occupation were treated with suspicion. Entire nationalities were deported. After the war, there was abject poverty, rationing and renewed purges. Even after Stalin’s death, most never knew what it meant to be free or safe, travel, own property, have a choice of food and consumer goods or live in a decent apartment.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who were able to travel abroad for the first time returned home shocked. Visiting Germany or Japan and contrasting their prosperity with poverty and backwardness at home, they wondered who had really won the war. In Eastern Europe, seeing the disdain for the Soviets and desire to join the German-dominated West, they asked themselves who was the real occupier.

Hitler’s forces murdered millions of Russians, but Stalin’s military strategy — which seemed to be designed to kill as many on his own side as possible — greatly aided Hitler in his task. By most estimates, Russia lost at least five times more people than Germany did, but no one even bothered to get the exact number, let alone find out their names.

Russia didn’t lose the war, but it didn’t win it, either. At the premiere of Nikita Mikhalkov’s self-aggrandizing pseudo-Hollywood war epic “Burnt by the Sun 2,” some 6,000 members of the Russian political, business and showbiz elites arrived to the Kremlin in German luxury cars and sanctimoniously praised the Great Victory. Now, 65 years on after the smoke has cleared, they seem to have been? the only? victors.

Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.