There is a strange sense of déjà-vu watching Nicole Philmon’s fly-on-the-wall footage of Russians celebrating Victory Day, 2022 for those of us who spent years of our careers living and working in the country.
Victory Day, today
I’ve lost count of the Victory Days I witnessed in Moscow – with only clear memories of three: 1995, when the fireworks display over the Sparrow Hills in Moscow rained burned cardboard debris down on spectators standing in front of Moscow State University, many of them proud Red Army Veterans. Then there were the celebrations in Saratov one warm spring in the early 2000s – again with many spry veterans still in attendance. And finally, 2019, the last year before Covid shut everything down. It was sunny, all the families were out, and the bessmertny polk – Immortal Regiment – was much in evidence. The Immortal Regiment was a grassroots initiative swiftly adopted by the Kremlin, where people gathered in their thousands, holding aloft photographs of grandfathers and great-uncles, aunts and mothers, who had served during the Great Patriot War, as the Russians call World War Two. It was an emotional and stirring experience to be among these families displaying the sacrifice that every Soviet family had made.
Victory Day was always, for me, a day that stirred something in my breast: a sense of pride and gratitude for the sacrifices of the Russian (Soviet) people, without whom Hitler would likely have won the war.
The tired old tropes and jingoistic circus – the military re-enactors showing kids how to fire machine guns, the young men and women dancing in period costume – was all part of the fun. One felt safe and included on this one day of true national unity. Victory Day may have been the last unifying myth of the Soviet Union, and one eagerly co-opted first by Yeltsin and then by Putin (the Red Square military parades took place infrequently until 1995 when they were made annual events), but it was still something that all Russians could agree on.
Nothing has changed, as Nicole Philmon’s film shows: the kids still dance to patriotic songs, dressed up as miniature versions of Red Army soldiers; the old costumes are dusted off, and crowds sing along to lusty or sad lyrics (how a young girl died from shrapnel; the way the calloused hands of Red Army soldiers grip bayonets) innocent of the irony of such behaviour as real children are dying under bombs in Ukraine; real soldiers are facing real bayonets on the battle lines.
Victory Day 2022 was celebrated just over a month after the massacres of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha had been revealed to a shocked world; killings the Kremlin denied, and Russian state propaganda created fake videos about. None of this seems to concern the happy families in St Petersburg on Victory Day in Philmon’s film.
The director lets the images speak for themselves. There is no attempt to interview Russians and no interrogation of the narrative.
Victory Day was always, for me, a day that stirred something in my breast
«Z heads»
Speaking at a school, an elderly woman recalls the days of the Siege of Leningrad – the starvation and the bitter cold of the winters. Russia’s air force and rocket batteries would be bringing that kind of winter to Ukraine within a few months of her speech.
Another speaker – a child during the war – tells of his father going to war and what he learned. Utterly without irony, he talks of war as being «wounds and death» and how he remembers June 22, 1941 – when the Nazis invaded.
The collective amnesia over current events is striking – his whole speech has been a preamble for declaring that Russia was once again facing fascists – this time the «neo-fascists» of Ukraine. «Our country is battling against it in Ukraine,» he declares as if Russia were the victim here. «If, God forbid, anyone tries to bring Russia to its knees, I believe that all our nation… will arise. Russia will never be brought to its knees.”
The kids in the school courtyard, holding aloft Immortal Regiment photos, fidget and chat among themselves. Even at a young age, they have already been through several Victory Day events. They stand in the sunlight, safe from bombs and shrapnel. Kids in parts of Ukraine on this very day did not have that luxury.
The mindlessness of adults spurring on youngsters to chant «Lugansk… Donbas» – the names of Ukrainian provinces Russian forces are fighting to conquer – is hardly shocking. Even «Donetsk is a Russian town! Kiev is a Russian city! Odessa is a Russian city! Ukraine is Russia!» fails to surprise in all its xenophobic hatred. Those who gave public pronouncements without so much as a thought – the so-called «Z heads» – are now the loudest voices on Russia’s public stage, where any criticism of the war in Ukraine (even calling what the Kremlin terms a «special military operation» a war) is subject to severe legal sanction.
Comfortable lies
It’s a surprise that the Russian army can spare so much modern equipment for the official parade; most of the tanks and armoured vehicles that stream across St Petersburg’s Palace Square are likely now to be rusting wrecks in Ukraine. And how many of those healthy, uniformed young soldiers of May 2022 are now dead or maimed because of Putin’s war?
These questions do not seem to concern ordinary Russian families enjoying the public holiday.
In today’s Russia, jingoism is commonplace. But it is profoundly depressing for this viewer, whose hopes for the birth of a democratic Russia held fast through the volatile 90s and the Putin years… until February 22, 2022.
The blind acceptance of so many Russians of the official line that Russian soldiers were fighting ‘fascists’ in Ukraine was already well-established by May 2022. The ignorance of the crowds reminds one of the ignorance of Germans during Hitler’s years. They are living a lie and Philmon’s film shows that lie in all its uncomfortable reality.
