How Putin fashioned Victory Day to serve his own ends

In cities across Russia on Monday, tanks and missile trucks growled their way along the main streets. Soldiers marched across central squares. Fighter jets roared overhead.

- Shaun Walker

Victory Day, when Russians celebrate the 1945 endpoint of what they still call the “great patriotic war”, has become the centrepiece of Vladimir Putin’s concept of Russian identity over his two decades in charge. This year, as the Russian army’s gruesome assault on Ukraine grinds on, the day held particular resonance.

Across Russia, some families quietly remembered the ancestors who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism, or toasted the few veterans still alive. Others took a more bombastic approach in line with the official messaging, perhaps adding a papier-mache turret to their child’s pushchair to make it look like a tank, or daubing “To Berlin” on their cars.

A more sinister slogan that has gained popularity on Victory Day in recent years is “We can do it again”.

According to Russian state messaging, this is exactly what Russia has been doing in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion on 24 February. The Kremlin has used the language and imagery of the second world war to describe the attack on its neighbour.

But already for some years, the victory cult has been referred to by critics as pobedobesie, a derogatory play on the Russian words for victory and obscurantism – “victorymania” is an approximate English translation.

As this pobedobesie metastasised year on year, the phenomenon took on forms that were ever more grotesque: schools put on performances in which the children dressed up as Soviet soldiers; people posing as captured Nazis were paraded through the streets. Evermore opponents of modern Russia were branded as Nazis, neo-Nazis or Nazi accomplices.