Recently there have been claims that the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, has ‘offended the Russians’. But, as a Russian citizen and opponent of the war in Ukraine, I believe it was not him who offended us at all. The real offence was inflicted on us by the (illegitimate) President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who, cowardly hiding behind the memory of the Great Patriotic War, conducts a criminal aggression against those with whom our grandparents once fought side by side against the Nazis. This blow to our historical memory, to what for us is the most sacred holiday – 9 May – hurts more than any statement by a foreign politician. President Mattarella, on the other hand, made an entirely valid comparison between Putin’s Russia and the Third Reich.

The Community of Free Russians has already published a statement in support of the Italian President, and we deeply regret that he is being subjected to crude and insulting attacks by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which has always been famous for its extreme arrogance. In her latest speech, spokeswoman Zakharova moved on to direct threats, saying that the Italian President’s words will not remain ‘without consequences‘: all in the ‘best’ traditions of their eternally mafia-like rhetoric.

Burnt memory: how the war in Ukraine offended the Russians themselves

For many generations of Russians, Victory Day has not only been a commemorative date, but a true memorial. Since childhood, we have been accustomed to seeing 9 May as a symbol of the courage and unity of the peoples who triumphed in the most terrible war of the 20th century. ‘Liberator people’: that is how we were taught at school. In reality, as it turned out later, Victory Day was not celebrated in a particularly solemn way in the USSR, because for those who had experienced the horrors of the conflict at first hand, it was not a holiday, but a day of silence, remembrance and mourning for their fallen comrades and the suffering they had endured. Only later was this anniversary first turned into a pompous celebration with parades and finally completely militarised. Thus it was that the painful ‘never again’ turned into ‘we can repeat’, and the day of remembrance into a display of force and military means.

Today, this memory, the memory of the heroism of millions of Soviet citizens, seems as if debased and desecrated. That is how I perceive it. And the bitterest thing is that it was not some foreign politician who offended us, but our own (illegitimate) President: Vladimir Putin. He is the one who exploited the great Victory in World War II to justify his new war, resorting to ‘let’s repeat our grandfathers’ feat‘ style propaganda. Official rhetoric inculcates in people the idea that: “If our forefathers defeated Nazism, then we too must defeat certain ‘Ukrainian Nazis'”.And it was with this justification that the war was presented to the Russian population. Meanwhile, they pretend to forget that it was precisely the Ukrainians (along with Belarusians, Kazakhs, Georgians and all the other peoples of the former USSR) who fought side by side against the real Third Reich. And when, on the site dedicated to the anniversary of the Victory, Ukraine is not mentioned at all, as if it had never existed, it is obvious who is really rewriting history and why.

From ‘Never again’ to ‘We can repeat’

At one time, the main meaning of 9 May was to remember the terrible lessons of the war and prevent such a tragedy from happening again. However, in today’s Russia, this has been replaced by the emphatic “We can repeat!”. Gradually, in the collective consciousness, Victory Day has become more and more like a military parade, with the display of tanks, bombastic slogans and patriotic rhetoric that Russia is ‘the nation that defeated fascism’. We were told that because our grandparents defeated the Nazis, that evil can never come back to threaten us.

This generated a dangerous state of complacency: we seemed to have lost the ability to grasp how our country was beginning to justify violence and militarism. As the veterans who had seen the war with their own eyes passed away, there was no longer anyone capable of explaining to the new generations what fascism really is, how it arises and what tragic consequences it can lead to. And that nothing in the world is more terrible than war. There is a famous song, “Do the Russians want war?”, the lines of which read:

Do the Russians want war?
Ask the silence
On the vastness of the fields and plains,
On the poplars and birches.
Ask those soldiers
Who rest under the birches,
And let their children tell
If the Russians want war.

Yet, it turns out that the Russians, in the person of Putin, do want war. The myth of the ‘invincible victors’ has taken the form of a country that acts with methods disturbingly similar to those of the Third Reich.

Who really offended the Russians

It becomes clear at this point that no foreign leader – not the President of Italy Sergio Mattarella, nor anyone else – can offend us as Putin has done. Putin’s distortion of history, his attempt to ‘erase’ Ukrainians from the chronicle of the Great Patriotic War, to peddle the idea that ‘if our grandparents fought against the Nazis, then even now we have a just cause’, is offensive to millions of Russians. For those who can distinguish true heroism from destructive aggression, and the memory of their grandparents from propaganda rhetoric.

As a Russian and a descendant of a soldier who fell in the Great Patriotic War, I feel deep sorrow and shame at what Russia is doing in Ukraine. It hurts me to see that the Victory Day, which I have considered sacred all my life, is being used as a cover to commit crimes against the people we once helped liberate from the real Nazis. It hurts me that, under the guise of the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, my friends and colleagues are being killed there, while the memory of those who truly defeated Nazism is being besmirched.

That is why, when one hears that ‘Mattarella has offended the Russians’, inside I protest: no, it was not him who offended us. It was Putin, who tramples on the memory of his own people, the memory of the Great War, the colossal sacrifice of millions of Soviet citizens. It is he who has condemned our country to a new conflict, in which the same fascist rhetoric echoes. It is he who forces us to no longer be able to celebrate what was once our most sacred holiday: Victory Day over Nazism. And that is why so many people in Russia today no longer feel pride, but a painful sense of a stolen holiday and violated memory.

‘Z’ as the new swastika

Particularly sinister is the fact that an entirely new symbol of war has arisen in today’s Russia: the letter ‘Z’. And only a blind man would not see in it a kind of half swastika, symbol of the Nazis. We see these ‘Z-patriots’ even lining up children in the shape of ‘Z’ in schools and squares, as if consciously imitating the mass gatherings of Hitler’s Germany. The cult of the leader, the letters ‘Z’ scattered everywhere on cars and posters… For those who know history, the parallels with Nazi propaganda are shocking. Even the justifications used by the Kremlin to invade Ukraine are reminiscent of Hitler’s: ‘we are oppressed’, ‘we must protect our people’. The Germans of the time also said the same about the Sudetenland.

This is not mere conjecture. After 24 February 2022, sales of books about the Third Reich in Russia rose sharply. Many Russians, at least those who read and reflect, began with horror to note: ‘Are we really repeating everything our grandparents fought against?’ It is hard not to shudder at the historical analogy of the attack on Ukraine that began in the early hours of the morning, as if recalling the verses of an old song about the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is called in Russia):

Twenty-two June,
At exactly four o’clock in the morning,
bombing Kiev, it was announced
that the war had begun.

It seems that someone wanted to point out how we are ‘walking in the footsteps’ of those we have always called enemies of all humanity.

A personal blow to the memory

For me it is doubly painful. My great-grandfather died during the Great Patriotic War, defending our land side by side with people of various nationalities – including Ukrainians. He fought against the real Nazis, proponents of an ideology of racial superiority, bringers of death and destruction. And it is frightening to think how he would ‘turn in his grave’ seeing that today Russia is bombing Kiev, Kharkiv, Mariupol – cities with which we once shared the same victory. That sacrifice of millions is now cynically used to justify bombs and missiles on civilians.

In the early months of the war, a meme was popular with Jurij Gagarin asking:

“So, descendants, how’s it going? Have you arrived on Mars yet? – What do you say? Are you at war with Ukraine?. And against whom?“

Those words chillingly describe what we felt: disbelief and bitterness, shame and helplessness. It seemed impossible that the descendants of the nation that had defeated fascism could become fascists themselves. Yet, reality testifies to the contrary.

Who really offended the Russians

It becomes clear at this point that no foreign leader – not the President of Italy Sergio Mattarella, nor anyone else – can offend us as Putin has done. Putin’s distortion of history, his attempt to ‘erase’ Ukrainians from the chronicle of the Great Patriotic War, to peddle the idea that ‘if our grandparents fought against the Nazis, then even now we have a just cause’, is offensive to millions of Russians. For those who can distinguish true heroism from destructive aggression, and the memory of their grandparents from propaganda rhetoric.

As a Russian and a descendant of a soldier who fell in the Great Patriotic War, I feel deep sorrow and shame at what Russia is doing in Ukraine. It hurts me to see that the Victory Day, which I have considered sacred all my life, is being used as a cover for committing crimes against a people we once helped to liberate from real Nazism. It hurts me that, under the guise of the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, my friends and colleagues are being killed there, while the memory of those who actually defeated Nazism is being besmirched.

That is why, when one hears that ‘Mattarella has offended the Russians‘, I protest inside: no, it was not him who offended us. It was Putin, who tramples on the memory of his own people, the memory of the Great War, the colossal sacrifice of millions of Soviet citizens. It is he who has condemned our country to a new conflict, in which the same fascist rhetoric echoes. It is he who forces us to no longer be able to celebrate what was once our most sacred holiday: Victory Day over Nazism. And that is why so many people in Russia today no longer feel pride, but a painful sense of a stolen holiday and violated memory.