Today is Victory Day. I remember eating dinner at my grandparents’ austere Voronezh apartment as a kid with real silver silverwave, butter knives with hollow bulbous handles and faded ornate monograms featuring a giant, unslavic letter: W. It was ‘trophy’ silver my grandfather brought back from Berlin 65 years ago.
A long time, but not in Russia.
“Time has great power,” Medvedev said in his victory day speech. “But it is not as powerful as human memory — our memory. We shall never forget the soldiers who fought on the front, the women who replaced men in factories, the children who underwent suffering unthinkable for their ages.”
After New Year’s, Victory Day is the only holiday that has not lost its halo in any of the
former communist countries after separation. All my life I remember it as a kind of religious holiday. Every time the song went “This Victory Day/Reeking of Gunpowder…” my mother’s eyes would well and redden. Her father fought in Finland first, where, he says he saw a buddy standing beside him decapitated by a tank shell, and where he was one of the few survivors of the disastrous Gangut retreat.
After he recovered from concussion, he was sent to the Eastern Front as an artillery officer; his unit later swept through Eastern Europe, ended up in Berlin where his jubilant graffiti was only recently erased from the Reichstag. My grandmother survived the German occupation in Western Russia, but her own mother died shortly after the war ended from the beating and malnourishment she sustained. Segueing uncomfortably from fighting Nazis to fighting his own people, my granddad spent those first post war years ‘mopping up’ anti-Soviet rebels in Ukraine and Belarus.
Victory Day is a religious holiday. And like every church, the Church of Soviet Victory
was built not just on love but also its fair share of blood, fear, faith, bigotry, denial, vengeance, sycophancy, dogmatism, hypocrisy, selfishness and cowardliness as well as bravery. Heroism, like faith, always had its flip side.
Like millions of his countrymen, my grandfather fought bravely and saved his land, our country, our people, from total destruction. This much we know. It is the truth. It is not the full story, which, of course, continues like this: “and then they took it out without pity on the vanquished foe, and stole some random people’s silver and god knows what else”. But that does not negate the first part. Nor does the first part negate the second. Rather, they exist in an irreconcilable tandem.
The dark tandem whose one half includes the Kafkaesque tragedies like this one, brought to life by Brigid McCarthy’s NPR piece about Inessa Marchevska, and hundreds of thousands like her: taken prisoner by the Nazis, liberated or escaped from camps, only to return home branded traitors or collaborators; surviving the Nazi onslaught only to be finally broken by their own motherland (it was standard Stalinist policy to try all soldiers and civilians who had been taken prisoner for treason, as the paranoid Stalin felt that the only way someone could not die in war was through some sort of collaboration or espionage).
The Great Patriotic War was not a ‘just war’. But then again, the entire concept could only have been dreamt by those for whom war was a philosophical luxury not an
existential choice. The US, the UK. They had a choice, to go fight or to stay at home as conscientious objectors, isolationists, pacifists. Like I would have done, probably, because I don’t believe in war. Or maybe just because I am a coward.
But in the USSR, overrun by tanks, set alight, to fight or not to fight was a choice of merely to live or to die. Your village burnt, your relatives were slaughtered, enslaved. You fought back or died with them.
I don’t know what my grandfather did in Berlin, and he bristles at such questions, but I’ve read Faust’s Metropolis, and it enraged me all those years ago because I hated to think of my grandfather doing those terrible things. It was calumny. Now that I’ve grown up a bit and know him a bit better, I have faced up to the facts, but what enrages me now is the undertone of denunciation, judgement. After all, can you forgive a man his vengeance? I don’t know. It was eye for an eye, they say. Was it? More importantly, whose eye for whose else’s eye? How can I know? How can any of us? Is victor’s justice still justice? I don’t know. 
I, of course, would never have done such things, not have kicked my former assailant when he’s down, not have taken some hapless, probably murdered or exiled, maybe even Jewish, family’s silver, even after seeing all that he had seen inflicted for four years on equally innocent Russians by the Nazis. Trust me, I’m a blogger!
But I also know that I would probably never have reached Berlin anyway, would have deserted, lost my nerve, shot myself in the foot on purpose and then been executed, or died in some awkward fashion in the first wave, fumbling with my water bottle or bootlace, or maybe ‘done my part’ from some Stalinist propaganda office with a microphone and radio transmitter.
But had I survived the march across Europe, seeing all that, losing most my friends in 
battle, starved, sleep deprived, thirsty, frost-bitten, having seen the corpses of my people left to hang at the roadsides by the retreating Nazis, I’m no longer so sure of what I would have done on arriving in the enemy capital.
I can’t even imagine the kinds of demands that were facing my grandfather, things that would have broken me on the spot. I have no way or right to deliver blog judgement on him. He fought for Russia; what have I done?
He may have been a private tyrant to my late grandmother, a mercurial, authoritarian dad to my mom, an often cruel, difficult, selfish, man to be around, but this one-time silverwave-thief and post-war Smersh agent also helped to save Russia from certain Nazi genocide. Without him, I would not be here, and I am selfishly grateful. But still, what of his victims?
How do you stack it all up? ‘History will absolve me’ said Castro. Maybe. My mother is in Voronezh with her father and her sister, cousin and nephew today, surrounded by his veteran comrades, watching the international parade on the TV, celebrating and crying in gratitude.
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