Russian solitaire

 On this day in 1945 the Third Reich surrendered to the United States, France, Great Britain and their allied powers, but only Russia continues to celebrate the hell out of it.  The rest of us have moved on.  Russia, then known as the USSR, remains stuck in a moment of victory for which it has long claimed sole credit.  Only they call it the Great Patriotic War.  The victory over Germany quickly became a victory over fascism, i.e., the capitalist West in general, and thus anyone who opposes Russian designs is by definition a fascist.  It's only funny when you remember Vladimir Putin's admiration for the fascist mystic Ivan Illyin, whose books he distributes as gifts, whose bones he disinterred and reburied in Moscow.  Most Americans have never heard of him.

"Victory Day" was a grim affair, by all accounts, with Putin ranting about a Russia surrounded by enemies and upholding alone "civilization."  Not very much about the huge sacrifices eight decades ago in the necessary destruction of Hitlerism.  Quite a lot inflating Ukraine into some Fourth Reich which defies Russia on behalf of the Woke West.  Even the once-grandiose parade was a shadow, with a single tank representing the thousands blown to pieces in Donetsk and Kherson.  No flyover -- no planes to spare, either.  As a general rule, the tighter the security around a "national celebration," whether a victory or a coronation, the more the authorities fear the people.  Putin is scared.

Russian cruise missiles pounded Kyiv as he spoke, but elsewhere between 63 (the official number) and hundreds of Russian troops died in Makiivka when Himar missiles from the US hit a facility where soldiers were quartered alongside ammunition.  This is a rookie mistake after more than a year of war, but it reminds us that Russian life is as cheap as it was in the 1940s.  

Why were 40 million Soviet citizens killed between 1939 and 1945?  There were nearly nine million military deaths.  Another fifteen million civilians were shot or starved by the Germans.  Over a hundred thousand troops were killed by the NKVD for crimes ranging from "defeatism" to falling asleep on guard duty.  If a soldier defected and his comrades failed to shoot him, they would be shot and their families would be arrested.  If an illiterate draftee from Turkmenistan picked up a propaganda leaflet to roll his cigarette, same deal.  It's one way to enforce discipline but it tends to prolong the war.  And the USSR had a lot of catching up to do in 1941, because the great genius Stalin threatened to shoot anyone who mentioned the million or so German troops massing on his border.  Yes, it was an astonishing victory over a country which could never win a two-front war, which ran out of everything American farmers and factories supplied to the Soviets -- food, trucks, shells, tires, airplane engines, industrial lubricant, everything but slave labor, which both sides created themselves.  

Maybe the democracies don't celebrate this day because they don't want to remember when they linked arms with evil to destroy worse evil.