Victory Parade in Moscow: When Putin talks about justice and fairness

Putin has ruled Russia authoritarianally for a quarter of a century, and has spoken at the May 9 Victory Parade 22 times (the president of Russia usually delivers a speech at the parade, but Putin did not do so from 2008 to 2011, when he was its prime minister). His speeches carry undertones of propaganda, as is the case with the last one, but some analysts believe that Putin has softened his rhetoric this year, due to the negotiations initiated by Trump, but also for other reasons

 

Author: Vangel Bashevski

 

Alleged justice, unity, and invincibility

In his last May 9th speech, Putin, among other things, stated (translated from Russian):

Truth and justice are on our side. The entire country, society, and people support the participants of the Special Military Operation. We are proud of their courage and determination, of that strength of spirit, which has always brought us only victory.

Special Military Operation (SMO) is a euphemism for Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, which is a violation of both international and Russian law, which prohibits waging an aggressive war (Article 353 of the Criminal Code of Russia). There is no justice in Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, just as there is no justice in the war crimes he is committing there, just as there is no truth in the disinformation he is constantly spreading.

With this statement, Putin is promoting unanimity and acting on the principle of “The state, it is me,” as if Russia were his private property, as if all its citizens thought like him, and as if they could freely express their views. In reality, Putin has introduced draconian penalties for “spreading false news about the armed forces” (Article 207.3) and for “discrediting” them (Article 280.3), thereby silencing any criticism.

Those who criticize risk losing their lives, as happened to opposition figures Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny. Because of the war and repression, about a million Russians have left their country. Elections or polls in such repressive conditions are irrelevant, so Putin has no legitimacy to speak on behalf of all Russians, and we cannot know for sure what the real position of the majority of them is.

Putting the so-called SMO and the fight against the Third Reich in the same basket is an attempt to draw a parallel between it and modern Ukraine, which Putin unfoundedly accuses of neo-Nazism. But Ukraine banned Nazi ideology with a law passed on April 9, 2015, and the country is headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish origin. His great-grandfather and great-grandmother were victims of the Holocaust, and his grandfather, as a Soviet soldier, fought against the Nazis, like millions of Ukrainians. As everywhere, there are now some neo-Nazis in it, but they are marginal.

In his speech, Putin also seemed to push the myth that Russia always won in war. But it had defeats in: the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the First World War (after which the Russian Empire even collapsed), as well as in the wars against Finland, the Baltic States and Poland (1918-1921), and especially significant is the defeat in Afghanistan (1979-1989), and finally the collapse of the USSR (1991), which was a major defeat for Soviet Russia, which was its founder. Modern Russia, on the other hand, was defeated in the First Chechen War (1994-1996) and in Syria (2015-2024).

Putin has failed to achieve the set goals for the so-called denazification of Ukraine (taking Kyiv and overthrowing and lustrating the government there, which he falsely describes as “neo-Nazi”) and for the so-called demilitarization (Ukraine is even more militarized and has even entered Putin’s home, the Kursk region of Russia).

 

Russia is not consistent in its anti-fascism

In his last May 9th speech, Putin also uttered the following falsehood:

Russia has been and will be an unbreakable barrier to Nazism, Russophobia, and anti-Semitism.

Historically, Russia was notoriously anti-Semitic. The Russian Empire discriminated against Jews, who were only allowed to live in certain parts of it, they were killed in pogroms, and hate speech was spread against them, such as in the pamphlet “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This culminated in the creation of the Russian anti-Semitic movement, the Black Hundreds (Russian: Черносотенцы), which resembled the future Nazis.

After the fall of the empire, such politicians found themselves among the White Guard émigrés, where between the two world wars they created the All-Russian Fascist Organization of Anastasy Vonsiatsky, the Russian Fascist Party of Konstantin Rodzaevsky, and the Russian National Social Movement of Pavel Bermondt-Avalov.

Even official Russia, then part of the USSR, was not consistent in its anti-fascism. With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23, 1939), Moscow became an ally of Adolf Hitler. They divided Poland, after which they held joint military parades and conferences of the German secret police Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD, and a German naval base was opened near Murmansk in Russia. Moscow even extradited German anti-fascists hiding in the USSR, such as Margarete Buber-Neumann to Hitler.

Hitler violated the pact by attacking the USSR on June 22, 1941, and among the Russians he found collaborators who formed their own armies: Andrei Vlasov’s ROA, Bronislav Kaminski’s RONA, Boris Smyslowski’s RNNA, and Cossacks like Ivan Kononov.

Ironically, Russian neo-Nazis such as Alexey Milchakov with the Rusich group are now participating in the aggression against Ukraine. Russia has a developed neo-Nazi scene, and on March 22, 2015, an international congress of such parties was held in St. Petersburg, among which were: NPD (Germany), BNP (Britain), Forza Nuova (Italy) and Golden Dawn (Greece).

 

The USSR was not a liberator for many

Putin also stated the following in his speech:

Today we are united by feelings of joy and sadness, pride and gratitude, bowing down to the generation that overthrew Nazism, that at the cost of millions of lives won freedom and peace for all of humanity.

Contrary to the widespread narrative that the USSR played the role of a liberator during the war, for millions of people it was an enslaver. An example of this is Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which the USSR annexed, after which it carried out brutal Stalinist repressions there.

After the war, the USSR established repressive puppet regimes throughout Eastern Europe, and converted Nazi camps such as Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald into Stalinist ones. Poland suffered particularly from this terror. After its invasion, the USSR carried out massacres of thousands of Polish prisoners of war, such as the one at Katyn.

The USSR took away territories from Poland inhabited by Belarusians and Ukrainians, ostensibly to liberate them, but they too were subjected to its brutal repressions.

The USSR also attacked Finland, which it also seized territory from, as it did from Czechoslovakia and Romania. Part of the territory it seized was annexed to Soviet Moldova, propagating the existence of a separate Moldovan nation in order to distance it from the Romanian one. The USSR also seized territory from Germany–the city of Königsberg and its surroundings (now the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia), where the USSR carried out ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans.

After defeating Hitler, the USSR occupied the northern part of Korea, which had been under Japanese occupation until then, and established a brutal regime that persists to this day.

 

Softened rhetoric

Some analysts believe that due to the negotiations on the war in Ukraine, initiated by Donald Trump, Putin this time refrained from overly strong qualifications, as he had in his previous May 9 speeches. This was also contributed by the presence of a wider range of foreign guests at the parade, for whom it might have been too much if Putin had scattered epithets like “rotten West,” “Ukrainian fascists,” etc. (keep in mind that this was a parade marking the 80th anniversary of the victory).

Therefore, Putin wrapped it in a slightly more diplomatic guise and stated that all of Russia’s allies from World War II contributed to the victory, although he did not mention Western ones like the United States and Great Britain by name.

 

Irregularities

In his speech, Putin mentioned China by name, whose troops even took part in the parade, which was not the most fitting, considering that China did not contribute to the victory over the Third Reich, although it fought against its Japanese allies. May 9 is celebrated in honor of the victory over the Third Reich, and not over Japan, which capitulated on September 2, 1945. There were also other foreign participants in the parade, whose presence was more or less illogical from a historical point of view (Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, etc.).

It seems that due to his isolation, Putin was forced to invite any guests, even without any historical logic. Russia was not as isolated before as it is today, so in the 2010 parade, Russian, American, British, French, Polish, and Ukrainian troops marched together, which was much more historically accurate.

 

Controversial statement

A rather controversial part of Putin’s speech was the following:

It is our duty to defend the honor of the fighters and commanders of the Red Army and the great feat of representatives of various nationalities, who will forever remain in world history as Russian soldiers.

Putin here used the term “русские”, which means ethnic Russians, as opposed to the term “россияне”, which means residents of Russia regardless of their ethnicity, so it turns out that he considers all those fighters he was talking about to be ethnic Russians, which would be factually incorrect and even offensive to the national feelings of many throughout Russia and the former USSR.

Perhaps Putin was referring to the fact that in much of the world, the USSR and Russia are used as synonyms, which is done out of ignorance or because Soviet Russia was the founder of the USSR and its dominant federal republic, and it was created on the territory of the former Russian Empire.

However, it would be extremely unfair to equate everything Soviet with Russian, and among the soldiers of the Soviet army there were members of various ethnicities. Therefore, Putin’s statement may sound to someone like an attempt to assimilate all the inhabitants of Russia or to appropriate everything Soviet by the Russians. What Putin intended to convey is not exactly clear.

 

 

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