Victory Parade

At today’s Victory Parade, many pompous words were said about its main hero, but it is interesting how the composition of participants has changed since these parades became the centerpiece of state propaganda.

In 2005, the heads of 56 countries, including the major Western powers, attended the parade as guests. Behind them, the leaders of the CIS countries, from Ukraine to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, sat modestly on the sidelines. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, it was no longer expected that the heads of Ukraine and the Western countries that supported it would participate in such a parade. In 2015, however, it was possible to boast that representatives of major Asian countries and peripheral countries of Eastern Europe participated in the parade. In 2018, only the leaders of Russia’s closest allies — Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — participated in the parade. Putin himself proudly greeted them alone, not even accompanied by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, but with his own Kazakhstani flag instead of the Georgian ribbon Putin wore.

Beyond Putin’s obvious affairs, a clear illustration of why the composition of his guests has changed is his speech at the parade. In it, he referred to the victorious USSR as «thousand-year-old historical Russia» and Kiev as «Russia’s capital», and called on the world to stand together against «terrorism, neo-Nazism and extremism». Given that many countries in the world see manifestations of these phenomena in Putin’s policies, and receive support from forces in the same Europe that qualify as neo-Nazi, all this looks like a complete loss of adequacy.

What else? It is significant that this time not only military units, which are theoretically supposed to defend the country from external enemies, took part in the parade, but also those whose task is exclusively to fight internal enemies. The cadet school of the Investigative Committee, Rosgvardia, and the military police — as some commentators joked, the only thing missing from this list was the Federal Penitentiary Service.

As for the religious component of the event, it is worth noting that among the representatives of the religious establishment who were present, the conditionally Muslim segment was represented only by the staunch loyalists Albir Krganov and Ismail Berdiev. The fact that secondary representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church sat beside them, but not Patriarch Kirill, once again demonstrated the hierarchy in inter-religious relations in the country. Let our readers decide whether this is what their ancestors fought for.