Today we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Victory over Nazi Germany. The events of those war years are receding further into history. And the further they recede, the more pompously our government marks this day, as if it and all of us have some relation to that war and that victory. As if we ourselves recently froze in the trenches, charged into attack under mortar fire, burned in tanks and planes, starved, and lived under occupation.
No, it was not us! Our ancestors went through all of this. And having gone through all the horrors of war, experiencing it fully, they bequeathed to us the task of preserving peace.
To preserve means to do everything possible, everything within our power to prevent war. This is our historical duty to the generations of our ancestors who defended a peaceful life for us. This is the essence of our memory of those people. Otherwise, what was the meaning of the human sacrifices our Motherland made in that war?
Are we fulfilling our generational duty?
For the fourth year, our country has proactively waged war with neighbors — with those with whom our common ancestors together defeated the enemy. Now their grandchildren and great-grandchildren on both sides of the armed conflict are dying and becoming disabled. How was it possible to reach this point!
Could my father, severely wounded near Rzhev and miraculously surviving, spending a year and a half in hospitals, have imagined that 80 years later his son would be deprived of freedom for 8 years simply for believing war to be the greatest evil and advocating for peace. And this is not happening to me alone.
And how would our family friend, Kiev resident Mikhail Radenko, awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for crossing the Dnieper, react to this? To what moral and ethical catastrophe has the political leadership of our country led the Russian people!
On May 9th, let's just remember and quietly commemorate the victims of that war, and also think about what we did wrong and how to fix it.
Photo: AFP