8/5/2023 0 Comments 75th victory dayIn May 2020, Putin amended the federal law on education, supplementing the concept of education with the need for students to develop a “sense of patriotism and civic virtue, respect for the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” (Draft Law #960545-7, 2020). The presentation, prepared by the Year of Remembrance and Glory Directorate in November 2019, named the patriotic education of young Russian citizens as the main task, which was not intended for just one anniversary year, but was expected to lay the foundation for a new system of patriotic education (Presentation, 2019). The memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Victory expectedly occupied the central place in this program. At a meeting of the Victory Day Organizing Committee in 2018, Putin emphasized: “The torch is passing to the great-grandsons of the victors, and this memory must remain clean and unite the public” (Putin, 2018). The target audience of the Victory Day celebrations had changed completely by the 75th anniversary. We see our main task in creating a preliminary “map” of the research field, which can be used for further work. But we consider it important to offer a kind of quick analysis, which covers precisely the “quarantine period” until the beginning of July 2020, and considers both the domestic and foreign policy aspects of the topic and their inter-relationship. Naturally, a comprehensive analysis of the domestic and foreign policy aspects of the politics of war memory in the anniversary year will require the time and effort of many researchers, especially since events previously held close to May 9 have now been stretched in time to several months. The date of events marking the end of World War II has also been changed and set for September 3. For the first time ever, we can observe an experimental gap between the sacred date of May 9 and the parade held on June 24, as well as the Immortal Regiment procession, which was rescheduled for July 26. We can also see unique social reactions to a situation in which most of the commemorative events have gone online, where the usual forms of commemoration and mobilization do not work. This, of course, does not rule out the analysis of the original plans, both implemented and canceled or delayed. We can assess the “response time,” in other words, the ability of the authorities to adjust plans and adapt to an unusual situation. This has created a complex and, at the same time, heuristically very productive situation for researchers of cultural memory and symbolic politics. And yet, not incidentally, the two events remained closely connected. This sequence had to be changed, with the parade on June 24 preceding the vote on July 1. The epidemic also messed up plans to intertwine growing expectations of the holiday with a nationwide referendum on constitutional amendments, initially scheduled April 22. However, all plans were ruined by the coronavirus epidemic, which not only forbade 60,000 living war veterans from public life but made any mass events in April and May impossible. In other words, the Kremlin hoped till the last that the planned scenario could be implemented. Four of them were signed in March-May of this year. The Office of the President of the Russian Federation in 2019-2020 concluded five contracts, totaling almost half a billion rubles, to organize protocol events, an international press center and the reception of foreign guests (ClearSpending, 2020). Planned expenses can give us an idea about the scale of events dedicated to May 9, 2020. Preparations began in advance (Decree #327, 2019). In this situation, the celebration of the anniversary of the Great Victory, which plays the role of the only “foundational myth” in modern Russia (since the Great October Socialist Revolution ceased to be such a myth with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the three days of the “struggle for democracy” in August 1991 did not become a new myth), was to become a particularly significant and momentous event. The main elements of the war narrative established by the victors in Nuremberg were questioned. The relative contribution of the anti-Hitler coalition states’ to the victory has always spurred debates, but the causes of the war, its results and meaning, if you will, began to be debated with a vengeance precisely at a time when the world order established in Yalta and Potsdam had largely been destroyed and its key international institutions shaken. The anniversary coincided with a period of increasing uncertainty in international relations, which also manifested itself in intensified politics of memory with regard to that war. The 75th anniversary of the end of World War II was supposed to be the last major event in which war veterans could take any significant part. M ajor celebrations are always momentous, but some are in a special way.
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