It is a glorious spring day in Petersburg this 9 May. No snow or sleet showers, such as can occur even this late in the season. Just a cloudless sky and a spring sun that is so intense that you had better apply full strength sun cream before stepping outdoors.
To be sure, the air temperature is brisk, well below the meteorological norm. Indeed two days ago the morning news on radio Business FM was all about possible damage to the sour cherry harvest given that the trees were already in full bloom and heavy frosts were recorded in the countryside from here all the way down to Central Russia. Farmers were said to be busy protecting newly planted vegetable seeds by covering as much ground as possible with black plastic sheeting. This may have been sad news, but it was more joyful than the daily reporting on the Ukraine war that otherwise fills the airwaves.
The beautiful weather today makes it especially regrettable that for reasons of security, not to give Kiev- directed terrorists easy mass targets on this day, the Russian authorities nationwide have prohibited holding Marches of the Immortal Regiment. These marches were a ground-up phenomenon. In the past few years they had turned Russia’s Victory Day celebrations from a formal state event displaying military force to a family event. Year after year, on this day my wife and I joined three generations of Russians marching down St Petersburg city streets holding aloft photos of their family heroes from World War II, both those who served in the front lines and those who sustained the war economy in the rear. These good-natured marches were conducted in a spirit of pride and gratitude for the sacrifices of one’s forebears.
This year, like most everyone else, we sat before our television sets at 10AM to watch the live broadcast of the military parade on Red Square.
Many traditions of this parade were duly honored. Others were cast aside for security considerations. The parade itself was notably shorter than in past years, lasting just 50 minutes from start to finish. Much less heavy military equipment was on display. And the traditional air show was cancelled, though flying conditions this year were perfect.
Most importantly, President Vladimir Putin was on the tribune, as well he should be, surrounded by WWII war veterans and also by foreign guests, the presidents of the former Soviet Republics that now constitute the Community of Independent States (CIS). With the exception of Belarus and Armenia, these are all Central Asian states, the very countries that Blinken and his foolish aides in the US State Department have been hoping to set against Russia in recent months of diplomacy. There they were all assembled, all wearing the iconic St George’s ribbon of victory that is now banned in Moldova and Ukraine in keeping with their rabid anti-Russian feelings. There they were after the parade accompanying Vladimir Vladimirovich to the Alexander Gardens of the Kremlin to pay their respects at the eternal flame to the Unknown Soldier and deposit their red carnations at the foot of this monument.
Putin’s speech was short and placed the accent on remembering the veterans and those who died defending Russia in the fateful years 1941-45. He opened by saying that Russia does not speak of unfriendly or hostile peoples. The issue is with unfriendly elites. Putin denounced the mentality of exceptionalism held by these elites that he first denounced in his Munich 2007 speech. He denounced those who seek to impose their own ways on other peoples as Hitler’s Germany once did. In short, he sharply rebuked the American administration without naming it. Ukraine came up only once in the speech, when Putin said that the Ukrainian people are hostage to the neo-Nazis who took power following the coup d’état of 2014. He insisted that Russia seeks only peace with the world and to facilitate the transition to a multipolar world. He also repeatedly thanked the participants in the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, whose military units were represented in the parade.
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The parade in Moscow being behind us, we moved on to the “at ease” phase of the day which, notwithstanding the loss of the Immortal Regiment, we celebrated as in past years with a festive dinner at the downtown apartment of long time friends. I will say a few words about who they and their guests were because it bears on any evaluation of their representing the public mood on the war, which is what I want to bring out in this essay,
The personal dimension here means age, social and financial status. As I remarked in my recent article on this trip to St Petersburg, our downtown Petersburg friends are all members in good standing of the creative intellectual stratum with ties to music and literary worlds. They are all of pension age, the youngest in their 60s, the oldest in their mid-80s. No one among them is wealthy, but neither is anyone poor. They live where they want to be: in the midst of a city that is culturally rich and provides them with high culture entertainment very often under conditions of city sponsored free or very low cost tickets to the Philharmonic, to the Mariinsky Opera Theater. One of the guests has composed nearly 100 musicals which are performed around Russia. He went to the piano and treated us to a rendition of several of his popular songs.
Our hostess was trained as a journalist and in the 1990s worked in the Public Relations department of then mayor Anatoly Sobchak, whom she admired without reservation. She became a member of the Friends of Petersburg circle founded and chaired by Hermitage Museum Director Piotrovsky, a globalist by conviction.
Like invitees to this party, whenever possible in the 90s and then in the new millennium our hostess traveled abroad, principally to Western Europe. Upon her return from these trips, she shared her gushing enthusiasm for what she saw abroad with her Petersburg friends. Now that is all finished.
Our hostess and all the guests have been embittered by the Russophobia, by the succession of cruel sanctions imposed by EU Member States, by what they see as the ambition of the US-led West to impose a strategic defeat on Russia, to stage direct regime change followed by break-up of the Federation into many small states that can be easily directed from outside while the national resources are plundered by foreign concerns, as was going on in the Yeltsin years. Their feelings are solidarity towards Vladimir Putin even if in the past they distanced themselves from the Kremlin leadership. This is the New Russia that I wrote about in my essay “Wars Make Nations.”
At the same time when I put directly to them the proposition that “victory” in this conflict can only come with the total destruction of Ukrainian forces, which will have the consequence of pulling the teeth of NATO, I was met with a rebuke from all present. No, they said, this war must end as soon as possible. The bloodshed on all sides has to stop!
For those who think that the rejection of the West and new patriotism reflect only the thinking of old fogies, of folks with residual Soviet instincts, I have an answer ready to hand, coming from what I observe around me in my ‘gated community’ housing complex in the remote Petersburg borough of Pushkin. Here my neighbors are nearly all young families with heads of household in their early 30s.
I have no way of knowing what they do for a living but I know from occasional exchanges with the couple who rent our parking space in the underground garage that they are watching and taking advantage of every government benefit being offered to those with more than one kid, including subsidized mortgages. If they had cash to spare, they would simply buy our parking space from us, but they do not. They understand correctly that our rental price is beneficial for them. I can only assume that the main breadwinner works in a government or major corporation office. Again, from our infrequent email conversations I understand that in the past they drove abroad on vacation. Those days are surely gone.
When I walk into the elevator at the entrance hall to our apartment building, I see something I never saw in earlier years: three A-4 sized sheets have been taped to the walls, all celebrating 9 May. Two are store-bought color prints. One is hand-drawn, obviously done by kids with some parental help. It is naïve, like the letters to soldiers that schoolchildren across Russia are now sending to men on the front lines in Donbas as reported on state television.
Yesterday when I was returning to our building from a morning jog, I let in a visitor who greeted me with с праздником, an abbreviated way of saying “holiday greetings on Victory Day.” Also yesterday morning I was hailed by a maintenance man in our compound who was cleaning the parking area with a long broom. He offered his own с праздником, then added мы все советские! which may be translated as “we are all Soviet people!” Looking at my gray beard, he judged correctly regarding my birth date coming well before the collapse of the USSR. He himself could have been aged 10 in 1991. More to the point, his oriental features indicate that he is likely a ‘guest worker’ from Central Asia. Notwithstanding the disparity in our age and circumstances, here was the solidarity effect of the Ukraine war in pure form. I call this my голос народа or Vox populi indicator.
The words of our Central Asian yard maintenance fellow came to mind yesterday evening when I watched the news reports of President Putin’s talks in the Kremlin with the first of the foreign heads of state to arrive, the President of Kirghizistan. As Putin remarked, Russia remains grateful for the sacrifices of the Kirghiz people in the common effort against the Nazi invaders in WWII. Many thousands of Kirghiz soldiers were sent to the front and less than half returned home alive when the war ended. Another moving tribute to the past common ties of the Russian and Kirghiz peoples was made by Federation Council chairwoman Valentina Matvienko in her meeting with the Kirghiz delegation. As a former mayor of St Petersburg during the 1990s, she expressed the gratitude of its citizens to the citizens of the Kirghizstan capital Bishkek for receiving 16,000 adults and children who were evacuated from Leningrad during the siege.
I note in passing that President of Kirghizstan Sadyr Japarov speaks near-native Russian. The same may be said of the other CIS heads of state visiting Moscow today in a show of solidarity for Russia in its existential fight for survival against the US-led Collective West.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023