Memorial Day à la russe: 22 June
Yesterday’s edition of the premier Russian talk show, The Great Game, moderated by Duma member and Kremlin insider Vyacheslav Nikonov, opened with a reminder that today, 22 June, is Memorial Day in the country. Summer Solstice, the longest day in the year, was the day in 1941 when German forces stormed across the Soviet borders at 4am.
This day is dedicated to the memory of the 27 million Soviet citizens who perished in WWII, of whom 8 million were soldiers and 19 million were civilians.
https://dzen.ru/video/watch/6674436834a7033854c36253
Please note: Nikonov’s separation of the Soviet Union’s global death figure into civilians and soldiers is something we have almost never heard before in official commemoration of the war dead. But it was essential to enable him to say the following, that we also have not heard in the past: that the war on the USSR initiated and led by Hitlerite Germany was a program of genocide against the entire Soviet people. It was not just intended to physically eliminate Jews and Russians, but also Ukrainians, Byelorussians, the peoples of the Baltic States, etc.
Nikonov backed this up with a pointed reminder to the Baltics, who are precisely the biggest loudmouths in the West condemning Russia’s Special Military Operation and who honor their own Nazi collaborators from WWII by annual public marches down the streets of their capitals (Riga). The reminder was how the German forces slaughtered all of the several hundred occupants of a hospital for Latvians in Nikulina, on the outskirts of Moscow in 1941. And it is for these reasons that Russians look with great anxiety at what today’s “Fourth Reich” in Germany [Nikonov’s words] is doing to provide advanced deadly weapons to the Kiev regime.
The tie-in between Soviet Russia’s existential struggle in 1941-45 and its existential struggle today against NATO countries on the territory of Ukraine was made in a speech earlier in the week by Vladimir Putin which Nikonov put up on the screen.
I might add parenthetically that the vicious crime against humanity in that Moscow region hospital had a counterpart at roughly the same time in the Krasnoye Selo suburb of St Petersburg where the grand aunt of my wife was murdered by German troops together with 500 mentally ill patients whom she, a medical worker, refused to abandon to their executioners. This type of tragic family lore is passed down through the generations in every household in Russia.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024