There was not a single month of May in my childhood, when our family did not travel to the small town of Svetova in eastern Ukraine.
We were hosted by the former partisan couple Galina and Ivan Kostrova, and on the morning of May 9, they took part in a ceremony in the small town square, near the Wehrmacht monument to the city in 1943.
My grandfather's name, Captain (Captain) David Mikhailovich Baron, is also engraved on it.
A few hours after the ceremony, we hurried to the long-distance bus home, to Kharkiv, to watch the live broadcast of the minute of silence, with the close-up on the perpetual fire in the monument to the unknown soldier in Moscow.
As in the childhood of millions of children in the USSR, even in my childhood May 9 was perhaps the most sublime holiday during the year. And it was also very personal: I am named after Grandpa David.
We came to Israel, the USSR disbanded, I grew up and learned that before the German invasion of the USSR Hitler and Stalin cooperated, and yet, tradition remained a tradition: on May 9, Grandpa David's picture was placed in the center of the living room table with a vase of fresh flowers.
It is still there today, but the holiday is accompanied by great unease: in the hands of the Putin regime, the "fight against the Nazis" has become an excuse to invade Ukraine in particular, and a framework that should neutralize any criticism of Russian aggression in general.
Ukraine grows on the facade of a building that was completely destroyed in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine, Photo: Reuters
Ukraine was elected to the post
For the sake of examples one should not go far.
When Putin announced the "special operation" on February 24, one of his goals was "de-Nazification" of Ukraine.
Even today, there is in fact no announcement from the Ministry of Defense or a current affairs program on television that does not mention the struggle "in the Nazi battalions" or "in the neo-Nazi regime of Zalansky."
Even the recent crisis between Russia and Israel was part of the "Nazi" preoccupation.
Russia's obsession with the "Nazis" is not accidental, and in retrospect it seems almost self-evident.
Already at the beginning of his term, Putin decided to "restore Russia to its greatness", and the main path to greatness was found in an attempt to bring back to life the USSR, which in its disintegration saw "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century".
Whether in returning the Soviet melody to the anthem at the beginning of the priesthood, whether in the justification of Stalinism in the sequel or in proposals to revive the Gulag system a year ago - the public discourse and space in Russia was gaining Soviet images.
It does not take too much effort to do so: in Russia the USSR has never been properly buried in the collective consciousness - unlike, for example, Germany, which after the days of the Third Reich made a deep, comprehensive and systematic mental calculation. Of Putin and his neo-imperial aspirations.
The body of a woman in the city of Bocha in Ukraine,
But the nostalgic setting was not enough.
Putinism lacked a founding myth, an event that would give motivation and the rest of the spirit.
This is how the flag unites the most unifying event in Soviet history: the victory in the Great Patriotic War in 1945.
Now all that was needed was to "find" the Nazis themselves - and Ukraine was elected to the post.
For while authoritarianism in Russia increased, Kyiv turned more and more westward, toward liberal democracy, realizing that its sovereignty, security, and indeed the right to exist — were all threatened by the wind that was blowing from the north again.
The Maiden Revolution in 2014 became a crossroads, where the paths of Ukraine and Russia parted.
The Ukrainians ousted pro-Putin President Yanukovych, while Russia annexed Crimea and ignited a war in the Donbas.
The propagandistic umbrella given to this was "the protection of the ethnic Russian population from the nationalists," who were soon upgraded in propaganda to "Nazis."
Long-range missiles of the Russian army, Photo: Reuters
Worship as a substitute for ideology
At the same time, in recent years a whole cult has developed in Russia around victory, from dressing babies in the uniform of Soviet soldiers, through stickers "To Berlin!"
And "can restore," to draconian laws forbidding mention of the close partnership between Stalin and Hitler before Operation Barbarossa.
The worldview of the Scarlett victory was raped by reality: the years passed, but Russian time became more and more demarcated between 1941 and 1945.
Inwardly, worship also served as a substitute for the absence of an official ideology, and also obscured the lack of horizon in the future.
The imaginary past has become Russia's real future.
Eight years after Maiden, the victorious idols developed an appetite large enough for the whole of Ukraine to "need" "liberation from the Nazis."
The invasion was therefore filed as a rematch of the Great Patriotic War, in which the Russian army embodies the Red Army, and therefore also can not help but win.
After all, history, raised to the level of a myth, must repeat itself.
Clinging to it is also one of the reasons for the failure of the invasion.
The decision-makers in the Kremlin fell victim to the worldview whose cultivation and assimilation allocated billions of dollars, but much, much worse: for the cult of victory and the game in the Red Army against the Nazis paid and pay the price of millions of people, thousands of them in their lives.
Therefore the day of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was tarnished by the current Soviet heirs in Moscow, whose various aspects of their policies are also reminiscent of the Nazis themselves.
It will not change the position of Grandpa David's picture on the living room table, but this year I placed it yesterday, May 8, the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Democratic Allies - and not to Stalin, whose ideological successor turned my homeland into a killing field.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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