STALINGRAD/VOLGOGRAD When the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended 80 years ago, was commemorated in Volgograd this week, the road signs also pointed to history.
In place of Volgograd, the old familiar name, Stalingrad, had returned to the signs.
When Joseph Stalin personality cult began to be dismantled in the Soviet Union, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in 1961.
In today’s Russia, it is often said that those in power intend to restore the city’s name once and for all, not just for holidays.
The next question would be whether it would mean restoration of honor to Stalin, during whose reign millions of people became victims of terror.
On the eve of Remembrance Day, a new bust of Stalin was unveiled in Volgograd at the Battle of Stalingrad Panoramic Museum – just 120 meters from the memorial to the victims of political persecution.
for restoring the name of Stalingrad there would seem to be no significant support.
The state polling institute VtsIOM says that 67 percent of Volgograd’s residents were rather dismissive of the restoration of the name.
Although Stalin’s reinstatement has support in some Russian political circles, it was by no means the president Vladimir Putin the focus of the visit.
For Putin, it was much more important to harness the enormous symbolic value of the Battle of Stalingrad to the needs of contemporary politics.
In his speech, of course, he took all the joy out of it About the Leopard tanks, which Germany has promised to Ukraine after much consideration.
The German leadership must have considered what kind of striking weapon the tanks equipped with the name of the feline beast will give to the Russian war propaganda, which anyway relies on recycling enemy images from the Second World War.
The Russian leadership has been painting for a long time image that the enormous sacrifices that the Russians had to make in order to defeat Nazi Germany are belittled in the West.
Soviet citizens – that is, not only Russians – paid a huge price for the war. The numbers are disputed, but according to the Russian Academy of Sciences, the number of deaths was 26.6 million.
In Western countries, it is not necessarily fully understood how a traumatic memory trace of destruction of that scale left society.
On the other hand, official Russia’s own interpretation of history has steepened in the other direction: according to it, the Soviet leadership never did anything questionable in World War II.
Putin has defended, for example, the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided European countries into their respective fronts.
According to him, it was good diplomacy in the current situation.
You got a picture of Putin’s speech in Volgogradthat in the Second World War practically all of Europe was allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union – and thus above all against Russia.
– In addition to the largest group of the Wehrmacht and its satellites, the will of the entire Hitlerite coalition was defeated. The European vassals and henchmen of Nazi Germany – and in Stalingrad they were by no means fought a little, practically all the representatives of the subjugated European countries were there – began feverishly looking for a way to escape responsibility and put all the blame on the shoulders of the former masters, Putin explained in speech (you switch to another service).
Putin did not refer to the Allies at all, as if the Soviet Union had alone waged a war against Nazi Germany and its allies.
The Russian leadership is selling the message to the Russians that it was like that then and it is like this now: Russia is fighting against the entire collective West.
In this way, the war against a smaller neighboring state can be transformed in the rhetoric of the Russian leadership into a struggle for the existence of the whole of Russia.
According to this style, the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov you can say in the interview (you will switch to another service)that the West is trying to solve the “Russian question” once and for all, without considering the formulation in any way offensive to the victims of the Holocaust.