VICTORY DAY

On May 9, 2015, Donetsk celebrated in the rain. It was Victory Day, the annual commemoration of Germany’s surrender to the Soviet Union in 1945. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, stood in the drizzle and made a speech.

Onlookers stood under umbrellas, cheering “thank you” and throwing flowers at the stony-faced new heroes of Donbas. Men with noms de guerre like Givi and Motorola held their white-gloved hands in fixed salutes as they rode past on tanks. In the evening there were fireworks, as is customary on Victory Day, though one might have expected the residents of Donetsk to be tired of explosions after nearly a year of intermittent shelling.

In Russia, a spokesman at the Federal Agency for Air Transport announced that a group of planes would be ready to attack any Victory Day rain clouds with cement particles and silver iodide. When Putin made his speech on Red Square, he was surrounded by foreign dignitaries from China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Egypt, as well as Winston Churchill’s grandson, a Tory MP. Most European leaders skipped the parade in protest of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. To many Russians, it looked as though the once-Allied countries had forgotten that it was the Soviet Union that had rescued them from Nazism. Intercontinental missile carriers rolled through Moscow’s streets, and fighter jets formed a huge 70 in the sky.

Russia was eager to claim the heroes of the Second World War, but Russian soldiers who’d been sent to eastern Ukraine were another story. Putin made military deaths a state secret even in peacetime, an obvious attempt to conceal Russian casualties in Ukraine. Sometimes Russian soldiers were required to “retire” just before their deployment to Ukraine. Russia disavowed two of its soldiers who were captured in Luhansk. From a Kiev hospital bed, Aleksandr Aleksandrov, one of the two prisoners, said he had been unable to reach his wife for weeks, and begged a Russian journalist to tell her he still loved her. He couldn’t believe his country had abandoned him.

SEVENTY YEARS OF VICTORY!, posters all over Moscow cried, as if victory were not a historical occurrence but a permanent state of exaltation. The orange and black St. George ribbon snaked across walls, windows, cars, trains, lounge chairs, bread loaves, dog collars, vodka bottles, flip-flops, fingernails, and even sex toys. On my train from the Moscow airport, the conductor wore a floppy St. George’s bow that covered half her breast; the ribbon was unnaturally large, too big for a human being. In the metro I bought a ticket from a glowering, beribboned woman with horn-rimmed glasses, smeared pink lipstick, and a military hat decorated with a hammer and sickle pin. On the metro platform, a man who looked like he might be Kyrgyz or Kazakh was wearing a St. George ribbon like a bolo tie.

As I waited for a friend outside the Belarus metro station, I watched two vagrants trying to smash each other’s heads against the plastic walls of the metro entrance. They were too drunk to succeed. Beside them, a dog whined in protest; she was chained up and guarding a puppy. My friend arrived, and we went into a Georgian restaurant around the corner. A St. George ribbon flapped on our waiter’s chest.

The Moscow art group Blue Horseman satirized the ribbon cult with a private exhibit called “We Won.” Works included a faucet spouting ribbons as tiny toy soldiers looked on from above, a man vomiting ribbons into a metal basin, and a black and orange meat-grinder.

Law enforcement agents confiscated the Blue Horseman’s work, detained the artists, and sealed the gallery. When Basov refused to give them his passport, they beat him. He screamed for help, hoping that the police and members of the government press in the next room would hear him, but no one even knocked on the door. A Russian television station began its story on the exhibit with the line “On the eve of May 9, the police liquidated a Nazi lair in the very heart of Russia.” Swastikas were removed from historical exhibits, and toy Nazi soldiers and copies of Art Spiegelman’s Maus were pulled from stores.

When I passed the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, I saw that the lawn had been decorated with artificial roses as tall as electrical poles. Their plastic leaves waved in the breeze.

RAPIDLY ESCALATING TENSIONS between the United States and Russia, wild threats and accusations from both sides, had led to a predictable uptick in anti-American feeling in Russia.

“Sanctions are a form of collective punishment,” said Dmitry Muratov, editor of Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s last independent newspapers. “They’re aimed not at the people who are responsible for the war in eastern Ukraine, or at the people who financed it, but at the whole country. A tremendous amount of diplomacy has tried to make the West not an enemy, to make Russia part of the world—and now these efforts have been derailed. The Russian authorities can now explain any mistakes and failures—for example, unsuccessful medical or educational reforms, or the awful state of agriculture—by blaming our enemies. It’s a blockade mentality. People aren’t touched by sanctions in a substantive way, but propaganda has convinced them that we live in a world of enemies.”

I asked him about the involvement of Russian soldiers in Ukraine; Novaya Gazeta was one of the only Russian outlets reporting on it.

He gave me butter cookies in a Victory Day tin and two pastel mugs made to look like rusting tin army cups, decorated with the words WE WON! and NOT ONE STEP BACK! As I left, he showed me the desktop computer of the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. It sat in a display case in the newspaper’s front hall.

MOSCOW WAS BLOODTHIRSTY and cheerful. Tricolor Russian flags waved beside red Soviet Victory banners, and kiosks sold T-shirts showing Putin dressed as a Soviet soldier. On Arbat, a touristy pedestrian street, I stopped in front of a stage where people were doing Victory Day karaoke, right across from the American chain restaurant Shake Shack.

“Death is not frightening!” a man sang off-key. Everyone applauded.

Walking farther down Arbat, past the Moscow Torture Museum and a long series of souvenir shops, I saw an enormous mural of Marshal Zhukov, one of the generals who led Russia to victory in World War II. The marshal’s chest was plastered in medals, and his shoulders were too wide to fit on the wall. The painting was the work of United Russia, Putin’s party, which claimed that it was the largest Zhukov portrait in the world: 250 square meters. United Russia member Andrei Metelsky, a deputy in the Moscow city council, had explained that the portrait was “our small ‘thank you’ to veterans.” It was also, he added ominously, “a warning to those who have forgotten what war and victory are.”

I wandered through Muzeon, the sculpture garden where Soviet monuments were brought to rest. Lenins led the way and Brezhnevs scowled. One Stalin had no nose and looked less like a worn Roman statue than like the victim of a terrible accident. Yakov Sverdlov, a Bolshevik leader who died under suspicious circumstances in 1919, looked jaunty, with riding boots and a popped collar. It was hard to discern the features of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, because his pedestal was so high.

The Muzeon lawn was populated not only by political figures, but by monuments commemorating the Second World War. In one statue from 1950, a woman with a baby released a dove. Behind her stood an armless veteran and a Chinese woman holding the corpse of her own child. WE DEMAND PEACE! declared the statue’s inscription.

ON NOVEMBER 7, 1941, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin held a parade that was filmed and shown around the world. Troops marched directly from Red Square to the battlefields. With the Germans just outside Moscow, the stunt was an extraordinarily risky way of raising morale and cowing the enemy.

In his speech, Stalin invoked the great minds of Russian art and science and Russia’s national heroes: Aleksandr Nevsky, who defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1242; Dmitry Donskoy, who defeated the Tatars in 1380; Minin and Pozharsky, who defeated the Poles in the seventeenth century; Suvorov and Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon in the nineteenth century. The symbolic union of the USSR with imperialist-Orthodox Russia was uncongenial to some revolutionaries, but it was a reliable crowd-pleaser. To win the war, Stalin harnessed the energy of all the victories of the Russian Empire. It didn’t matter that the revolution had promised to abolish the imperial system for good. The old heroes and gods were too potent to be discarded.

After the war was won, the metro’s hammers and sickles were joined by artwork celebrating the greatest victory of all. Now these works were reminders of a state that had once been much more than just Russia. In Moscow’s Kiev metro station, mosaics showed the liberation of Kiev in 1943. A Lenin mural in another station read THE FRIENDSHIP OF THE PEOPLES IS THE STAUNCHEST BASTION OF A FREE FATHERLAND, a line from the Soviet anthem. Victory could not be separated from the memory of the days when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union; many of the war’s key battles occurred on Ukraine’s black earth.

After the war, the Ukrainian Republic played a correspondingly important role in the emerging Victory cult. War commemoration was incorporated into coming of age rites, wedding processions, and national holidays. This helped to counteract the wartime surge in Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, some of which the Party had encouraged for reasons of morale. The Victory cult also helped dull the memory of agricultural collectivization, which had killed millions of Ukrainians. According to Party rhetoric, Victory was final proof of the necessity of uniting the family of Soviet republics; all the sacrifices had been worth it.

WHEN I ARRIVED at Boris Kagarlitsky’s office at the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, where he was director, the only person there was an acned, overweight young man who had just finished a meal from McDonald’s. As we waited, I looked at the books on the shelves: the Soviet Encyclopedia, the collected works of Marx and Engels. A poster for Rabkor, the institute’s online journal (the title is a Soviet abbreviation for “worker-correspondent,” the name for freelance contributors to worker publications), showed a bullhorn in the shape of a revolver. Kagarlitsky, a Marxist theoretician and sociologist, was one of many Russian leftists who had embraced the idea of Novorossiya. In late 2014 he told a journalist that the Cossack separatist leader Aleksei Mozgovoi was the “best show in town from a left point of view.” Mozgovoi was later assassinated, perhaps for this reason.

Kagarlitsky walked in, accompanied by a dark-haired man in a limp suit.

“One of my friends said it very well: the liberals want to make it look like Putin is Hitler. But Putin isn’t Hitler, he’s Chamberlain,” Kagarlitsky told his friend, an exiled Moldovan leftist politician, who laughed knowingly. Enjoying their own performance, the men discussed the crisis in Ukraine and made analogies with the Russian Civil War, using Soviet terms like “antipeople” and asking questions like “Will it be red?” The room reeked of political conviction.

“When Brezhnev’s generation died—the generation of leaders who actually fought in the war—the legitimacy of the Soviet government disappeared with it,” Kagarlitsky told me once the Moldovan was gone. “Now Putin’s government is trying to establish legitimacy not based on any real historical experience, but by using late Soviet style and aesthetics. On television, you see dancing girls in uniforms of the Second World War. Half the girls with the red Soviet flag, and half with the tricolor Russian flag. The message is very clear: Russia is the successor of the Soviet Union, the heir to Victory. It looks like a mockery, a way of hiding the fact that the war was won by a different government, a different political and social system. They’re claiming a historical inheritance to which they don’t have sufficient rights.”

“Do you think the government is using Victory Day to prepare the population for war?” I asked.

“No. On the contrary. They do everything they can to make the people feel that they are not on the verge of a serious armed conflict. The Russian regime isn’t ready to fight with anyone. It’s ready to make friends with the West; it’s the West that doesn’t want to make friends with Russia. That’s Russia’s big problem—unrequited love for the West. The Putin regime is just trying to keep what it has. A dog has been hunting, and if you take away its kill, it starts to growl. That’s its dinner. Isn’t that right?”

UKRAINE WAS TRYING HARD to distance itself from the Soviet past. It declared May 8 “Victory in Europe” Day and replaced the Soviet term “Great Patriotic War” with “Second World War,” in keeping with European practice. May 9 became “Victory Day over Nazism in World War II,” a solemn rather than a festive affair. Kiev’s traditional Victory march was replaced by a peace march, without fireworks. The Motherland statue was crowned with a garland of red poppies, which are used in Europe to commemorate the war dead. St. George ribbons were frowned upon, or worse. A video circulated of two Svoboda members berating an older man who was trying to leave his home wearing a ribbon on his lapel; when he refused to go back inside, they doused him in kefir.

Shortly after Victory Day, Poroshenko signed new laws that attached criminal penalties to the display of Soviet and Nazi symbols in almost any context, and prohibited any denial of the “criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917–91 in Ukraine.” A second law, written by Yury Shukhevych, son of Ukrainian Insurgent Army general Roman Shukhevych, recognized the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as “independence fighters” and made it a criminal offense to question the legitimacy of their actions. Shukhevych was leader of one of the groups that had joined Right Sector; his law realized a cherished dream of Ukraine’s far right, enshrining the controversial nationalists as heroes. (Shukhevych had a life story that could have radicalized anyone: because of his father’s past, he was deported to Siberia at age eleven along with his mother, then sent to an orphanage for children of enemies of the people; at sixteen, he was sentenced to hard labor. He spent more than thirty years in Soviet camps and was blind by the time he was released, in the 1980s.)

The laws didn’t only affect discussion of the past; they also effectively banned Communism in contemporary Ukraine. The “memory laws” were criticized by historians, Poles, Jews, leftists, and advocates of free speech, among others. In its strenuous effort to break with the Soviet past, Ukraine was using Soviet-style tactics: the suppression of political speech and debate, and the imposition of an official version of history. The new laws were an act of symbolic violence against the civilization in which many Ukrainians grew up, and for which millions of Ukrainians lost their lives while fighting the Nazis. They were also an enormous waste of money at a time of economic collapse. Thousands of signs had to be changed and monuments removed, replaced with the heroes of the moment.

I WENT TO VISIT my old friend Max, the truck driver from Meganom, at his house in Dreamtown, a gated community outside Moscow. (The first time I’d visited him there, he crowed, “Well, what do you say? Is this Switzerland or what?”) Max had just returned from several months in Vietnam. When I had written to tell him I was coming, he’d joked, “You’re our only chance to tell the world that not everybody in Russia is a Putinoid.” Max didn’t like taking sides. It upset him when people turned into “Putinoids,” as most of his relatives and neighbors had, but he was also unhappy when his Ukrainian friends turned into “Maidanuts.” Either way, they lost themselves and became impossible to talk to. The Ukrainian contingent from Meganom no longer communicated with him, he said, except for his sometimes-girlfriend, Alyona, who had moved back in with him as soon as things got crazy in Ukraine.

But he had new Ukrainians in his life. An old acquaintance from Luhansk had gotten in touch with him over the summer, and Max had let the friend and his family stay with him. Two other families had followed. Max said there were a lot of Ukrainian men living in Russia to avoid being sent to fight in the east. Putin had made it easier for them by changing the rules about how many days a Ukrainian could stay. Max and I agreed that this was one of Putin’s better moments.

“Of course a lot of refugees were taken in by Muscovites,” Max said. “Why wouldn’t they be? It was one country so recently.” As a former truck driver, he was opposed to borders on principle.

While Max and I were having dinner, a neighbor named Natasha came over to visit. She was from Mariupol, in the Donetsk region, and had left to get away from the conflict. Now she was living in an unfinished house in Dreamtown. Plump and smiling, with glasses and short dark hair, she exuded the almost desperate cheer and friendliness of the recently resettled; she reminded me of Tanya Savchenko in Dnipropetrovsk. She had brought batter for syrniki, fried pancakes made with soft white cheese and raisins. Like a true Ukrainian mother, she fried enough pancakes to last a week. They were delicious.

“What do you think of Dancing with the Stars?” Natasha asked me shyly. I told her I didn’t watch it but knew what it was.

“Oh, I love it very much,” she said. “My favorite is Derek Hough. I can tell from his dancing that he’s a good person.”

Max said he regretted that he couldn’t speak English. “People don’t speak with languages, they speak with their hearts,” Natasha said, with her sweet smile. This was another way to avoid taking sides, especially important, no doubt, for a Ukrainian refugee in Russia: a denial of boundaries, an all-encompassing kindness and optimism.

Max had been in Crimea in the fall; he reported that everyone there was very happy about Russia, selling Putin magnets with affection and respect. To him it didn’t matter whether Crimea belonged to Russia or to Ukraine; he only wished there wouldn’t be any more corpses. Crimea had once been the center of his fantasy world, the destination of his life; now it had been replaced by Vietnam.

BELGOROD, THE HOMETOWN of Olga and Sanya, my friends from Crimea, was a midsize city twenty-five miles from the northeastern Ukrainian border, just fifty miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Because of its location, Belgorod was hit hard by World War II. It was occupied by the Germans from October 1941 until early 1943, then recaptured by the Germans at the end of that year. The Red Army liberated it after the Battle of Kursk, the world’s largest tank battle, which saw 863,000 Soviet and nearly 200,000 German casualties. The journalist Alexander Werth wrote that when he arrived in the area north of the city, the earth was dead for miles around, and “the air was filled with the stench of half-buried corpses.”

Belgorod’s airport was on Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street (the double of my old street in Kiev), just one sign of Belgorod’s close ties to Ukraine. In 1918 Belgorod had been part of the short-lived Ukrainian state established by German-backed Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. When Skoropadsky was overthrown, Belgorod became Ukraine’s temporary capital. Some residents, like Sanya, spoke with guttural accents like those in eastern Ukraine, and sprinkled the occasional Ukrainian word into their speech.

Olga and Sanya told me that one Ukrainian friend had disowned her sister for going back to Meganom after it became Russian. Before the conflict, people had moved between Belgorod and Kharkiv with little sense that they were crossing a national boundary. Now a border crossing required time, documents, and money, and people didn’t do it unless it was absolutely necessary. Many of those who crossed were escaping the violence in eastern Ukraine. Sanya said there had been long lines at the border at Easter, when people had been to visit the graves of relatives killed in the conflict.

OLGA AND I WOKE UP early on the morning of Victory Day to go to Belgorod’s Immortal Regiment march. Organized several years earlier by journalists from a respected independent television station, the Immortal Regiment began as a nonpolitical, nongovernmental initiative to encourage people to collect and share information about family members who served in the war. Every Victory Day, participants marched carrying pictures of their relatives. The project was an attempt to focus attention on the real people who fought in the real war, on historical reality rather than jingoistic fantasy. Not all of the stories on the Immortal Regiment’s website were about heroic feats: one person wrote about how his grandfather arrived late to the draft office and was never seen again.

Belgorod was a relatively small city, and we’d spent the last day and a half wandering through empty streets. Now we were confronted with a sea of faces, living and dead. Olga kept seeing acquaintances carrying portraits of their grandparents or great-grandparents. Many of the portraits we saw were handmade, often with carefully assembled collages of photographs and words.

A group walked by carrying a huge red Soviet Victory banner and a large portrait of Stalin. Nearby, a man in a mass-produced red Stalin T-shirt was waving a Soviet flag and carrying a bunch of red roses. Another man in an identical shirt soon joined him. A heavily made-up young woman paired the same top with red high heels.

“How do you feel when you see people with Stalin’s portrait?” I asked Olga.

“I feel completely calm about it,” she said resolutely. “I’m not a political person.” After a pause, she added, “But I’m surprised to see them at the parade. And there are moments... I saw a picture recently online, of Gumilyov”—the poet, husband of Anna Akhmatova, shot by the Cheka in 1921—“after he was tortured. And then I did think about the terrible things that Stalin did. You know, my great-grandfather fought in the war, and came home afterward. He was living in a village outside the city, where it was safer, but someone got jealous of him and informed on him falsely. He was deported to Siberia and shot.”

Vendors were selling balloon tanks and helicopters along with balloon SpongeBob SquarePants and hearts that said I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH in English. Men dressed as Cossacks stood on guard, knouts in hand. I bought a Victory Day ice cream bar.

Whole families were dressed in Soviet uniforms or in camouflage. A woman pushing her uniformed toddler in a stroller looked like a parody of a war nurse. Family members of all ages competed to see who could assemble and disassemble a rifle fastest, and posed for photos with an actor-soldier on a vintage military motorcycle. Two tanks swarmed with little children, and a boy in uniform marched in circles on the back of a military truck. A tiny dark-haired girl, perhaps five years old, recited a poem into a microphone held by a man in uniform. It ended, “What is Victory Day? It means there is no war.”

An older woman, whose hair was dyed the same shade of purple as her raincoat, told me that she was carrying the portrait of her grandfather, who had been killed just two months before the end of the war, when he was only twenty-three. She looked like she was about to cry.

“I’m tired,” she said mournfully. “I’m going home.”

Olga and I were also tired; we stopped in a cafe for coffee. A grinning man sitting alone at one of the tables said, “Girls, where are your ribbons? Today is an important day! It’s our duty to celebrate!” He was visibly drunk, though it wasn’t yet eleven a.m.

Every store was decorated in honor of Victory Day, which led to strange juxtapositions like

BELGOROD IS A CITY OF MILITARY GLORY

MEAT

FISH

CANDY

UNDERWEAR

Walking down the city’s main stretch, we passed the offices of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, which did PR and recruiting for the more recent war.

After the parade we met up with Vasya and Misha, a gay couple who were Olga’s close friends. The flamboyant Vasya was wearing bell-bottoms, a T-shirt with orange stripes, and a St. George ribbon. Like pretty much everyone else I talked to in Belgorod, he loved Victory Day.

We went over to his and Misha’s apartment, which featured velvet curtains and an immense collection of cat figurines. Like Olga and Sanya’s apartment, it was lovingly renovated and obsessively tidy. People in Belgorod seemed to devote most of their energy to interior decoration and childrearing. The world outside was too sinister; the only way to find happiness was to turn inward. Your home was your country, as the Ukrainians liked to say.

More friends arrived, and we went to grill sausages and chicken in Vasya and Misha’s garage, which was almost as well decorated as their apartment. The neighbors had disguised their cars as tanks and airplanes, with red stars and hammers and sickles. The back of one car had cardboard rockets and the words TO BERLIN.

Dima, an old friend from Meganom, joined us. He told me that his grandfather had made it all the way to Berlin, where he fell in love with a German woman whom he married and brought back to Russia. They were repressed, sent to the taiga; they were lucky they weren’t shot.

Dima had been working in construction, building houses on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Now no one wanted houses there, and he was broke.

“Death to traitors,” he said ironically, lifting his glass of vodka, “and to fascists.”

We went up to the roof to watch the fireworks, which were just across the street. The blasts were deafening and the air was thick with smoke.

“This is how the universe began,” Dima yelled into my ear, “with explosions.”

Back in the apartment, Vasya put on a record of patriotic Russian power pop. Olga was telling everyone about how moved she’d been by the Immortal Regiment.

“I had goose bumps! There were tears in my eyes!” she kept saying, though when we’d been there, she’d registered almost no emotion.

By now all the men were extremely drunk. I started drinking vodka, too. The atmosphere of close-lipped happiness in the room, in Belgorod, in Russia, had become too much for me.

“Sophie, let’s drink to Bruderschaft!” Dima said.

I knew that Bruderschaft meant “brotherhood,” so I consented. Dima poured us two shots and linked my arm in his. We drank, and he leaned in to kiss me with an open mouth.

I pulled away, laughing awkwardly.

“You ruined the toast,” he said. “Now it won’t work.” I’d hurt his feelings.

I moved over to Lyosha, another friend of Olga’s, and asked him what he thought about the conflict in Ukraine.

Leaning in close, he told me he’d been feeling paranoid.

“You know,” he slurred, “when I heard about the fire in Odessa, I wanted to drop everything and go and fight for Donbas. But now I think about how I reacted, and I wonder if the whole thing was just a Russian provocation. Sometimes I watch the Ukrainian news and then the Russian news, just to compare. All of them are lying. They tell you everything is black and white, but it’s not that way at all. There are no heroes in this. In Belgorod, we all know people who’ve come from eastern Ukraine. They tell us about being attacked by Ukrainian forces and by the rebels—by both sides. They’ve been as close to the fighting as we were to the fireworks.”

He held his palm up to his face to demonstrate.

“Do you think Russian soldiers are fighting in Donbas?” I asked.

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think so. But everyone thinks I’m wrong—even my friends. Even my mother.”

We drank to peace, again and again.