ДЕНЬ ПОБЕДЫ как он был от нас далёк

The Victory Day is celebrated on May 9th in Russia and other ex-USSR countries as opposed to the May 8th in the West, and this day for many years has been associated with this song actually composed some 30 years after the war. My personal attitude to the Victory Day has changed over the years from blind belief into the school book propaganda to I hope a more balanced and informed view. I don’t really like the more recent attempts to turn this day into some blind propaganda-fuelled event. To me this should rather be a day of remembering all those 20 million plus Soviet people who lost their lives prematurely both in the war effort itself but also through mismanagement and domestic repressions. The school books conveniently taught us that the war started on 22 June 1941, conveniently omitting some historical facts, including the 1939 partition of Poland by the USSR and Nazi Germany and the pact of Molotov-Ribbentrop. We may not know all of the facts about this war now that the generation of people directly involved is disappearing. However, looking from the current days, it’s sad to see that Russia is still lagging behind in living standards compared to the countries that lost the war