'Happy Victory Day', Red Square 2010.
Today is День Победы (dyen pobyedi), Victory Day in Russia, marking the end of WWII in Europe. VE Day doesn’t typically get a huge amount of attention where I'm from (the UK) most years, although the multiples of five and ten tend to generate a bit of additional public interest and a few more column inches. Not so in Russia. It’s huge. Every year.
While it would be naïve to suggest that there aren’t other reasons for this contrast in commemoration, the massive disparity between the numbers of casualties suffered by the Soviets in comparison to the Western Allies certainly has to be a very significant factor.
You'll probably have heard some variation of the line, ‘one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic’ at some point, It’s infamous mainly due to its startling callousness and the fact that has long been attributed to Joseph Stalin, but also, I suspect, because there a sickening element of truth in there somewhere. Numbers, after all, can and often do have a numbing effect.
Although the video that I’m sharing here explicitly focuses on the numbers en masse rather than the individual people, for me, the medium provides a partial antidote to the aforementioned numbness. Neil Halloran has found an simple but elegant way to convey what is quite frequently said to be unimaginable. The starkness of the presentation gives the numbers back some emotional heft.
True, the video is less Russia-centric than what I would usually include here, and, understandably for something produced in the States by an American primarily for an audience of his compatriots, it starts off with the US Forces and goes from there. In an odd way though, that context adds all the more force to when the losses on the Eastern Front for both sides, but especially for the Soviets, are brought into the picture later on.
It's sobering stuff.
Here it is in English:
And again, in Russian this time:
