The next crucial date in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

May 9 is Victory Day in Russia, which marks the anniversary of the end of World War II, or as it is known there, the Great Patriotic War. Putin has elevated the memory of that conflict to the status of a national religion in recent years, as he has exploited the war to rally support for his leadership and transformed Victory Day into the country’s most important national holiday. Russian troops were reportedly originally told they must win the war in Ukraine by May 9, in time for Victory Day celebrations, and the Ukrainian military says it has recovered full dress uniforms from Russian positions. abandoned on the outskirts of kyiv, presumably with the intention of using them for a triumphal parade. once they had captured the city.

The Russian president’s initial plans for a quick victory in Ukraine have been dashed, but that does not mean he is prepared to tolerate defeat. Instead, British defense officials have warned that Putin will step up his offensive in coming days to show significant progress. “Russia is likely to want to demonstrate significant success ahead of its annual Victory Day celebrations on May 9,” said a UK intelligence update on April 21. “This could affect how quickly and how hard they try to conduct operations in the run up to this date. ”

Victory Day has not always played such a crucial role in the Russian political calendar. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin canceled the holiday shortly after it was established, apparently concerned that focusing too much on the conflict and the immense suffering he had caused would be detrimental to his rule and distract from the pressing business of the day. His chief propagandist issued a directive to propaganda workers instructing them to discourage the notion that “people should take time to recover after the war” and move on to the great battle to build socialism at home. The paranoid dictator also demoted some of his most prominent wartime commanders, worried they might attract too much popular support and detract from his own magnificence. A brief notice in major newspapers in December 1947 announced that May 9 was now a normal weekday.

It was not until 1965 that then General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev reintroduced the Victory Day holiday and resurrected the memory of the war. Lenin’s revolution was nearly half a century old by then, and though portraits and quotes of the former leader were still everywhere, the intensity of his appeal was fading. Meanwhile, the image of his successor, Stalin, had been completely tarnished after Nikita Khrushchev denounced the horrors of his rule in 1956. Brezhnev needed a new idea to rally popular support behind the Communist Party, and war was the answer. best option available at the moment. weather. He also suited her personally, as he was able to draw on his own service during the war and present himself as a heroic front-line officer, when in fact he had been a minor political commissar stationed far from the famous battle lines. .

Two years later, in 1967, Brezhnev inaugurated a new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier next to the Kremlin to commemorate the fallen in the Great Patriotic War. The remains of a Red Army soldier were exhumed from the site of the Battle of Moscow and buried with full military honors in the new monument. A portion of the eternal flame from the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was transported inside an armored personnel carrier to Moscow, where it was used to light a new eternal flame at the war memorial. It was a symbolic as well as a real passing of the torch, as the party turned to war as a new source of legitimacy. During his 18 years in power, Brezhnev doubled down on patriotic education and presided over what has been described as the “cult of the Great Patriotic War.”

When Putin was appointed interim president in December 1999, he too needed a popular symbol to unite the country and build support for his regime. Just as Brezhnev had done 34 years earlier, he settled on the memory of the war. His cult status had vanished during the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms when he allowed for a more critical interrogation of the country’s past, and any remaining triumphalism had disappeared with the collapse of the USSR. Boris Yeltsin set up a committee to find a new “national idea” for Russia in 1997, but he came up empty-handed. Putin had no intention of repeating the public soul-searching and quickly seized on the Soviet victory as the founding myth of his regime.

Two days after taking office as president on May 7, 2000, Putin presided over his first Victory Day commemoration, laying out a vision of Russia as the “victorious country” that had saved the world from Nazism. “Just as the greatness of our homeland is immortal,” he declared, “the pride of the nation and Russian patriotism are immortal.” Russia has always been a great power, he said, “and will remain so forever.”

Putin has cultivated this image of Russia as the heroic nation that defeated Hitler during his two decades in power, insisting that a fascist threat is rising in Europe once again, and that the Russians must defeat their enemies now as they did. their ancestors during the Great Patriotic War. War. He has exploited this version of the story to justify his invasion of Ukraine to his national audience. There is already evidence that his forces are rehearsing for huge parades through Moscow and St. Petersburg on the upcoming Victory Day, with the symbol of the current conflict, the letter “Z”, front and center.

Putin cannot win this war by May 9, but he will declare victories in the first few battles, insisting that he has “liberated” cities like Mariupol, even as in real life he has bombed these peaceful places to ruins and terrorized their citizens. residents. And he will use the anniversary of the last war to mobilize even greater support for his war in Ukraine and to prepare his citizens for the prospect of a long and bloody conflict to come.

-Millisecond. Stallard is Senior China and Global Affairs Editor at The New Statesman and a Nonresident Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. She is the author of “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia and North Korea. ”