Victory Day: Three Interventions from the Left

May 8, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Today, its meaning and legacy are still hotly contested. Putin’s Russia asserts itself as the exclusive heir to the victors and presents the war against Ukraine as a continuation of the fight against fascism. Meanwhile, it is Russian aggression that undermines the principles of European security and international law that emerged from 1945. Kremlin propaganda seeks to appropriate the Allied victory in WWII, thus erasing anti-fascist solidarity from personal and collective memory and rendering the very concept of fascism meaningless.

What do the lessons of WWII mean today? What stance should the international left take towards its legacy? And is it possible to resist the Kremlin’s ideological appropriation? We present three contributions on the modern-day meaning and significance of what is known in Russia as Victory Day. Two contributors come from post-Soviet countries, and one from Europe. Hanna Perekhoda is a researcher and activist from Ukraine; Elena Gapova is a Professor of Sociology (Western Michigan University); and Bernd Gehrke, historian and publisher, is a member of the left-wing opposition in the GDR.

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Hanna Perekhoda, Ukrainian historian, researcher, and activist 

From Kyiv to Brussels: The Great Patriotic War as Putin’s propaganda

Since the Maidan uprising and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainian leaders as Nazis or fascists. Russia also accused the Ukrainian authorities of “genocide” of the population of Donbass. On 24 February 2022, while announcing the full-scale invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine was presented as the primary goal of the war, which is itself portrayed merely as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: a conflict embedded in a cyclical conception of time in which Russia, eternally under threat from a Western enemy, fights for its very survival — on Ukrainian soil.

On the ground, there is no evidence to support Moscow’s accusations: nobody has ever documented a “genocide” against ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. As for the Ukrainian far-right, its political influence remains minimal: in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the main ultra-nationalist parties, running together on a joint list, received just over 2% of the vote, well below the threshold required to enter Parliament. In short, the image of a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv is based on a glaring mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

So why do the Russian authorities repeatedly invoke references to the Second World War — or, in Russian parlance, the “Great Patriotic War” — when speaking about Ukraine? Understanding this memory dynamic is essential to grasp the power of a rhetoric that, despite lacking any factual basis, continues to shape the official Russian worldview.

The Soviet and Russian insistence on using the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer exclusively to the period from 1941 to 1945 erases the twenty-one months that preceded Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR. Between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, and Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies: they engaged in extensive economic cooperation, diplomatic coordination, jointly invaded and partitioned Poland in September 1939, and the Soviet Union proceeded to annex the Baltic countries and wage war against Finland. By reducing the war to the period 1941–1945, the USSR and Russia could deny any responsibility in the outbreak of the Second World War and present itself solely as the victim of Nazi aggression and the primary liberator of Europe.

The Great Patriotic War — and especially the victory in 1945 — became the founding event of Soviet history and the cornerstone of collective memory. Yet this memory, often portrayed as monolithic and universally shared, is anything but uniform. A Ukrainian from the west, who endured two successive occupations between 1939 and 1944, remembers a war very different from that of an eastern Ukrainian, whose experience was shaped primarily by Nazi destruction. The memory of a Russian bears little resemblance to that of a Crimean Tatar, who was deported along with his entire community and denied the right of return for decades. As for Soviet Jews, whose families and communities were annihilated in the Holocaust, they were long forced to remain silent — official narratives left no room for the specificity of their suffering.

The collective experience of the war and the official discourse surrounding it deeply reshaped the Soviet population’s understanding of “fascism” and “antifascism.” Rather than referring to a specific political doctrine of the inter-war period, the term “fascism” had become a catch-all label for the ultimate enemy. Trotsky or the British Conservatives could just as easily be branded as “fascists,” as well as domestic and international opponents after 1945 — including even the Chinese Communists. The word “Nazi” itself was rarely used. In everyday life, calling someone a “fascist” served more as the gravest possible insult rather than as a statement of ideological substance.

Under Vladimir Putin, the cult of the Great Patriotic War has been revived. Following the pro-democracy protests of 2011 and Putin’s bid for a third presidential term in 2012, the regime instituted a deliberate policy of historical narrative construction, aimed at grounding its legitimacy in a vision of the nation as under siege. The glorification of the 1945 victory also allowed the regime to purge collective memory of its specifically socialist elements: by retaining only the narrative of national triumph, the Soviet period could be seamlessly integrated into a continuous national history without any revolutionary rupture. At the same time, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin as a legitimate victor served to validate autocracy. The mass repressions and genocidal policies that claimed millions of lives were reframed as a tragic but necessary step: they had made the USSR a global superpower, capable of defending civilization against the “brown plague.”

The Kremlin has multiplied its legal instruments to enforce this narrative. Since 2020, the Russian Constitution mandates “respect for the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” and prohibits “diminishing the importance of the heroism” of the Soviet people. In April 2021, Putin signed a law increasing penalties for “insults” or “false claims” about the Second World War and its veterans. In December 2019, Putin himself gathered some leaders of post-Soviet states around a pile of archival documents that he said proved historical truths long ignored in the West — selectively quoting them to justify, in retrospect, the USSR’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states. In this way, Putin has weaponized history, which has become inseparable from national interest. To challenge his interpretation is tantamount to treason.

Every year on May 9, Russians march in the Immortal Regiment carrying portraits of relatives who fought between 1941 and 1945. Increasingly, the faces of those who fought — or died — in the war against Ukraine are added to these ranks, as though both wars were part of a single, endless struggle. Past and present warfare are merged, and the victory of 1945 becomes the lens through which all events — past, present, and future — are interpreted in a continuous historical timeline. This symbolic fusion also explains the surreal images of Russian occupation forces who, in recent weeks, have placed propaganda banners in destroyed Ukrainian cities. An uninhabitable Bakhmut was transformed into a stage for celebrating the 80th anniversary of Russia’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” 

The cult of victory is not only a central element of the Putinist imaginary — it functions as an operating system for both domestic governance and external aggression, with all of Russia’s actions on the international stage framed as part of an eternal war against fascism. A telling example of this is the installation of a giant screen on the Estonian border, broadcasting Victory Day celebrations in a loop — an attempt to remind Estonians, as well as Latvians and Lithuanians, that the Soviet victory represents an unassailable moral superiority. In the Russian collective imagination, the word “fascism” has lost all connection with a specific political ideology and now refers only to an abstract, absolute threat: the desire to destroy Russia. It has become synonymous with “enemy” or “Russophobe,” always denoting the Other, never a historically defined movement. This separation between word and meaning allows the regime to simultaneously glorify the antifascist victory and openly promote xenophobic, homophobic, or ultraconservative rhetoric, without any perceived contradiction.

The word “denazification,” used by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, to justify the invasion, initially puzzled many Russians, most of whom were unfamiliar with the term in this context. Shortly afterwards, the state news agency RIA Novosti published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev — What Russia Should Do with Ukraine — aimed at clarifying its meaning: “denazification” was described as a “total cleansing,” targeting not only alleged Nazi leaders but also “the popular masses who are passive Nazis,” deemed guilty of having supported the “Nazi government.” According to Sergeytsev, modern Ukraine is able to hide its Nazism behind aspirations for “independence” and “European development.” To destroy this Nazism, he argues, is to “de-Europeanise” Ukraine. In this logic, denazification becomes synonymous with eliminating all Western influence from Ukraine and dismantling the country’s existence as a nation-state and a distinct society. Incubated on official state platforms, this narrative reveals the true scope of “denazification”: a large-scale project aimed at erasing any trace of Ukrainian singularity, a blueprint for the genocide.

The article recently published on the official website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), entitled “Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington,” strikingly illustrates the expansion of the “denazification” discourse far beyond Ukraine. The accompanying image depicts a grotesque hybrid monster: its body is shaped like a black swastika with the EU's circle of stars in the centre, while its head is a caricature of Ursula von der Leyen. The creature, with its blood-stained claws outstretched, is caught between two bayonets — one American, the other Russian/Soviet. This grotesque image is not merely a provocation: it reflects a narrative deeply entrenched in Russian state propaganda, where “Eurofascism” becomes an operational concept encompassing all European societies.

The 2022 tipping point revealed these discourses for what they truly are: the ideological foundation of a large-scale invasion, long prepared within the informational sphere. Today, part of European society — particularly elements of the pacifist left — is falling into the same trap: underestimating or ignoring the ongoing propaganda dynamic. But the machine is already in motion. The language of fascism is being broadened daily to include new designated enemies, and the ideological war is shifting: it is no longer stopping at Ukraine — it is now targeting all of Europe. In the face of this brutal reconfiguration of the official Russian narrative, complacency or passivity have themselves become forms of strategic blindness.

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Elena Gapova, Professor of Sociology, Western Michigan University

Once on Victory Day, I posted a picture on my Facebook page: the year 1974, the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus. Veterans march down the Minsk main avenue in a formation — elderly, but not yet old people adorned with medals, many women among them. People were lining along the streets and throwing flowers at their feet.

What struck me was a reaction to that post from a (relatively) young man whom I once taught in graduate school. “I imagine,” he wrote, “that all those people were brought by the authorities to greet the veterans.” He simply couldn't fathom that no one had been transported or coerced — that people had come of their own accord, standing for several kilometers along the avenue, tossing flowers onto the pavement, many in tears. I was there with my mother, and I remember the lump in my throat. At the monument on Victory Square, where the procession ended, there was an enormous mound of flowers, all day long people were approaching it. All of them belonged to generations of living witnesses of the war among their family. There was no need to organize them from above. I began to explain this to the (relatively) young man, but he still didn't believe it, saying that it was impossible, that it could never happen. Indeed, some work must have been done to change the meaning of May 9 in such a way that led a person who grew up in Belarus (where, as it is known, every fourth person died in the war) to stop believing in the significance of this day. I realize that everything connected with it is used by propaganda, especially today, and it causes rejection. On the other hand, there's the prevailing attitude towards the “Soviet” that underpins all this.  It is almost impossible to recognize a victory since it is “Soviet.” To untangle all these contradictions and complexities, one often lacks the intellectual energy or human courage. Here are my reflections on this issue.

In 2008, Barbara Epstein, a historian at the University of Santa Barbara in California, published The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism. She believes that proportionately more Jews survived in Soviet (i.e., eastern) Belarus than in neighboring Lithuania or Poland. She gives several reasons for this, the main one being Soviet-educated internationalism. Barbara collected data for the book — memories, archival documents, interviews with witnesses still alive at the time — in Israel and Belarus, and at one point she stayed for a short time with me in Minsk (she mainly stayed at a different place, but somehow everyone there got the flu, so she asked me to spend some time in “quarantine”). During our prolonged talks over coffee in my kitchen, she explained that the crucial thing was that these people, both Jews and non-Jews, lived close to one another, worked together, had their children go to kindergarten together, and often belonged to the same party organization. And, after all, they shared a common communist ideology.

In the early 2000s, I asked Barbara to write a text for Women at the Edge of Europe, the collection I was editing. The text was about women in the resistance of the Minsk ghetto, where the Jews from Europe were brought. There was both a communist, “Soviet” underground and a “spontaneous” underground; some were rescued fleeing to the partisans in the forest. The ghetto was liquidated in November 1943: we all know what that means. On the basis of the evidence she had at that time, Barbara wrote a short text. Here is its last paragraph: “To conclude her account of underground activity in the ghetto, Helena Maysles writes: ‘I want to point out the friendship between people of different nationalities. When we were forced to move into the ghetto, my Belarusian neighbors sheltered my 17-year-old daughter; on November 24, they came to the ghetto and took my 3-year-old son as well.’ It was friendship between people of different nationalities that allowed a significant number of Jews from the Minsk ghetto to break free, especially when this number is compared to the situations in other ghettos in Eastern Europe. Aron Fiterzon, who was also a part of the Minsk ghetto underground, writes: ‘I must say that if it had not been for the Belarusian and Russian comrades and the underground organization in the Russian district, hardly any of the Jews would have survived. It is only thanks to them that we remained alive.’” This testimony is from the Yad Vashem Archive. I feel like adding a few personal words “from myself” to this long quotation. I know this from everyday family discussions. Something said not specifically about the war, but as if in passing, while doing the dishes. Like how my father's Jewish family in a small Belarusian town was put in a truck by Soviet authorities and taken to the Urals, to Chelyabinsk in the summer of 1941, when German tanks were so close one could hear them. Everyone survived. Or how my mother, a girl from a Belarusian village, a first-year linguistics student in Leningrad, received a letter from my father from near Vitebsk: “Don't come home, Vitebsk is burning.” Or the story of how my grandmother, with her blind husband, a village teacher, and three small children evacuated by foot. How the glorious Luftwaffe bombed those columns of women and children going east. I once met a young woman in the US, a PhD student, whose grandmother was also in those columns. How my husband's grandfather was already gone to the front before the Mogilev region was occupied in the first days of July, and his wife and three children learned about his death in the battles for Lvov only after the liberation. As on May 9th my mother always said: “During the blockade, I was saved by the Leningraders [translator’s note: residents of what is now known as St. Petersburg]. I was a girl from a Belarusian village, I didn't even have a winter coat. I could have lain in that ditch with two million others…”

What can one add to this? A great and tragic day.

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Bernd Gehrke, historian and publisher, a member of the left-wing opposition in the GDR

May 8, 1945: Between Liberation and a New World Order of Blocs

May 8, 2025, marks the eightieth anniversary of the Allied victory over fascist Germany. The brutal regime was overthrown, and the war that resulted in 60 million fatalities was finally brought to a conclusion. In addition to the profound joy that both the liberators and the liberated experienced at the end of the war that brought about their liberation from fascism, May 8, 1945, is also associated with a variety of historical experiences, perspectives, and feelings, some of which may even contradict one another. “Liberation Day” also marked the formation of a new global order and the emergence of imperialistic blocs, thus leading to the division of Europe under the Yalta regime. Western victorious powers, including England and France, sought to maintain their colonial empires by engaging in war and attempting to bring their spheres of influence back under their control. The USA’s influence extended beyond the Western European region, solidifying its role as a dominant global power during the period known as the Pax Americana. 

The countries of Eastern Europe that were absorbed into the Soviet sphere underwent a transition to new dictatorial regimes, marking the conclusion of a brief period of freedom that had ensued after the dissolution of the Nazi rule. Many of those who had fought for liberation from fascism soon saw their hopes for a socialist and democratic country betrayed in East Germany and Eastern Europe (and also in Western Europe or in the USA under McCarthy) — or even found themselves exposed to new persecution and terror. The conclusion of the fascist regime and armed conflict as well as the period of liberation, awakening, and hardship associated with the implementation of a new international order by the global powers are therefore equivalent to May 8, 1945.

Despite the contradictory effects of May 8, 1945, for the German left in particular, this day is a symbol of liberation. For Germany, the nation that instigated the fascist turmoil on a global scale, the country that was responsible for the genocide of the European Jews, the Sinti, and the Roma as well as the violent ‘Germanisation’ of Poland and the genocidal war of extermination against the Soviet Union, the end of the Nazi regime meant above all the liberation of all the prisoners of the concentration camps and prisons, the millions of forced labourers and anti-fascists. Since 1933, German anti-fascists have been imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in concentration camps and prisons. This also applied to other fascist developments. The crushing and murder of the German left was the prerequisite for all the crimes committed by fascist Germany against other peoples. This underscores the significance of May 8th as a day of liberation for Germany. This is particularly salient given that contemporary German reactionaries have historically downplayed and denied the fascist crimes committed.

Despite the fact that the day of liberation on May 8, 1945, did not mark the anticipated socialist freedom for the left in Eastern and Western Europe, the significance of this event cannot be overstated. In Germany and the rest of Europe, the systemic competition between imperialist blocs evolved into a contest over social and democratic values, influencing practical politics on all sides. Despite the division caused by the bloc confrontation that passed directly through Germany, the Germans on both sides benefited from the systemic competition. The East Germans were spared the massive Stalinist terror campaigns that the other Eastern European satellite states had to endure after 1945. In West Germany, the GDR consistently engaged in discreet negotiations as a bargaining partner, encouraging capital to engage in compromise with labor to prevent open class struggles, which would have favored the communists. As a result, wages and social benefits increased, even without significant strikes like those seen in France or Italy.

From a global perspective, the post-war Yalta order in Europe was inextricably linked to the founding of the United Nations and the establishment of a system of international law and human rights based on multilateralism and the renunciation of violence. The USA and the Soviet Union had the potential to provide targeted support to the colonial peoples in their struggle against the old colonial empires of Great Britain and France. The UN Charter and human rights were established as fundamental principles, a decision that was influenced by the lessons learned from two world wars and the atrocities of German fascism.

However, the existence of imperialist blocs and new post-colonial imperialist power relations has repeatedly led to their violation. The USA’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union’s occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968 are just two examples of the many ways in which these rules have been broken by the imperialist powers. However, the anti-war and human rights movements, along with their accusations of UN rule violations and the dishonesty of those in power, demonstrate the civilising impact of these rights, which have been hard-won. The UN Charter and UN human rights played a pivotal role in fostering opposition in both Eastern and Western Europe in the 1980s. Similarly, the 1975 final document of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe laid the foundation for a model of antagonistic peace that has proven effective in numerous conflict regions worldwide.

However, we are currently experiencing a significant shift in the global balance of power. In the span of less than three decades of US global hegemony following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it became evident that the nation’s influence had reached its limits. The pursuit of regional dominance led to a state of perpetual war, resulting in the devastation of numerous Middle Eastern countries. These actions indicated a shift in global power dynamics, prompting the Putin regime to initiate its attack on Ukraine and the European peace order. It appears that Putin’s anticipated multipolar world order, influenced by the actions of the fascist US President Donald Trump, will now more quickly replace the multilateral order enshrined in the UN Charter. At the recent Munich Security Conference, the Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China also spoke of a multipolar world order. However, the PRC has always emphasized multilateralism in international relations.

It is my belief that, as an emancipatory socialist left, the following responses are necessary to confront contemporary challenges:

1. Top priority must be given to the concept and implementation of internationalism in the context of global nationalism. This means, above all, providing support to the internationalist left in all countries and, as far as possible, unifying it.

2. An emancipatory left must advocate for the standards generally recognised after World War II and with the establishment of the United Nations as the minimum requirements for any political system. It is imperative that the violations of these rules by any power be acknowledged rather than denied.

3. Without neglecting global contacts and relations along value chains, the emancipatory left in Europe should focus on creating a different, radically democratic, social and ecological Europe in place of today’s neoliberal European Union.​ ​That would be a Europe that would be able to establish a social alternative and a firm opposition to the nationalist and imperialist new superpowers.

4. In light of the global threat to democratic and social freedoms, as defined by the UN Convention on Human Rights and the standards of the International Labour Organization, posed by both internal and external enemies of democratic states, such an alternative can only exist if it is capable of defending itself both internally and externally. The significance of this for the current emancipatory left in Europe must finally be the subject of a serious debate in the spirit of emancipatory socialism about an independent military policy that takes seriously both the internal and external threats to freedom, democracy, and social progress.