Russia looks back to the war to rekindle national pride

May 1 was a glorious spring day in Pskov. Young people roller-skated or lounged on the banks of the Velikaya river. But 14-year-old Vladimir instead chose to spend the day standing vigil at a war memorial.

Every 10 minutes, he and eight fellow camouflage-clad members of a local patriotic club, took turns goose-stepping in front of an eternal flame and an anti-aircraft gun battery used in 1941, when the town in northwestern Russia defended itself against attack by Nazi Germany.

"We must remember," said Maria Semyonova, a teacher who oversaw the youngsters' changing of the guard. "A nation must know its heroes."

Seventy years after Nazi Germany's capitulation, Moscow is gearing up for the biggest commemoration in decades of what it calls the Great Patriotic War, with a massive military parade on Red Square on May 9.

Outside Russia, many are watching the elaborate anniversary celebrations with mixed feelings and fear that Vladimir Putin's government is exploiting the event to underpin its narrative of a Russia under attack from a hostile west.

But for Moscow, Victory Day helps unite a Russian nation that has been struggling to define its national identity since the collapse of the Soviet Union in a way that other anniversaries do not. More than 25m Soviet citizens died in the second world war, and there is barely a family without direct and personal links to the conflict.

"That victory is the only thing everyone can relate to and agree upon," said Elena Chernenko, foreign affairs columnist at the Kommersant newspaper.

Memories of the conflict are most vivid in Western Russia, location of Germany's Eastern Front. Large parts of the area stretching several hundred kilometres east of the border were under German occupation between 1941 and 1944 and suffered some of the country's bloodiest fighting.

In Litovo, a tiny village some 100km southeast of Pskov, a group of middle-aged men and women last week were cleaning a war monument while swapping wartime stories they'd heard from their parents and grandparents.

"This was a scary place because the Germans were right here," said a woman named Anastasia, as she gave a stele with the names of fallen Soviet soldiers a fresh coat of white paint.

She recounted how German military police had set up their local headquarters at Altun, an estate abandoned by its aristocratic owners in the 1917 revolution. "They were always hunting for partisans in the woods, and they would randomly arrest villagers and accuse them of helping people from the underground," she said.

Today the region is slowly losing its population. Deserted wooden farm cottages are collapsing and fallow farmland is transforming back into bog. But the countless war monuments dotting the landscape are immaculate.

One of them, on a remote moor, commemorates the shooting of more than 300 civilians by German forces - just one sign of the many killings and deportations that took place in this area, according to Wehrmacht diaries and Nuremberg trial records.

Some 50km away, a group of men were busy expanding an old memorial to more than 2,500 Soviet soldiers who died on a ridge here during fierce fighting when the German military invaded in 1941 and again when it retreated. <

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The men have built a miniature Kremlin wall around the few graves and a simple white obelisk. "Earlier, only the Latvian soldiers were commemorated, but now we have added everyone else," said Kamzin Zhumabek Zhekenuly, a Kazakh official who was touring the region's memorials in a van embellished with Russia's official Victory Day logo - a war medal and a St. George's ribbon. "We built seven new monuments around here this week," he said.

The lack of international recognition for the high price the Red Army paid in its role as a liberator of Europe rankles with Russians. A poll conducted by British company ICM Research for Sputnik, the Russian state media outlet, last month found that only 13 per cent of British, French and Germans believe that the Red Army liberated Europe from fascism, while 43 per cent named the US Army.

While this partly reflects the fact that liberation from the Nazis was quickly followed by the imposition of Soviet control over central and eastern Europe, it angers many in Moscow. Sergei Ivanov, Mr Putin's chief of staff, said last week he was concerned that western politicians "purposely try to rewrite history".

It is a view that is popular among ordinary Russians. Ms Semyonova tells her students how her grandfather witnessed a German officer shooting a Russian girl to end a quarrel between two of his soldiers over who should have her.

"My grandfather said that to make sure this kind of thing would stop, he was ready to fight to the last," she said. "Enabling all of us to live freely and in peace is his generation's great contribution, and it deserves commemoration."

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