First They Come For Your Holidays

I freaking love the American flag. It’s a beautiful thing. With all those stars and all them stripes, it looks as great gently billowing in the winds of freedom as it does hanging limply off a flagpole. It’s unmistakable and poignant. It’s just a real solid, top-notch piece of vexillological design. I freaking love it almost as much as I freaking hate people who tell me the exact way in which I should love it.

You know you’ve stopped living in a free country once folks show up to explain how to love the Motherland properly. You sure as hell aren’t living in one once those folks are government employees. I was born and raised in a nation where most of the government’s interaction with its citizens was specifically dedicated to explaining the degree and the manner in which their love for the country must be expressed. From the day you were Little Comrade Kindergartener, being told that Grandpa Lenin is eternally alive in your heart, to the day you became Former Comrade Corpse, being eulogized by fellow members of the working collective, you were always expected to adhere to the state’s strict protocol of love for the Freest Nation on Earth. The very same nation, of course, which is now generally regarded as a symbol for lack of freedom. And a cautionary tale on becoming such.

But, for all the inundation with party politics and state-approved patriotic affection, there were some days in the calendar that offered us a degree of freedom. Not entirely from the government or the Motherland but at least from the strict directives on how to feel about them. The New Year was one such occasion, because no Russian will ever need a party field manual on how to get properly drunk. Victory Day was another.

Now, to be sure, our annual May 9 celebration of kicking Hitler’s ass was full of politics and saber-rattling. This is how the Soviet-style military parade was invented, after all. But it also managed to evoke deeply personal feelings in all Soviet citizens, without any need for guidance from ham-fisted official propaganda.

Why did I need to know how to feel about the Soviet victory when my grandfather on my mother’s side, private Yakov Derinovsky, survived the entirety of the war, came back with a chest full of shrapnel, was told by Soviet doctors that extracting all of it was impossible and that it would eventually kill him at some point, met my grandmother and managed to conceive a daughter just before dying in his late 30s?

What would the parade tell me about pride, when my other grandpa, Usher Malamud, was a marine who came through hell in the Crimea? His NCO made him change his ID to a less Jewish-sounding Alexander Malamutov in case he got captured.

How could the Party teach me about loss and sacrifice when my grandma lost two brothers in the first month of the war, their bodies never found and their stories only known from vague eyewitness accounts or unconfirmed rumors, and then, as a refugee from Ukraine, had to bury her father under someone’s fence in Uzbekistan? Every single family in the former USSR has stories like these. We sure as hell didn’t need either the parade or flag-waving displays to feel proud of a country that, on its own merits, offered few other reasons for pride. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Victory Day stayed one unifying, poignant, sincere holiday. Then, Putin happened.

In his quest to build up fierce nationalistic pride and shore up his self-proclaimed image as the leader who “raised Russia off its knees”, Putin did what all dictators do: he hijacked patriotism. First, he upped the ante on the military parade, making it more and more elaborate each year. Hell, even one parade isn’t enough anymore, and Russia has held one in June (in dedication to the original Victory Parade in 1945) and one in November (commemorating the parade of departing troops in 1941). Yes, Putin’s Russia has parades in honor of other parades now. You won’t out-Russia us, guys, don’t even freaking try.

Then, they came for individual expressions. “St. George’s Ribbons”, striped black-and-orange pieces of cloth originally used as a military decoration and later worn by private citizens as a way to commemorate the dead, were co-opted by the government as an almost-mandatory patriotic accessory. At this point, the dead and the war itself are an afterthought: the ribbon is used to show support for Putin’s annexation of Crimea, for Russia’s longing to reclaim lost imperial territory and for any other occasion a citizen feels like screaming “Fuck you!” at the West from the back window of their car.

Nowadays, Victory Day is so thoroughly owned by Putin’s brand of patriotism, the phenomenon has even earned its own word in the Russian language, “pobedobesiye” (Victory Madness). Weeping veterans and somber recollections of the horrors of war are so last century. Nowadays, it’s all about toddlers in war-era uniforms, sexy war-themed women’s costumes and, for added WTF value, ultra-patriotic activities in honor of the Soviet Army by the Orthodox Church.

To Putin, of course, it doesn’t matter a lick that Russia has lost the original purpose of Victory Day along the way, and that he has made into a propagandized farce to a much greater degree than anything his Soviet predecessors managed to. He is just fine with the hollowness and the tackiness as long as aggressive, blind, partisan pride is also there. He can sure as hell ride that wave like a champion. This is what dictators do.

It’s hard to dislike the Fourth of July. It’s a quaint, joyous occasion rarely marred by anything other than burning a few hot dogs and losing a digit here or there. It’s time to pop open a cold one, meet with friends and enjoy the good things this country offers without necessarily screaming about them from the rooftops. Here, we let homemade fireworks do that. I always admired Americans for the homespun, non-government-directed ways they showed their patriotism. Immigrants could bitch all they want about how baseball is boring and hamburgers are overrated and those smiles plastered on your faces are creepy and insincere, but we have always enjoyed the way you like your country without being explicitly told how to do it.

Goddamn it, I really hope nothing happens today to change that perception.