May 9. Victory Day

[Hors]

Dedicated to Victory of Russia in WWII

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[Thorum]

Great photos. Especially the first one. Unbelievable. Definitely a great day!!

[Beorn]

...as we Russians meet together for what is now mainly a social occasion, we will never forget the sacrifices of the generation of Soviet and British service personnel who gave everything to rid the world of the scourge of fascism.

Let it not be forgotten that in the grim winter of 1941, Britain and Russia stood alone against Hitler, the bully of Europe – who at that time appeared invincible. Britain had a relatively small army but had vast reserves of weapons and ammunition. Russia on the other hand had a huge army but had lost much of its equipment and weapons industry to the Nazi invaders.

Winston Churchill, ever the pragmatist, knew at once what had to be done – he immediately authorized a daring programme of Royal Navy convoys which, slowly but surely – and in the face of ferocious attacks from the Germans and merciless Arctic weather - shipped huge amounts of weapons and other supplies to Russia, helping to turn the tables against Hitler. Their misson, famously described by Churchill as “the worst journey in the world”, is described here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/mid/sites/ww2/pages/aran_morris2.shtml). Before setting off on their perilous voyage (http://www.naval-history.net/WW2Memoir-PQ17-Carswell.htm), the British ships gathered at Loch Ewe in Scotland, where their crews are remembered to this day by a permanent memorial (http://www.john.fotoblog.org.uk/p16229899.html).


Amazingly, Churchill even agreed to a request from Stalin to send the very best British fighter planes, the legendary Spitfires, complete with RAF pilots to Russia to help defend the vital port of Murmansk. (For a full account of this – see here (http://ww2airfronts.org/Theaters/eto/rinr/rinr-0.html))

Hopelessly ill-prepared (http://www.mary-kenny.com/published_articles/soldier-for-Hitler.html) for the freezing cold of the Russian winter, the morale of the German soldiery collapsed as their early successes gave way first to stalemate and then defeat after defeat. At Leningrad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d90AeLZbQ3o), Moscow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlKpNxCA5Y), Kursk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-FwkUQ7m1I) and decisively at Stalingrad, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzhKsD6ZwUE&feature=related) they found out that Hitler had lied – the Russian soldiers they had once sneered at as sub-human Slavic untermenschen were not so inferior as their Fuhrer had led them to believe. The shock of this revelation was too much for some – who now also began to realise that not everything about the Soviet system was bad:


“I began to see that war was all too idiotic for words and to realise that there was a possibility that Germany might lose the war. And then I fell in love with a Russian girl. Nothing happened, but I saw her as a human being. The Russians were human beings, not untermenschen. I wanted to be friendly with the Russians. I wanted to learn Russian. I talked to girls – they told me that their parents were proud that they were going to university so that people could learn, could build for the future, and they asked me, ‘Why do you come here to destroy all that?’ – the words ofHenry Metalmann (http://www.mary-kenny.com/published_articles/soldier-for-Hitler.html), a German soldier who drove a panzer on the Eastern Front, and who after the war devoted the rest of his life to campaigning against war and fascism



The sacrifices of the Soviet armed forces and people from 1941 to 1945, when millions suffered at the hands of Hitler’s criminals (http://www.russian-victories.ru/russians.htm) (Click here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BEglP6xuxs) to listen to the experiences of both British and Soviet war veterans who participated in the liberation of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Belsen. One of the British soldiers, speaking at Belsen, speaks with a typical Lancashire accent.) has also been commemorated in England by the erection of a permanent memorial (http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/2/2/0/global_3697408.jpeg) in London.


Many of the British Royal Navy veterans who helped Russia in her hour of need are still alive - and several live here in the north west of England. One such Lancashire veteran of the Arctic convoys was recently horribly beaten (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084900/War-hero-89-beaten-burglars-obscene-attack-millions-remember-fallen.html) by robbers.

Thanks to the heroes from Britain, Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union who fought against Hitler, the barbarous creed of fascism was finally beaten in 1945. But it has never gone away entirely…

Neo-nazis used the recent occasion of April 20th, which they still celebrate as Hitler’s birthday, to desecrate Jewish and Muslim graves (http://www.lep.co.uk/news/CCTV-call-after-yobs-smash.5207698.jp) here in Lancashire, and sadly in Russia such criminals have been allowed to get away with similar outrages (http://www.antirasizm.ru/).

Such acts call to mind the famous words of Brecht, who after Hitler’s death warned:


“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men.
For though the bastard is dead, the bitch that bore him is again in heat.”


The defeat of fascism


In April 1945, as the Soviet forces prepared for the final showdown with Hitler’s forces, the population of Berlin was gripped by panic – many committed suicide - while the city’s hardcore Nazi defenders prepared to fight to the death.

The reason why so many of the Nazis continued to resist in the face of the unstoppable Russian steamroller was explained by acclaimed military historian Dr Aryeh Nusbacher – see clip below:

done


Of course, given the sheer scale of the Soviet assault on the city there could only be one outcome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arivw0qXfxQ) :


http://russianlancashire.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/soviet_flag_on_the_reichstag_roof_unaltered1.jpg?w =203&h=300
Soviet flag raised on the Reichstag - photo by Yevgeny Khaldei

With the defeat of Nazi Germany the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But today, at a time when Britain is again at war – this time in Afghanistan, where many Russian soldiers fought in the 1980s, we in the Russian community in Lancashire share the British people’s hope for peace throughout the world and fervently hope that fascism will never again triumph in Europe.

Britain and Russia: Comrades in Arms

The famous black American civil rights leader Malcolm X (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BC_%D0%98% D0%BA%D1%81) was once asked by a television journalist how he would tackle the problem of racism in the United States. He replied that he would use the media, and went on to explain that the power of the media in America was such that it could do almost anything. As an example he said, “During the war the American media got everyone to love Russians. Yet as soon as the war was over it got everyone to hate Russians.”

(Incidentally one of the most moving and powerful ripostes to the Russophobia that permeated much of the Western media during the Cold War came from the acclaimed Scots folk singer Dick Gaughan in his famous song “Think Again (http://www.dickgaughan.co.uk/songs/mp3s/thinkaga.mp3)”).

It does indeed seem incredible, especially to those of us who grew up during the Cold War, when people in the Soviet Union were taught to hate and despise Britain (http://www.sovlit.com/iwanttogohome/) and similarly British people were taught that Russians were their deadliest enemies (with things being not much better today (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535867/Russia-biggest-spy-threat-to-Britain.html) in terms of the British government and media’s protrayal of all things Russian), that for a brief period during the Second World War, Britain and Russia were in fact the closest of Allies (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1144874.shtml?sectionId=6&articleId=1144874).

This close co-operation was not limited to purely military collaboration. In both America (http://www.dhm.de/magazine/heft7/popup-texte/americanworldwar.htm) and Britain the government and the media set out to instil a sense of respect and solidarity with Russia throughout the Anglo-American world. In Britain, Winston Churchill personally appointed the late John Platt Mills QC to lead the pro-Russia media campaign. Similarly Soviet wartime movies (such as the final newsreel in this sequence (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRcBt904OJ0)) encouraged Russians to regard the British as their closest friends and allies.


http://russianlancashire.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/rush.jpg?w=200&h=300 (http://calypso.bib.umontreal.ca/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=%2F_guerre&CISOPTR=1552&DMSCALE=25&DMWIDTH=825&DMHEIGHT=1400&DMMODE=viewer&DMFULL=0&DMX=0&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&DMTHUMB=1&REC=8&DMROTATE=0&x=156&y=107)

Wartime propaganda poster urging Britain to rush weapons and supplies to Russia In America the pro-Soviet campaign was perhaps best typified by the 1943 movie “The North Star”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Star_%281943_film%29) The film, which was recently shown by the BBC on daytime TV, was directed by Lewis Mileston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Milestone), an American Academy-award winning director from a Russian family, and told the story of how a group of Ukranian peasants formed a partisan brigade which then sets out to wreak revenge on the Nazi invaders who have attacked their village.

Despite its pro-Soviet message, some elements of the movie have a distinctly American tinge. In the clip below we see the villagers forming a partisan cavalry detachment whose mission is to hunt down the German enemy. The scene is reminiscent of many Hollywood Westerns, except in this case the enraged townspeople are forming a posse not to catch some bloodthirsty outlaw but to round up those pesky Panzers! Nevertheless, the clip conveys a serious and moving message as the villagers swear the oath of the Soviet partisans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_partisans), showing their determination to rid themselves of the Hitlerite oppressors.
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The Soviet partisans

In the post-war Soviet Union the struggle of the youth of Ukraine against the Nazis was commemorated in such books as Alexander Fadeev (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Alexandrovich_Fadeyev)’s The Young Guard (http://www.sovlit.com/youngguard/) based on the anti-fascist Ukranian brigade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Guard_%28Soviet_resistance%29) of the same name, while Elem Klimov’s masterpiece of Soviet cinema, Come and See (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See), portrayed similar struggles in Belarus.

It is apt that this Victory Day we remember the sacrifices and heroism of the Soviet partisans. Scandalously, certain nationalist forces in some European countries like Latvia have attempted to besmirch their memory by bringing war crimes prosecutions against partisan veterans like Vasily Kononov, a heroic fighter against fascism who after a lifetime of fighting for freedom was jailed in his old age, thanks to a vicious witch-hunt initiated by the government of a supposedly democratic EU Member State.
Thankfully, last summer (2008) Mr Kononov showed his detractors that an old Soviet partisan never dies: He took his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and won. The court ruled (http://www.ln.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/0/F1B3183690DB0FEFC32574910049538B) that, in seeking to punish those who had executed Nazi collaborators during the war, Latvia had enacted retrospective legislation that was not compatible with Art.7 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Disgracefully, the Latvian authorities are appealing against the court’s ruling, with the appeal (http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090428/121351917.html) scheduled to take place on May 20th.
Source (http://russianlancashire.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/23/)

[Atlas]

I have a great deal of respect for the red army during WWII, they have been accused of the worst, what is it compared to German atrocities ? A great day for Russia and the free people of Europe.

Sorry if I offence anyone but I am not a nazi.

[Manifest Destiny]

I have a great deal of respect for the red army during WWII, they have been accused of the worst, what is it compared to German atrocities ? A great day for Russia and free people of Europe.

Sorry if I offence anyone but I am not a nazi.

I'm not a Nazi, either. I'm glad the Russian people were able to fight off Hitler's invasion. They paid a terrible price for it, though.

[Thorum]

I'm not a Nazi, either. I'm glad the Russian people were able to fight off Hitler's invasion. They paid a terrible price for it, though.

Click on each chart for a better view:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/WorldWarII-DeathsByAlliance-Piechart.png/210px-WorldWarII-DeathsByAlliance-Piechart.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Allies-Piechart.png)http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Allies-Piechart.png/250px-WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Allies-Piechart.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Allies-Piechart.png)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Axis-Piechart.png/250px-WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Axis-Piechart.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WorldWarII-MilitaryDeaths-Axis-Piechart.png)

From Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties).

EDIT:
Perhaps I am uninformed, but I don't believe the US or Canada celebrate the end of WWII with a holiday. I wonder why? Or am I wrong?

[SwordoftheVistula]

Perhaps I am uninformed, but I don't believe the US or Canada celebrate the end of WWII with a holiday. I wonder why? Or am I wrong?

We have V-E Day and V-J Day, but nobody gets work off for them or anything. All things considered, WWII didn't have that much effect on the US compared to other events.

[Hors]

Happy Victory Day!

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[Loki]

I'm viewing the spectacle on the Russia Today channel. I've never seen it before, it should be very interesting. :)

[Hors]

It's over already. It was the largest Victory parade ever.

[Loki]

It's over already. It was the largest Victory parade ever.

Ah yeah damn, I just realised you are hours ahead of us in the time zones. :(

I'm sure everything will be available online soon anyway. Did you attend? :)

[Hors]

No. This year they didn't send me an invitation ticket to the VIP section where Medvedev and Putin stood. :)

[Sarmata]

Victory day, but no ones remember that after that day red terror covered half of Europe for almost 50 years. Anticipating Hors I must to say that it was probably better then dead from nazis hands...and we must be grateful for contribution of Russian people...But we must also remember that 2 WW was started by German attack on Poland in 1939 and Soviets were in pact with Germans. So responsibility for 2WW was also on their hands.

Look at German-Soviet friendship(September 1939) in occupied Polish land:rolleyes2:

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And probably the most ironic thing was that soldier with red flag was a jew...

http://www.photodom.com/fotos/2007/05/08/330988.jpg

[Hors]

But we must also remember that 2 WW was started by German attack on Poland in 1939 and Soviets were in pact with Germans

So were Poles.


So responsibility for 2WW was also on their hands.

Nope.


And probably the most ironic thing was that soldier with red flag was a jew...

Yeah, 100% Cohen :D

http://img.rian.ru/images/3994/12/39941296.jpg

[Beorn]

http://www.photodom.com/fotos/2007/05/08/330988.jpg


It's also the unedited version of this picture as you can still see the man supporting him with two watches. One on each wrist.
In the "official" releases of those pictures, the Soviets edited out one of his watches to ensure their soldiers of the people were not exposed as the raping, murdering, stealing animals they really were.

[Hors]

Tragic... :D:laugh2:

[Äike]

Tragic... :D:laugh2:

Do you find it funny, that a bunch of mongrels raped almost half of Europe?

[RoyBatty]

I find it funny that Nazi Baltic executioners of civilians and jews cry about being disciplined. :p :laugh:

[Äike]

I find it funny that Nazi Baltic executioners of civilians and jews cry about being disciplined. :p :laugh:

Another person who doesn't know what he's talking about... When the first Estonians were recruited into the 20th Waffen SS Grenadier division, then there was no one to execute. Estonia was already "Judenfrei" as the Germans said it.

The local Estonian authorities also made a pact, with Germany. The 20th Waffen SS will ONLY be used against fighting the Soviet Union, On the front.

Estonians weren't used as executioners of anyone. But I'm not sure about the Balts.

[Thorum]

I thought this thread was about the May 9 Victory celebration?

[Hors]

Not anymore, I'm afraid. Hijacked by closet Nutzies.

But maybe the administration would kindly split the thread into the original one and "Whining and bitching of losers" :D

[Sarmata]

So were Poles.


:D Right but we had not any secret protocol where wrote how to devide conqered countries.



[/QUOTE]Yeah, 100% Cohen :D

http://img.rian.ru/images/3994/12/39941296.jpg[/QUOTE]

Sorry but I haven't got source to my comment about jewish origin of that soldier...but I saw it on TV, probabably on discovery channel. Ok this is maybe not the best source;) but your soldier comes from soviet propaganda poster,face of the soviet worker or peasant. I don't realy belive that he hang the flag.

[Äike]

Not anymore, I'm afraid. Hijacked by closet Nutzies.

But maybe the administration would kindly split the thread into the original one and "Whining and bitching of losers" :D

Yeah, posts with 1 word and 2 smileys are very on-topic. The thread went off-topic from you, so the thread was hijacked by closet Commies...

[Hors]

Right but we had not any secret protocol where wrote how to devide conqered countries

1. What's wrong about secret protocols?
2. You can not post any quotes from the protocol backing your claims about "dividing conquered countries".
3. The protocol was not executed, you would know it if you ever read it.

[Inese]

Dedicated to Victory of Russia in WWII

http://www.photodom.com/fotos/2007/05/08/330988.jpg

Bad day for our Baltic countrys , bad day for Germany and bad day for sovereigity of all Eastern European states!! Many tousands of people were raped by soviet army , million getting killed , freedom was lost for 45 years. A member of my family was killed on 9 may 1945!!

Now you can have your thread back it was my only post you can be sure. But the "party party! " feeling is un-bearable.

[Äike]

Bad day for our Baltic countrys , bad day for Germany and bad day for sovereigity of all Eastern European states!! Hundred tousands of people were raped by soviet army , million getting killed , freedom was lost for 45 years.

No party in Germany or Latvia.

There are "parties" in Estonia and in Latvia too. The Russians are celebrating:p

Thousands of Russians are currently worshiping the Bronze Soldier.

[RoyBatty]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch somewhere in Northern Europe revenge is being plotted...... :D

http://thelaughingstork.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/hitler_dolls.jpg

[Tabiti]

Bad day for our Baltic countrys , bad day for Germany and bad day for sovereigity of all Eastern European states!! Many tousands of people were raped by soviet army , million getting killed , freedom was lost for 45 years. A member of my family was killed on 9 may 1945!!

Now you can have your thread back it was my only post you can be sure. But the "party party! " feeling is un-bearable.
But it is still the Day of the EU, so there are some "parties" outside Russia, I'm sure about that!
Whole page regarding that issue:
http://europa.eu/abc/symbols/9-may/index_en.htm
Good we have enough holidays in May (1st, 6th, 24th), so they are not going to accept that one as official too, just for now. Even without that I'm tired of foreign celebrations!