Victory Day?

I’ll go ahead and admit that I’m mildly confused as to which holiday it was we celebrated today. I think it was related to Victory Day – it looked a lot like Victory Day – but it’s two days early. My counterpart said that today was the day of celebrating the defenders of the motherland. Both are throwbacks to the Soviet Era. And it’s that nostalgia which brings you today’s post!

Today at noon I went to our local park for the dedication of the memorial the veterans of the Afghan conflict. It was a nice ceremony and they unveiled the monument – a tank. Then flowers and such were placed at the base of the monument and soldiers fired a 9-gun salute. Three guys, three shots. You do the math. Also, many people were given medals by the town’s deputy mayor. A lot of folks here have a lot of medals. Especially the men and women who were involved in the Great Patriotic War (that’s WWII to us). In fact, Victory Day, which takes place May 9, is the celebration of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany. But I digress.

This afternoon at three I went to the house of culture and watched a concert that was also related to the holiday. Again, very interesting and entertaining stuff.

What I couldn’t help but think about is the irony of my attendance at this ceremony. I’m an American at a ceremony honoring the men of the Soviet Army who fought against the rebels in Afghanistan. A guy from the country who supplied weapons and training to the people who were trying to kill today’s honorees. That’s not something to be taken lightly. It’s even more ironic in light of the fact that now America is engaged in a battle against, essentially, the same enemy in that country. Add to that irony the steady diet of anti-Soviet propaganda we were all fed growing up and you’ve got a seven-course dinner of irony.

Another thing that I found interesting, and would have probably found even more intriguing if I completely understood it, was a song that one of the veterans sang about the conflict. It was a Russian ballad that seemed to, by my best estimation, talk about the war and the fight against the Muslim bandits. What’s interesting about that is that the guy singing the song was Kazakh. The vast majority of Kazakhs are Muslim. So contrary to what we saw in Rambo III, not all the guys fighting in Afghanistan were Russian. Interesting sidebar, one of the volunteers in Pavlodar watched Rambo III recently with his Russian girlfriend. The Russian in the movie was so bad that she thought they were speaking a different language altogether! End sidebar. Now, here we have a war against Muslim extremists that’s pitting Muslims against each other. That just seems like it could be a really difficult thing. But then again, what do I really know about it?

So what did I take away from all this, exactly? Well, it just helped to fortify this ever-growing sense that we’re all the same way down deep. We may have different ideologies, different religions and different cultures, but we’re all human. It’s been a truly eye-opening experience living in this country. Even now, the Soviet influence is still heavy. The system was so deeply ingrained in the populace that it may take decades for it to resolve, if ever it does. The other thing I notice is that even though I spent my whole life being told by American society that the Soviet Union, Communism and Socialism were bad things, it’s very different once you meet the people who lived through those things. It’s also very uplifting to see that even though the Soviet system tried its best to rub out the cultures of the people it absorbed into its collective, the cultures survived.