Moscow remembers

Subject: Moscow remembers.

Yesterday there were thousands on the streets of Moscow ordinary people walking in procession through the streets, celebrating an anniversary of the Russian defeat of Germany.
The contribution of the Russians in defeating Germany was immense and it was the numbers of ordinary Russians who laid down their lives in the millions who were being remembered. It’s almost impossible to imagine the trauma for the average Russian during the war. The attrition of Stalingrad where the German and Russian armies laid into each other with a ferocity which was almost unbelievable. In open warfare the conscripted Russian soldier ordered to march through minefields in front of the tanks to explode the mines before the tanks arrived. Used as cannon fodder, millions lost their lives as they slowly repulsed the German army and even many more millions of civilians whose villages were plundered, the women raped and the men shot. In total 11 million soldiers and  20 million civilians died and such was the megalomaniac mind of Stalin the soldiers captured and interned in concentration camps in Germany and Poland were, when released after the war ended, re-interned in soviet camps in Siberia for the crime of being captured in the first place. Kafkaesque in the extreme.
The stoic nature of the Russian, an outsider as far as continental Europe was concerned,  laid the invincibility of soviet arms at the doorstep of the western coalition and  the need for a nuclear deterrent which sidestepped the implicit life force which was Russia.
The Gorbachev years, as he dismantled the centralised planning of the USSR and the Yeltsin years, when a free for all sale of all methods of production and mineral rights turned the upper echelons of the society into a casino where the nations wealth  was traded by a few corrupt oligarchs. 

Putin has reestablished self belief into the Russian people and made them proud of their heritage by returning the nation to centre stage in world politics.
The people streaming down the streets of Moscow under a cloudless blue sky each carrying a placard showing the face of a family member lost in the war was a sombre reminder of the carnage which comes when hubris takes the place of common sense.