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12:00 PM May 09, 2006

"The Saved World Remembers," drawn from a photo of the Soviet flag raised over the Reichstag.

That's Happy Victory Day to you, a good day to stand a drink for any Russian who happens to cross your path.

With D-Day imminent, speechwriters hereabouts are limbering up their "Greatest Generation" cliches (perhaps for the purpose of belittling said generation). But it takes nothing from those who forced Omaha Beach to acknowledge that it was Soviet blood that won the war ... and this is the day to honor those who bled to shatter Naziism.

(V-E day is celebrated in the west on May 8 because midnight had already passed in the USSR when Germany capitulated.)

The scale of brutality and loss on the Eastern front -- well over 20 million dead, wholesale destruction of agriculture and industry, rape and pillage impossible to account -- beggars description and considerably exceeds that in all other theaters throughout the war.

The carnage left no Russian family untouched. My wife's grandmother spent her teenage years in a work camp felling trees for the war effort. Her husband-to-be was captured in Belarus and imprisoned at the Gusen-II concentration camp, liberated by American troops, and returned to the Soviet Union where he was exiled to the interior of the country. Many Russian POWs, whose capture made them politically suspect, suffered more terrible fates.

Facing the greatest military machine the world had yet known, scant a generation removed from lingering feudalism, hobbled by the 1937-38 purge that eviscerated the officer corps and by Stalin's poor preparation for the attack, Russia saw the Wehrmacht reach the fringe of Moscow (where Soviet troops paraded for review through Red Square directly to the front), lay siege to Leningrad, and advance so far in the south that vacation-in-the-Crimea promotionals were circulated in Germany.

And at the most unimaginable cost, Russia arose and returned a blow still more terrible that felled Hitler and saved the world.

By the time D-Day finally came, Russian troops had repelled the German invasion and were driving the Reich towards Berlin -- the war won in essence, its conclusion a question of time and terms. In those last months, Germans threw the majority of their available resources into the eastern theater, rightly anticipating a milder brand of victor's justice from the west.

But all that is tomorrow and beyond, the Cold War and the atom bomb. The ninth belongs to a different world. Thank Russia that that is so.

Update:  Stills of Victory Day celebrations in Moscow, courtesy of Russia Blog -- "the entire megalopolis turns into a surreal vision of heaven."

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