It was probably the most unusual Victory Day in a very long time. In the holiday, even after 75 years, the energy of the very day when the terrible war ended and the whole people of a huge country felt victorious was magically preserved. A walk, a parade on the spring streets, all this feeling of involvement and collective elation - it is all from there, from 1945. In 2020, there was nothing like that. The holiday turned out to be chamber.

The “Immortal Regiment” took place on the pages of social networks, people went out with lights to the windows, but basically they were left alone, and in the unusual silence we all had a chance to comprehend this great continuity.

Happy are those who still have living veterans in their families, but most of them have long been talking with portraits, mentally addressing questions to them and, perhaps, thinking about how they would appreciate us, our life and actions.

Of course, not all thoughts flow in this elevated eastern channel (the main holiday in many eastern countries is the day of memory of the ancestors). Some days did not notice, but some suddenly woke up a kind of vile creativity. Smerdyakovschina.

Immediately on several pages where it was possible to load photographs of veterans, their names and biographies, portraits of cartoon heroes and Nazi leaders: Hitler and Goering appeared. After all, this is very funny when a black-and-white photograph of someone’s great-grandfather with a track record and the final “died on the Kursk Bulge” is followed by a mustachioed face familiar to everyone. Ah ha ha ha How will bomb these quilted jackets!

The IPs from which the pictures were loaded were mostly foreign: Europe, America, Asia. No, no conspiracy theories. All, of course, can be explained by the machinations of the State Department, but I still assume that our Russians, or at least Russian-speaking wits, were encrypted.

To evaluate what happened, I propose two simple thought exercises. First: imagine a similar situation, say, with the page of the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The heroes of the tragedy, stories about their lives, photographs of children who were burned in the ovens in an embrace with toys, and between them - Donald Duck or Heinrich Himmler, who, in fact, came up with the burning of living people. What do you think would be the reaction of the whole world and how soon would people in uniform go to the jokers home? I recall that, for example, in Germany, denial of the Holocaust (that is, a simple statement that Jews were never burned in ovens) is a criminal offense with a real prison term.

The second experiment: imagine that there is no pandemic, the “Immortal Regiment” is taking place as always, and our laughers came to him with real, printed portraits of Hitler. We all understand what would happen: these nice guys would not have gone a meter. They would be beaten with sticks from their own posters, or maybe they would have done something worse: a stick is a multitasking tool.

Victory Day has not just become our main holiday, which, forgive me for such a banality, unites the whole country and makes us at least temporarily forget any differences. Because its main characters are not Santa Claus or religious saints, who, if they existed, then very, very long time ago. These are people whom the majority remembers alive, and some are still alive.

Putting a portrait of Hitler next to him is not a spit in the void, and not even in the icon, but in a concrete living face.

To the grandmother who sang songs for the night, or to the grandfather who taught to tie shoelaces or to make a bow from a branch. They beat for such a thing, and no one, no one at all, will later condemn the cruelty of beating.

We are a country whose heroic epic was happening recently, our time of the titans lies at arm's length from current generations.

This is a tragedy, but also a great happiness for the nation. Only a complete bastard can spit at him, thereby breaking this continuity, and she, a bastard, knows this - otherwise she would not be hiding behind fake IPs.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.