By Boris Kagarlitsky By Boris Kagarlitsky
A Holiday Minus the Public
The big hero of the official celebration was U.S. President George W. Bush. He was the one everyone was waiting for, the one the parade and fireworks were supposed to impress. They pulled out all the stops to please him, like some rich relative who could make or break the family...
The Russian authorities have a serious problem with official holidays. What are national holidays good for, anyway? They are not just about giving people an extra day off. No, they have an important political function. They are designed to reinforce in the public mind the unity of the state and the people, to create a feeling of shared experience and to bring the people and state officials closer together.
The post-Soviet Russian state has got a problem, however. It inherited all its national holidays from the Soviet Union. Officials have not managed to come up with any new dates. There has not been a single achievement worthy of national commemoration or celebration.
Post-Soviet authorities first tried to take over Nov. 7 and turn it from a holiday honoring the October Revolution into the Day of Reconciliation and Accord. They failed: The date was permanently tied to the Bolsheviks' storming of the Winter Palace. After unsuccessful attempts to remake the holiday, officials decided to scrap it. They decided to celebrate National Unity Day on Nov. 4, the approximate anniversary of Moscow's liberation from Poland in the 17th century. This holiday, too, will soon be history.
You need more than a presidential decree to turn a day into a holiday. A significant portion of the population needs to observe it without any state prompting.
New Year's, for example, is a popular holiday among both the public and state officials. Yet it is emphatically apolitical and for this reason cannot be used to serve government ends. Then there's May 1, which the authorities have tried to strip of its ideology for years. They made some progress especially because the process began during the Soviet era. The new name for May Day, the Day of Spring and Labor, was already in casual use back then, even though the holiday was officially called the Day of International Workers Solidarity. A similar thing happened to the ideology behind March 8, Women's Day, and even Feb. 23, which long ago ceased to be a professional holiday honoring the armed forces, simply becoming a "men's day" to match March 8.
Yet there is another side to the fairly successful transformation of May Day. It can no longer be used for political purposes. Only May 9, the day of victory over Nazi Germany, still inspires hope in Kremlin politicians that they will be able to urge the country to come together. The Russian authorities can admit to their status as successors to the Soviet Union while disassociating themselves from the communist ideology. War remembrances reinforce patriotism and strengthen the public's faith in government institutions. At the same time, the Soviet Union fought together with Western democracies to defeat Nazism. This makes the day a good excuse to invite a bunch of foreign guests and emphasize yet again the necessity of working with Washington. In short, President Vladimir Putin's administration was destined to make May 9 the big national holiday.
But alas, like always, things turned out badly. You cannot have a public holiday without the public. Moscow was virtually shut down. Police flooded in. Traffic was stopped. The metro closed early. Residents faced every problem imaginable, and some that were hard to imagine.
The big parade to Red Square was reduced to 130 faux front-line trucks. The broad windshields on the brand-new trucks glistened, and they looked more like Mercedes than World War II vehicles. They had been custom ordered and probably cost an arm and a leg. The organizers must have thought, however, that the trucks that carried soldiers and supplies to the front were less than luxurious. Thus, they did not reproduce them but refashioned them to fit the tastes of today's leadership.
The big hero of the official celebration was U.S. President George W. Bush. He was the one everyone was waiting for, the one the parade and fireworks were supposed to impress. They pulled out all the stops to please him, like some rich relative who could make or break the family.
The majority of Russians found very different ways to celebrate. Across the country, people wore striped ribbons reminiscent of those of World War II medals. They toasted the 60th anniversary of victory. They thanked the veterans who are still with us. Yet the authorities and the people celebrated at cross purposes. Instead of uniting the state and the people, the holiday reminded everyone how divided they are.
The official party was pompous and hollow, expensive and insincere. Whatever Putin's Russia pretends to honor, it is really only tooting its own horn.