Special Agents and MiGs to Safeguard Foreign Leaders in Moscow on Victory Day
Back in USSR, Victory Day used to be one real holiday. New Year, too, but New Year celebration, being an atheistic substitute for Christmas, was a holiday without holiness. Blood of the tens of millions made Victory Day a real holiday.
Somehow even communists managed to strike balance between official and unofficial for this day. Maybe it was so because Brezhnev, who was the first who started to celebrate Victory Day in earnest, was a veteran himself. Now there are signs that this delicate balance can tip to the governmental pomp.
It is one thing to invite world leaders to celebrations and, maybe, to prevent unauthorized access to a few sites in the capital for a few hours. To shut down virtually all of the Moscow’s downtown, to encourage Muscovites to leave city for these days, to close several popular downtown sites completely for days is to cross the threshold. Hope some sanity will still be left, and all this pomp and pageantry will not manage to rob the Russian people of our main holiday.
Somehow even communists managed to strike balance between official and unofficial for this day. Maybe it was so because Brezhnev, who was the first who started to celebrate Victory Day in earnest, was a veteran himself. Now there are signs that this delicate balance can tip to the governmental pomp.
It is one thing to invite world leaders to celebrations and, maybe, to prevent unauthorized access to a few sites in the capital for a few hours. To shut down virtually all of the Moscow’s downtown, to encourage Muscovites to leave city for these days, to close several popular downtown sites completely for days is to cross the threshold. Hope some sanity will still be left, and all this pomp and pageantry will not manage to rob the Russian people of our main holiday.
posted by Mike Tyukanov at 6:02 AM
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