All last week, a 16-year-old boy from Novy Urengoy has been in the spotlight after his address to the Bundestag in Berlin, attended by all German political elite and even President Steinmeier. The faces of high-ranking listeners expressed a restrained German gratitude when the boy told about the misfortunes of Wehrmacht corporal Georg Johann Rau, who was captured near Stalingrad; and about how he visited the graves of other Wehrmacht soldiers near the Russian city of Kopeysk. At the same time, the boy called these soldiers "innocent dead people".
Nikolay Desyatnichenko: "It distressed me as I saw the graves of innocent dead people, many of whom wanted to live peacefully and didn't want to fight".
The Russian blogosphere was indignant, but President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged people to get off their high horses and stop bullying the boy.
I agree, why bully the child? He is a victim himself. Leave the boy alone.
The speech raises a concern. Russia badly needs an absolutely unquestionable position on the Great Patriotic War, and it has been formulated rather simply so far. Fascist Germany treacherously attacked us. We defended ourselves against the aggressor. In the hardest battles, the enemy was defeated and forced out of the country. We won and liberated Europe from the Brown Plague. It cost 27 million lives, including our innocent dead soldiers and innocent dead civilians.
Actually, it's always been like this. And then suddenly they began to contemplate ideas like if Leningrad should have been abandoned to the enemy for humane reasons, or that the 28 Panfilov Men didn’t exist or that Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was crazy.
We allegedly occupied Ukraine and the Baltic and now must compensate for it.
Hence the activists who are demolishing monuments to our liberator soldiers there.
These are all parts of a new post-truth world that is hostile to Russia.
Now they offer to put our innocent victims on the same moral level as those who came with weapons to kill us: to shoot, burn, torture, kill, capture, bury alive, or burn in concentration camps. They wanted to destroy us as a people and a country. But now Hitler's soldiers are portrayed as "innocent victims" as well.
The next suggestion will be to carry the portraits of Hitler's soldiers at the Immortal Regiment March. Why not? Why not invite Germans and march in the same column so that someone carries the portrait of Georg Johann Rau, like we are all against the war. And here it is, reconciliation. Ready for it? Absolutely not. Not in the least.
We are for reconciliation, but on a different basis: German fascism that stemmed from the idea of racial superiority was pronounced to be criminal and condemned by the Nuremberg trial. And also on the basis that the Soviet army had no option but to kill those who unleashed war on us. Thus, the Germans killed on our land were killed rightly and correctly, as well as all those who came with them and fought by their side.
The aggressor did not leave us any other options but to kill his soldiers. And there were no innocent people in the enemy army by definition, because all of them — whether they wanted it or not — took part in the common task of disposing us forever in the most violent way possible for because they believed themselves to be racially superior.
Do we pity them? We do. But in the way that we pity people whose lives are led by false values.
As for the phrase, 'innocent soldiers dead on our land', its aim is to transform the public consciousness to such an extent where pride in the Victory is replaced by a sense of guilt for what was done. That's it. And the Germans, of course, like it. Everyone seems to be for peace. And even more so when children from Russia come to pity them. Do we need to put our children in such a vulnerable position?
We probably don't. Do we need to replace pride for the Victory with guilt? No way.
