Today is a sacred day in Russian history, the 80th anniversary of the Feb. 2, 1942, Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad. Paying homage to those who fought and died during that six-month battle, one of the largest and longest in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War (World War II), President Vladimir Putin laid wreaths at the Eternal Flame at the Hall of Military Glory in Volgograd—the renamed Stalingrad—and then at the gravesite of Marshall Vasili Chuikov, the extraordinary commander of the 62nd Army responsible for the defense if the city and the final defeat of the German Nazi forces.
Putin’s very moving message not only drove home the meaning of that 1942 victory, but the memory it seared in the minds of generations that followed and its relevance for Russia’s battle against Nazism in Ukraine today. “Our moral duty – first of all to the victorious soldiers – is to cherish and fully preserve the memory of this feat, pass it on to future generations, not allow anyone to belittle or distort the role of the Battle of Stalingrad in the victory over Nazism, in the liberation of the whole world from this monstrous evil,” he said.
“Those who threaten us seem to fail to understand the simple truth that our entire nation, all of us, were brought up and absorbed our people’s traditions with our mothers’ milk. There was the generation of victors who gave their blood, sweat and tears to create the country that we inherited from them.” Stalingrad, he emphasized, will always represent the “eternal symbol of the invincibility of our people, the essence of life.”
