The Day of Victory: With War Some Are Homeless Forever
By Stephen Wilson, one of our reporters abroad
The 9th of May marks one of the most striking celebrations in the Russian calendar because of the immense loss of lives which was so staggering it defies the imagination. One of the too often overlooked legacies of the Great Patriotic War is the destruction of so many buildings which led to mass homelessness and poverty which did not fade away with time but in some cases lingered on into the 1990's and the 21st Century.
It is practically impossible to escape this day! Some war veterans want to forget this. They never even watch war films. But the celebration of the 9th of May commemorating the end of the war against fascism is all pervasive. Switch on your television and a war film surfaces, go shopping and the shop might have a poster with the words 'Nobody forgets, nobody is forgotten' and all along the bridge spanning the River Moscow to Gorky Park you can observe a row of red flags fluttering in the wind and then just above my home military planes doing rehearsals thunder over my home setting off car alarms.
What I find most moving is when the Immortal Regiment of ordinary people take to the streets in a march each carrying the placards with photos of their dead relatives. You see a sea of photos which remind you that each loss was not a statistic but a personal tragedy. In a way, this march is like 'a Day of the Dead.’ This is as it should be. It is a remembrance day rather than a menacing military threat where some say, 'We won this war before and we can do it again!'
One of the main founders of the Immortal Regiment Sergei Lapenkov, in a past interview in September 2015 with the historical journal Rodina, expressed his fear that the legacy of the Great Patriotic War might be used as a pretext to justify another war. He feared that 'It would be the most terrible thing if the Immortal Regiment' was used not in the name of peace but for the sake of a new war. It would be terrible if the memory of our ancestors was used to raise a young generation for future battles.' Sergei stated his grandfather fought for peace and not for war. Sergei's worst fears seem to be materializing as school teachers are being asked to provide lessons in 'patriotism ' with a particular bent to justifying all kinds of new conflicts.
For the current conflict in Ukraine has soured the usual buoyant mood on this occasion. The mood was made even more somber by a gray and overcast sky—where it constantly rained and gusts of wind sent your umbrella reeling back. Performers at some concerts sang to a dwindling crowd when the rain poured heavily.
The wearing of military caps, singing of old traditional songs, dancing, and firework displays should not conceal that this is still a day of mourning. The losses in this war were staggering beyond belief. The unthinkable had happened. Few thought that such cruelty could have reared such an ugly head. As many as 27 million people of the Soviet Union had perished. Whole villages were left without young men. The demographic imbalance between men and women still exists in Russia today.
The number of women still significantly surpasses the men. When the war ended it felt as if the Soviet Union had not won a war but had lost so much. Soldiers returned to towns and villages which lay in ruins and rubble. Times were so hard that mass famine returned leading to millions of deaths in Ukraine and parts of Russia.
The number of people rendered homeless by the war was immense. According to the historian Orlando Figes 'In all, 20 million people were left homeless by the war. The Soviet authorities were very slow to respond to the urban housing crisis, which was exacerbated by the massive in-migration of people from the countryside as rural living standards steadily declined. As late as the 1950's, there were still millions of people living in the ruins of buildings, in basements, sheds or dug outs in the ground.' {page 457, The Whisperers, Private life in Stalin's Russia, Orlando Figes, London: Penguin Books, 2008}. In fact , Figes might have added that some of the war veterans are still homeless.
Contrary to the state television channels that claim all the war veterans have received new homes, some still linger on homeless. And this is 77 years after this war.
Just read a past article about the case of a war veteran Vera Yevgorova, who must be in her 80's now, which StreetSense published last October. Vera Yevgorova complained that she could not get back her family home because the court claimed she could not furnish documents to prove she had once lived in her home in Saint Petersburg. She was denied her own home due to a lack of 'recorded registration.' The court even claimed that her apartment had ceased to exist because of renovation! She stated, "I think that they expect that with time, I will die and the problem will be solved. They won't be due to give any account of this case after I die!" She is currently living in a homeless shelter with three or four people.
Only one week ago I met an old friend Angela, who had been made a refugee by a war in Abkhazia. She had gone there to reclaim her late mother's apartment which had been destroyed by bombardment 30 years ago in the war. But she could not reclaim this apartment because the bombardment had destroyed all the documents which proved the home belonged to her. So she remains without a permanent home because she can't come up with documents confirming this was her family home.
What those two sad cases demonstrate is that if your home is destroyed in a war or you have to flee from it there is no guarantee you'll get your home back. You could be wondering around the streets for decades never mind years. This is the living legacy of war which seldom receives a hearing. For the truth of war is drowned out by either phantom or reinvented memories!
Many people prefer to identify with an abstract rather than a concrete war. They refuse to face the grim truth or exercise a little imagination. Perhaps the truth of war is just too traumatic.
As the Russian writer Maxim Gorky who was himself once homeless put it: 'The truth is beyond consolation.'