Sasha Lensky

The Victory Day celebrations on 9 May have been, under Vladimir Putin, through a dramatic mutation. In my childhood, in the late eighties and early nineties, it was, apart from the New Year, by far the best holiday of the year. You normally spent it outside, in excellent May weather with lilac blooming all over and war songs – like ‘Victory Day’ or ‘Katyusha’ – booming out from loudspeakers in the streets. We children presented flowers to the veterans, whose chests were sparkling with medals and decorations. This day connected three generations: the veterans, their kids (our parents) and the grandkids – us.

In Russia these days, the reintroduction of the death penalty has a grim inevitability about it. There has been a moratorium on capital punishment since 1996, but there are increasing calls for its revival. In December last year, the Head of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin wrote that the original moratorium had been a surrender to values ‘alien to the Russian national sense of justice’. The feeble Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s erstwhile presidential seat-warmer, has reinvented himself as a hardline proponent of the ‘Supreme Penalty’. In a recent interview he claimed that, given Russia had left the Council of Europe, there were no obstacles stopping its reintroduction.

I was born, grew up and have lived in Russia all of my 45 years. This means that I belong to a state that was established by force, expanded by force and is maintained by force. In this, of course, Russia is not alone: this fact is true of several countries. But the world has changed and other empires have learned new ways. For a brief 15 years from the mid-eighties onwards, there was an illusion we would too. Alas, now we’re on the same old road again. My countrymen, it seems, will make huge sacrifices for the sake of a phantom national pride. It’s this pride that’s now sending Russian forces out into Ukraine. It’s the same pride that the Ukrainians – with their rejection of us – have bruised.

Thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia in the wake of Putin's crackdown are receiving a poor welcome. ‘F*** Russia’ and ‘Russians go home’ are scrawled on the walls, and there are campaigns to boycott Russian goods. A Russian girl asked in a local chat about the best way to transfer money, and received several responses of roughly the same content: ‘Get out, lousy occupants, no one wants you here.’ In the US, owners of Russian restaurants (even if they are non-Russians) have received bomb threats or seen their premises vandalised.