"We are again looking at WWII heritage through same eyes"

Aleksey Urazov, a political analyst from Moscow State University, believes that this year Victory parade is a very different show than on its 60th anniversary.

“Today we have seen a wide-scale parade, about 11,000 militants participating in it,” Urazov said. “New equipment. Something magnificent, especially the coverage of TV. It’s a real show, but it’s a show that has great philosophical and historical background. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of the UK, once said ‘Never in the history of world conflicts so much has been owed by so many to so few.’ The number of sacrifices here in Russia is about 27 million, and it’s practically a half of the whole number of sacrifices around the world.”

“To my point of view it’s a great experience, because there are times when history divides people and times when history unites us,” he added.

“There has been a period of Cold War when we were divided by controversies,” Urazov told RT. “Now we are again on the one neutral ground, we share the same values and we look at the heritage of the Second World War through the same eyes.”

Mikhail Fishman, editor-in-chief of Russian Newsweek, says the victory in the Second World War can be the basis for building international relations today.

“It’s so easy to make this war a common ground of moving ahead together – instead of continuing ideological struggling that we had before. And we Russians could be clear about what happened after the war. If we all move together we will be in a very different situation soon,” he told RT.

Vladimir Semago, a Russian businessman and politician who also produced a feature film “In August of 1944”, depicting the events of WWII, believes, that asking pertinent questions, including through movies, is a good way to make people think.

“The particular thing about people’s mentality is that they are learning very hard,” Semago told RT. “If you do something in this direction, if you want to push people to clearance their mentality – what was the Second World War? What were people struggling against? – it’s a very good thing. If you could not do it, it means you have a bad movie.”

Speaking of differences in depicting the greatest conflict of the 20th Century by Russian and Hollywood film-producers, Vladimir Semago said that these two views are definitely different.

“We are talking about the problems which were on our earth, while Americans prefer to see this like a view outside, and this is the different kind of view,” he said. “But I saw a lot of French and British movies and it was very close to our view of WWII.”

Fred Weir, a Canadian journalist writing for the Christian Science Monitor, says the glorification of Nazi veterans that happens in some countries in Europe is unacceptable:

“Everywhere in the world WWII still is our main historical frame of reference and it still brings forth emotions, though probably not quite strongly as it does in Russia. I don’t think in Canada a march by SS veterans – and we have lots of those who immigrated to Canada after WWII – would be possible. Any public manifestation like this would be clamped down on. So it’s dangerous and maddening to see it happening in some places.”