9 May - Victory Day
Academia Rossica celebrates the 65th anniversary of the Victory together with the whole world and with all Russia. We have decided to put together a few links that we think help us to remember the importance of this day for humanity:
“Time is very powerful, but not as powerful as human memory, our memory. We shall never forget the soldiers who fought on the fronts, the women, who replaced the men in factories, the children, who suffered from ordeals inconceivable for their age. All of them are heroes of the war.
The victory in 1945 was not only a military victory but also a great moral victory. A common victory. All of the Soviet Union’s peoples fought for it and our allies struggled to bring it closer. And today troops from Russia, the CIS countries and our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition will march together triumphantly. They will march in a single formation as proof of our common desire to defend peace and never to allow any revision of the outcomes of war, never to let any new tragedies happen.
The war has taken tens of millions of lives, the lives of people from many countries, people of different ages, nationalities and confessions. In Russia almost every family has suffered from the atrocities of war with family members or relatives either killed or missing, dying of hunger during the siege of Leningrad or killed in concentration camps. That cannot be tolerated. That cannot be forgotten. Their memory is eternal.
Dear friends,
The lessons of World War II call us to solidarity. The world is still fragile, and we should remember that wars do not start in a flash. Evil gains in strength if we shrink back or try to ignore it.
Only together can we counteract modern threats. Only based on the principles of good-neighbourliness can we resolve issues of global security so that the ideals of justice and of the good can triumph in the whole world and the lives of future generations can be free and happy.”
(from Dmitry Medvedev’s speech at the military parade to commemorate the 65th Anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945. May 9, 2010, Red Square, Moscow)
Check out this web resource which contains a multimedia map of the Great Patriotic War and lots of documentary video and audio files, photographs and stories told by surviving veterans. The pobediteli.ru (‘Winners’) website was launched in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Click here to see the English version.
Click here to see the Russian version.
Please send us your favourite websites on World War II and the Great Patriotic War to be included in our library of links.