June 22

... watching old Soviet films “about the War”. I can’t tell you how many times we must have watched Secret Agent, The Shield and the Sword , the cinematic epic Liberation and the Polish series Four Tank-Men and a Dog that was super-popular in the USSR at the time. My friends and I would “play war” outside (scenes that were probably played out in all of Moscow’s streets at the time), and there was nothing worse than having to be on the side of the “Nazis.” Larisa Smirnova: World War II and Change of Generations: Trauma, Myth, and Memory I remember when May 9 was first made a national holiday. The way in which it rose the country’s spirits meant that the somewhat wilted celebrations of the Soviet May 1 had to recede into ...