Victory Day

It's been five years since I explored my family's connection to Ukraine. We'd  spent the first weekend in Zhytomyr caught up in the Victory Day celebrations. It's a big event marking the defeat of the Nazis in the USSR.

From my hotel window I could see one of the tank monuments commemorating the event. The ex-Soviet Union is big on monuments.
Even tiny villages have big monuments. I doubt there's family that didn't make a direct sacrifice for Mother Russia. If you dig into the statistics, you learn that the Soviets lost way more people in WWII than any other country.  

I like the contrast in this tank photo. The church in the background, the tank in front and the old woman walking by. Mother's Day weekend here in Canada. Yeah. Cruel ironies - mothers, tanks, churches. 

Oh, and I see that today in Moscow the military is still flexing its muscles.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30654932/

1 comment:

Stacy Nyikos said...

Hungary had their share of large communist monuments as well. The communists really liked to go big when it came to remembering the war.

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