The March That Never Ends: Victory Day as State Religion
On 9 May 2026, military columns rolled through Novosibirsk, Ulan-Ude, and Blagoveshchensk—cities thousands of kilometres from Moscow, in the timezone that puts them among the first in Russia to see the sun on the anniversary. The 81st anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany was, by all accounts, a spectacle. Tanks. Missiles. Marching formations. A population encouraged to carry portraits of ancestors who fought in a war that ended before most of them were born. The images were familiar. The function was not.
Victory Day has undergone a quiet but thorough transformation. What began as a genuine Soviet memorial—imbued with the actual grief of 27 million dead—has become something closer to state religion. The difference matters. A memorial processes loss. A religion demands worship. And worship, in a Russia where genuine political dissent has become structurally impossible, means affirmation of the regime that stages it.
The Architecture of Grief
The Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War is one of the few historical narratives that commands near-unanimous consensus across Russian society. Unlike the chaotic 1990s, unlike the contested Soviet past, the war against Hitler offers something rare: an unambiguous moral centre. The Red Army was on the right side of history. The suffering was real. The victory was earned.
Moscow has understood this for decades. But under the current configuration, the instrument has become more naked. The annual parade is less about remembrance than about permission—permission to claim the moral authority of the past for the politics of the present. When portraits of the "Immortal Regiment" process through Siberian streets, the implicit message is continuity: the same state that won the last great war is winning this one too. The framing is totalising. To honour the past is to endorse the present. Question the war in Ukraine, and you are—somewhere in the logic of the spectacle— questioning the veterans of Stalingrad.
The eastward tilt of this year's celebrations is not accidental. The Far East and Siberia have historically received less of Moscow's attention, their resources extracted westwards while their populations endured second-tier citizenship in the federation. Parades in Blagoveshchensk and Ulan-Ude serve a compensatory function: we see you, the regime tells these regions. You are part of this. You matter.
Why the East, Why Now
The geography of this year's coverage deserves attention. These are regions with substantial military-industrial presence, significant conscript populations, and—increasingly—families with direct stakes in the Ukraine conflict. Sending the celebration to them is a gesture, but it is also an extraction. The parade is staged partly for the audiences who live there, and partly for the audiences back in Moscow and the West who will see the images of a nation united, a nation at peace with its history.
There is a secondary function. Siberia and the Far East border China, Japan, and the Koreas—geographies where Russia is simultaneously seeking economic partnership, strategic alignment, and a counterweight to Western pressure. Victory Day, projected eastward, is also a signal to Beijing. We are the inheritors of the anti-fascist tradition. We stand on the correct side of the great power contest. The Soviet flag over the Reichstag has become the regime's calling card in a multipolar world where historical legitimacy is currency.
The "surprise" announced in Blagoveshchensk—the specific reference from the telegram thread—suggests an element of performance control. The unexpected announcement keeps the audience attentive. It prevents the ritual from becoming routine. Every Victory Day must feel like the first one, or at least like it matters.
The Price of the Pageant
Here is what the spectacle costs. In 2026, the Russian state is conducting a grinding territorial campaign in Ukraine—one that has consumed an estimated half-million or more military casualties on the Russian side alone, depending on which independent trackers and Western intelligence assessments one credits, with figures that vary substantially across sources. The families of those losses are being asked to mourn privately and celebrate publicly in the same breath. The Immortal Regiment portraits carried through Siberian streets this week depict veterans who died defeating fascism. The question the regime cannot allow to be asked, in any official capacity, is whether the men and women depicted in today's memorial processions—carried by grandchildren and great-grandchildren who may have received burial notifications in the past three years—would recognise the equation being made on their behalf.
The answer is not the point. The point is that no answer is permitted. The narrative is sealed. The grief is real, but its political deployment is managed. And management of grief at this scale, with this level of institutional orchestration, is not commemoration. It is manufacture.
What the Rest of the World Does With This
Western governments have largely settled on a posture of calibrated indifference toward Victory Day—acknowledging the historical event while condemning the current war. That posture is understandable but insufficient. The two are linked by design. Moscow's investment in the commemoration is precisely an investment in blurring the line between the righteous war of 1941-45 and the contested war of 2022-present. The West, by treating Victory Day as an irritating but essentially private Russian affair, cedes the historical framing to the Kremlin.
The countries that have been more shrewd—China most notably, but also large parts of the Global South—have understood that the victory over fascism is not a Russian possession. It was won by multiple nations, at immense cost, across multiple continents. Chinese state media covers Victory Day each year with a framing that emphasises the role of the Pacific theatre and the Chinese contribution to the anti-fascist coalition. The historical memory is contested, and contests are won by those who show up.
The stakes, ultimately, are not about Russia alone. They are about who controls the narrative of the 20th century's defining moral struggle—and, by extension, who gets to claim the legitimacy of standing against tyranny in the 21st. Victory Day is the Kremlin's most valuable piece of soft infrastructure. The rest of the world should stop pretending it is merely a parade.
This publication covered the eastward expansion of Russia's Victory Day celebrations as a deliberate signal to regional audiences and external powers, rather than as spontaneous national mourning.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/10847
- https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/10846
- https://t.me/DDGeopolitics/10845
- https://t.me/readovkanews