I don't find it very spooky. Moving though, considering it's a solemn burial of the bodies of enemy soldiers. And if really it was top-secret, it's not even propaganda. Better times than ours.
And how cool is the Soviet anthem?
And how cool is the Soviet anthem?
Those people are shallow. It's one of the most beloved anthems globally. Go check the comments in renditions of the anthem in YouTube.
Nobody cares if it was connected to USSR or not, the same way people can admire Gagarin and not care about the USSR connection.
Not to mention that there are worse things to be connected to than USSR -- USSR had several stages, including a more open stage (with many social firsts) in the NEP era, and a more or less conventional and more open post-60s part, it wasn't just stalinism and suppression all the way.
"The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then."
And that's from 2014.
Source: Last year I spent 6 weeks travelling around Romania and Moldova
Your attempt to relativise what Soviets did is a spit in face of each one of the 65 million victims.
That's neither here nor there. Many countries who weren't communist at all are like that. And most of them are far worse.
>Your attempt to relativise what Soviets did is a spit in face of each one of the 65 million victims.
Well, the extravagant "65 million" number and summation of anybody that died during that era as a victim is a spit in the face of the billions who say it as their cause, overthrew colonialism in their countries, and died by the tens of millions fighting Nazis.
What I said about Romania is that it used to be heavily subsidized at the cost of their own people from other regions and other nations' people, so of course the people in these poor areas had it better than today and liked it more than when the subsidies are gone. That does not excuse anything in any case.
Fighting in the second world war also excuses nothing. My countrymen also fought there and actually didn't conspire to start the war, if we are to compare dicks. From my point of view, of course the Russians and other SSSR nations helped win the war and I'm thankful, but again - that excuses nothing.
Also, yeah, some people today don't value freedom and would like economic subsidies instead. I'm very sure that would change the minute they lost their freedom - that's proven historical experience, people usually want freedom more than to stay alive.
Well, to me being crucial to not living in a Nazi Europe today, counts for a lot and excuses a lot. And I differentiate between bad actors like Stalin and co and their crimes, and a huge state with domestic (at least at first) and large global popular support.
>Also, yeah, some people today don't value freedom and would like economic subsidies instead.
Or they don't consider slavery to market forces and corporations freedom, and would rather have actual freedom from need with economic subsidies (which even the modern world is considering as UBI).
And no, communism never had popular support anywhere, especially not in Central Europe, but not really even in Russia except for the two major cities. It's just that those who didn't agree had no way of disagreement (and it was same in my country and everywhere in the Eastern Bloc). Note that I live with a Russian national/citizen, these are her words.
In my country, they had to literally throw our pro-West (we were supposed to be a part of the Marshall plan, btw) prime minister out of the window and kill some more people to establish their rule - not cool. They had 31% (not universal) popular support because people had no idea about this and frankly no idea about what happened during the war as well, and that popular support was lost not even a year into their rule. This all happened AFTER the second world war.
> Well, to me being crucial to not living in a Nazi Europe today, counts for a lot and excuses a lot
Well, not to me. They could've went home after the war but instead (this is the key part) they decided to kill the people they helped save - not cool; and then they returned again in 1968 to occupy some more - not cool. My country could've been a free place with happy people instead of dead and sad people for past 70 years if it wasn't for them. Our economy would not be destroyed and our wages and pensions would be comparable to Austrian. I feel absolutely zero sympathy. None of the people who fought in second world war are alive anyways; most of those who occupied us in 1968 still are.
BTW were you paying attention during history classes? Have you forgotten that it was also the USSR who actually started the second world war because of their hunger for more power and global communism (God save us)?
> slavery to market forces and corporations freedom
Stop with this shit already. There was actual slavery in communist/socialist countries, can't you feel how wrong and unemphatic what you're saying is? It seems like you have absolutely no idea of the horrors that happened, or you're soulless. Our grandfathers died in uranium mines, and this uranium was then "given" (give or we destroy you, what a choice! What a nice people!) to the Soviets for free so they could subsidize other places (these are the places where they liked it). NOT COOL. (my country was left with absolutely no uranium and zero repayment, btw)
No one is a slave to any market force in the Czech Republic or in most other Eastern Bloc countries (the problem here lies in corruption which in turn lobbies for harder debt collection laws - entirely government fault!), go solve your USA shit elsewhere, it's not my problem that "the land of the free" can't handle its market when even formerly communist countries can (btw many of my countrymen and friends live in the USA and their experience is vastly different, they always return with pockets full of money - seems interesting; maybe there is a problem with you Americans if foreigners that barely speak English are more successful in your own country).
I wonder what was the motivation behind that, huh
Rather than desperately trying to rewrite history, why don't you take a stroll through Cuba or Venezuela, the current and latest communism victims? Ask those people how much they like it.
Now they're stuck with it, though - all versions had lyrics written by the same guy, Sergei Mikhalkov, who died in 2009.
There was a canadian opera singer who did anthems for hockey games. He would sing three notes then turn the mic to the crowd. That is how national anthems should be done.
There is also a great vid of a game where the american soloist had a mic fail. The canadian crowd finished the american anthem for her.
The song was made originally as Bolsheviks' Party anthem with completely different lyrics (and author of them).
The song was written by Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo and the group's lead singer Victor Willis. The melody is based on the State Anthem of the Soviet Union composed by Alexander Alexandrov, which was itself a reworking of Pachelbel's Canon.
For one to determine that soldiers are 'enemy soldiers' would there not have to be a state of declared war?
Ask Iran if they're at war with the US (maybe kinda sorta). Then ask them if the US is an enemy (definitely). The same would go for Iran and Israel. There's no confusion there, you can clearly have enemies without a declared war.
The instant prior to the declaration of war the other side wasn't an enemy? Logically it's not a sound concept.
Ask a Vietnam War veteran, or a Korean War veteran, if they fought any enemy soldiers at any point. War was not declared in those cases either.
And these are obviously not soldiers in the first place - they're sailors.
Tell that to the dead.
This is how search auto completed my query on the matter: were russia and us allies in ww2
That suggests people are still surprised to learn that and routinely search that question. Americans tend to believe that Russia has always been our enemy and remains so in the eyes of many Americans to this day.
Compare that to US/UK aka true allies.
An alliance in every sense - it just wasn't a permanent alliance. Allied even though few liked Stalin's regime. Yalta conference - to plan the peace - was the point of change that slid toward cold war.
Edit: accurate numbers. :)
The whole army and the workers of the most crucial factories had ate almost exclusively a lend-lease food from USA, also after food stock depletion in 1943 Soviet Union increased the demand of food over weaponry to ¼ of supplies' tonnage (that's how my grandmother had a first taste of chocolate at the age of 9). So don't talk like it was "just food", some (due to widely censored documents and history classes) of us still know how crucial this support was, along with trucks, air fuel and others.
Without it USSR would have probably lost - probably the whole war, certainly Moscow and St Petersburg. Maybe there could have been withdrawal to the Steppes - though the fightback always struck me as unlikely after such a retreat. The food aid, and the hundreds of thousands of trucks, entire divisions using GB, Canadian and US tanks, or squadrons of aircraft. First convoy only weeks after German invasion. Enough that Britain delayed some operations due to lower availability at home. Important enough to both sides, to keep Germany split on two fronts. Without it all it could have taken far longer, or been lost on the Western front too. Liberating Europe would have been that much harder, perhaps impossible.
Then it all went to crap at Yalta, though signs were there from the Anglo-Soviet treaty in 41 with Stalin's wish to stick to the Nazi Molotov-Ribbetropp pact's view of Europe, and its spheres of influence. Which is pretty much exactly what post-war Europe got.
For the UK and US, it was much cheaper sending tanks and jeeps and letting the USSR sacrifice the lives.
A Russian leader gave a speech where he clasped his hands together above his head, iirc. Americans interpreted it as a threatening gesture suggesting Russia "winning" against America or conquering us. It was interpreted like he was a boxer self congratulating following a win, raising his own hand up in triumph over the enemy.
It was kind of a scandal and only came out later that it was a cultural misunderstanding. It was intended to suggest hands clasped in friendship or reaching out to each other and bridging the distance.
My mother knows some Russian. It was the norm to study Russian in school in East Germany, where she happened to grow up. This interfered with her getting permission to marry my father, an American soldier, because it helped make her a suspicious character who was probably a spy.
Not sure why it’s necessary to make a slight against our times? Even Osama Bin Laden was given a proper burial at sea, and he wasn’t even a soldier, he was a damn criminal. We didn’t even use photos of his remains for propaganda.