Screenshot from website of transcript of speech by Vladimir Putin on May 9.Īndrei Kolesnikov, who heads the Russian domestic politics program at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, also said he did a double take when he heard Putin's words. "Then I listened to him again - no, he specifically said 'alone.'" "I didn't even believe it at first - I looked at the text and it said 'united,' and I thought I had heard it wrong," Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former Kremlin adviser who is a critic of Putin, told the Russian news outlet Dozhd TV. Those words are unremarkable: Amid ethnic tensions inside Russia today and disputes between Russia and other former Soviet republics, Putin has often used his Victory Day speech to advance the narrative of wartime unity among the Soviet people - though in some cases, such as with dictator Josef Stalin's persecution of ethnic groups in the North Caucasus, this picture is inaccurate.īut in the speech itself, Putin replaced the word that means "united" with one that means "alone," suggesting that the Soviet Union - at least at the most crucial junctures in the war - had no help. In the initial Russian-language transcript of the May 9 address on the Kremlin website, Putin is quoted as saying that "at the most difficult moments in the war, during decisive battles that determined the result of the struggle against fascism, our people were united - united in the toilsome, heroic, and sacrificial path to victory." The remark drew criticism from Russians who accuse Putin of using the people's pride in the victory in the war, which killed an estimated 27 million Soviet citizens and left few families untouched, for his own political purposes.
This year, he seemed to take that approach a step further, even going off-script - possibly - to suggest that the Soviet Union essentially defeated Hitler on its own. In his speeches at the annual Red Square military parade marking the anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasized the massive role the Soviet Union played, while often minimizing the contributions made by the Western Allies, including the United States.
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