Veterans of what exactly?

As I watched the Victory Day parade in Red Square, admired the spinal strength of old men bending under the weight of their medals, and listened to the speeches glorifying Soviet veterans, I was doing sums.

Mathematical nous isn’t my core strength, but my numeracy still stretches to simple additions and subtractions. Putting those modest talents to work, I whipped out my trusted calculator and went to work.

The youngest Soviet participants in Stalin’s war against Hitler were born in 1927. Today that would make them… let’s see: 2023 minus 1927 equals 96. That’s almost 30 years more than the average life expectancy for men in Russia. And would it be wild conjecture to assume that the physical and mental traumas of a horrible war don’t bolster longevity?

Combining these basic calculations with empirical observation, one could notice that most of those bemedaled veterans in Red Square were no older than me. Meaning they were born several years after the war that the Russians have elevated to a secular cult.

And yet they were applauded every time the Second World War was mentioned, which was all the time. Why, even that great veteran of KGB wars, Putin, sat flanked by those senior citizens, wingmen to his flight leader.

Actually, the one on his right looked as if he just might be old enough to have caught the tail end of the big war, if not to have had enough time to garner all those decorations. And there were a lot of them.

Each wingman exhibited more decorations than Field Marshal Mongomery and Gen. Bradley had between them. But then the Soviets were notoriously generous with tinsel, if nothing else. Actually, that was the only war the Soviet Union ever fought for a good cause, if not from the very beginning.

For almost two years, from 17 September, 1939, to 22 June, 1941, it was an ally of Nazi Germany and hence shared her guilt in starting the Second World War. However, the veterans of the Soviet attack on Poland would now be way over 100, and no one lives that long in Russia.

The chap on Putin’s left looked the right age to have taken part in the Soviet war on Afghanistan, 1979-1989, as an officer, not an enlisted man. But since that war ended in abject defeat, its veterans aren’t usually feted with effusive enthusiasm.

So where did those men win their medals? No doubt Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t need anyone’s help to figure out their life stories by just examining the photograph through a magnifying glass. But since I possess neither his talents nor indeed a magnifying glass, I welcomed the help of someone who has done the legwork for me.

It was Tamara Eidelman, whom I recently described as “a Russian historian who looks like everybody’s favourite aunt and sounds the way a Russian Easter cake would sound if it could talk”. Even though she has been exiled from Russia, she still managed to dig up the information I sought.

The older wingman, Yuri Dvoikin, indeed caught the very end of that war, but mostly distinguished himself after it. He served in the NKVD punitive troops “fulfilling assignments of liquidating the nationalist underground on the territory of Western Ukraine”.

Allow me to translate the quoted phrase from Soviet into Human. Until 17 September, 1939, Western Ukraine had been known as Eastern Poland, and until 1918 it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The people there were fierce nationalists who fought first the Poles, then the Soviets, then the Nazis (with whom some of them collaborated), then the Soviets again. After the war, Western Ukrainians supplied most (though far from all) fighters for the guerrilla units that continued to fight the Soviets well into the mid-50s if not later.

The Soviets responded to the resistance movement the only way they knew how: with unrestrained brutality. Hostages were taken and shot, whole villaged were burned down, hundreds of thousands were deported, the fighters’ families were exterminated, and eventually the resistance was suppressed.

But mutual hatred remained, and you can hear its echoes in today’s battlefields. The Ukrainians’ hatred was largely fed by the artificial famine the Soviets organised in the early 1930s. Some five million starved to death in that fertile land – and that’s a conservative estimate.

So Yuri Dvoikin was Vlad Putin’s colleague in Soviet security, though his service was more hands on. He earned his medals by shooting Ukrainians, some of whom shot back, some – I suspect most – didn’t. They were what’s today called ‘collateral damage’, civilians exterminated pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire described the execution of the English admiral John Byng.

Putin’s left wingman, Gennady Zaitsev, looks about my age, meaning he was born way after that war. Dr Eidelman doesn’t specify the origin of all his numerous decorations, but she does mention the probable origin of some.

Gen. Zaitsev, as he now is, took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, nipping the so-called Prague Spring in the bud. If some of Dvoikin’s victims were armed, Zaitsev’s targets weren’t. The Czechs, most of them young idealists, came out into the streets demanding a communism with a human face.

That was their mistake: communism has no human face. It has a scowling snout red in tooth and claw. (Having first used Voltaire’s phrase, I’m now using Tennyson’s. About time I came up with my own, wouldn’t you say?)

And some of those red splotches were doubtless added by Comrade Zaitsev. That made him a precursor of Putin’s stormtroopers currently trying to do to all of the Ukraine what Comrade Dvoikin did to its western part, and Comrade Zaitsev did to Czechoslovakia.

Kremlin watchers knew in the past to ponder the order in which Soviet leaders appeared on the Lenin Mausoleum during Victory Day parades. Proximity to the Great Leader at the time was symbolic. Expert analysts were able to infer all sorts of zigs and zags of Soviet policy just looking at the people who flanked the Secretary General.

That job description has changed, but the symbolism remains. Putin chose his wingmen advisedly, as a tacit declaration ad urbi et orbi. You don’t need me to understand its meaning: Russia is proud of her past and present of stamping out freedom movements at her borders. Get the message?