A Message to Putin From 42 Million Dead

According to official data, more than 800,000 people in Moscow alone, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, took part in Tuesday's march to commemorate their ancestors' participation in World War II. This memory is the basis of the Putin school of Russian patriotism and a big part of the ideology underlying the nation's recent geopolitical assertiveness. But the so-called Immortal Regiment movement also has another side, which undermines this ideology: Its leaders claim that declassified data show the Soviet Union's wartime losses reached an astronomical 42 million people, rather than the officially recognized 27 million.

The Immortal Regiment -- the tradition of people marching with the photographs of their relatives who fought in the war to mark the anniversary of the Soviet victory on May 9 -- started as a grassroots movement in the 2000s; three journalists in Tomsk named it. The Kremlin's decision to head up the marches has had the effect of replacing the patriotic spontaneity of local activists with the dutifulness of an official propaganda effort specifically aimed at making the 1945 victory the cornerstone of Russian national pride. Organizers have quarreled about the degree of closeness to the official authorities, with the Moscow chapter of Immortal Regiment splitting off to go along entirely with the Kremlin effort.