The Soviet Victory in Europe, and the Memory War That Never Ended

On 24 June 2025, the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, foreign delegations walked into Red Square past banners that read, in Russian and English, "80 Years of the Great Victory." The parade itself followed the choreography set in June 1945, when Red Army regiments, having just smashed through Berlin, threw nearly 150 Nazi banners at the foot of Lenin's mausoleum. The Russian-language milblogger channel Two Majors, posting on its Telegram feed on the eve of the 81st anniversary in 2026, treated that 1945 parade as the founding scripture of a state still being written: a ceremonial ritual in which the Soviet people, in the channel's phrasing, "defeated Nazi Germany and saved the world." The grammar is deliberate. The victory, in that telling, is not a historical event with a date attached to it; it is a continuing claim about who ends wars, and therefore who gets to define them.

That claim has become the load-bearing wall of a memory war in Europe, and it is older than the war in Ukraine. For three decades, the European Union has been quietly writing a competing text. The 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism condemned "the massive human rights violations" carried out "by totalitarian Communist regimes." Eleven years later, the European Parliament went further: a 2019 resolution declared that the Nazi and Soviet regimes had committed "crimes against humanity of the highest magnitude" in a manner the Parliament said was "in no way comparable." Member states were urged to commemorate 23 August as a Europe-wide day of remembrance for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism, framing the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact as the moment the two totalitarianisms divided the continent between them.

The language matters because it is the language of institutions. The 2008 Council Framework Decision, still on the books, requires member states to criminalise public denial, gross trivialisation or justification of the crimes of the Axis powers and of "crimes against humanity" defined in the statute of the International Criminal Court. Soviet-era crimes, by that 2011 text, sit alongside Nuremberg ones. Moscow's reading of 1945 and Brussels's reading of 1939–45 are not just incompatible stories about the past; they are competing legal and pedagogical projects running in the same European space.

This is the under-reported pressure point, and it sits inside Russia rather than outside it. The human-rights society Memorial, the country's most respected attempt to document Soviet repression, was formally liquidated by Russia's Supreme Court in December 2021, a closure that closed decades of work on the Gulag, the deportations, and the manifold repressions that the European Parliament's resolution treats as central to the continent's 20th-century record. With Memorial gone, the field of legitimate Russian memory work has narrowed sharply. Independent historians who treat the 1939 pact as aggression rather than realpolitik, or who count Soviet deportations alongside German ones, now operate under conditions that push them either into exile or into silence. The result is that the Russian state's own version of the Great Patriotic War, the version Two Majors echoed in its June 2026 anniversary post, faces almost no organised domestic counter-narrative.

Europe's institutions, for their part, have not been idle. Across the EU, school curricula now treat 23 August, the date of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, as a date to be marked. National remembrance museums have grown in Tallinn, Vilnius, Riga, Prague, and Budapest, each making a different case about the long shadow of Soviet rule on local soil. Yet the European text remains uneven. Hungary's government, itself the target of regular EU criticism over historical policy, has periodically aligned its commemorations with Moscow's. Italy has its own grudge match over the foibe massacres, in which Yugoslav partisans killed Italians in 1943–45 and which Italian conservatives have spent three decades arguing was a Communist crime the EU has refused to recognise. Each national strand pulls at the European synthesis in a different direction.

What the Two Majors post actually illustrates is the durability of a Soviet victory narrative that has outlived the state that produced it. The Red Square parade of 1945 was a piece of theatre aimed at a domestic audience: a people told they had won, and told it in banners and boots and the theatrical humiliation of enemy flags. Eighty-one years later, the choreography is preserved because it remains useful. Against an EU that has spent two decades compiling a different file, and against a Western popular culture that has, since at least the 1980s, often reduced the eastern front to a Soviet footnote in a war won by the Americans and the British, the parade is the visible proof that the Soviet story still claims the centre. The memory war is not fought in 1945; it is fought in school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and the speeches delivered at anniversaries. And the question of which 1945 a European child grows up reading about will be settled, or at least contested, in the next decade.

Watch, in particular, the European Commission's next progress report on the implementation of the 2008 Framework Decision. It is there, in the bureaucratic prose of compliance monitoring, that the European synthesis either thickens into a common text or stays a patchwork of national variations. Two Majors will keep posting its banners. The harder question is whether, inside Russia, anyone will be left to post a counter-banner by the time the 85th anniversary comes around in 2030.

Sources

• [2026-06-25] Two Majors (Telegram), anniversary post on the 1945 Red Square Victory Parade: https://t.me/two_majors
• [2019-09-19] European Parliament resolution on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe, TA-8-2019-0097: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2019-0097_EN.html
• [2011-12-13] Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law, CELEX 32011D0786: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32011D0786
• [Wikipedia] Memorial (society), entry on the Russian human-rights organisation liquidated by Russia's Supreme Court in December 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

Desk note: Monexus treats the Two Majors post as a counter-claim indicator, useful evidence of how the Russian milblogger ecosystem is framing European memory politics in mid-2026, and pairs it with the public European institutional record to test the claim. The article does not credit the channel with findings that originate in EU institutions, and it flags, in the final section, the in-country pressure on Russian historical scholarship as the under-reported side of the dispute.