Every May 9, the European Union celebrates itself wrapped in the language of peace, integration, and democracy. Golden stars against a blue field. Ceremonies of consensus. Speeches invoking reconciliation and shared destiny. Yet beneath the polished rhetoric of European unity, another reality increasingly shadows the continent: a Europe where the discourse of peace now coexists uneasily with rearmament, where civil liberties are debated under the pressures of security, and where faith in democratic institutions grows more fragile and uncertain.

May 9 commemorates the so-called “European idea,” born from the Schuman Declaration of 1950, presented as a civilizational response to the ruins of war. But while European institutions celebrate the birth of the postwar community project, another memory fades quietly into the margins — the victory of the Soviet Red Army over Nazism in 1945.

This is not a matter of symbolism alone. Dates are never innocent. They are instruments of memory, and memory itself is always political territory.

The defeat of Nazism cannot be understood without acknowledging the decisive role played by the Soviet Union in World War II. It was on the Eastern Front that Hitler’s military machine suffered its most devastating losses. Soviet cities were annihilated. Entire populations were sacrificed. More than twenty-five million Soviet civilians and soldiers perished. Names such as Battle of Stalingrad, Battle of Kursk, and the siege of Siege of Leningrad remain inscribed in history not merely as battles, but as monuments to absolute resistance against fascist barbarism.

Yet over the decades, the West gradually constructed a narrative of the Second World War increasingly centered upon itself. The Normandy Landings became the dominant cinematic and political symbol of Europe’s liberation, while the Soviet contribution was pushed into the background or treated with ideological discomfort. The Cold War reinforced this reinterpretation. It became difficult for the Western world to fully recognize the historical role of the USSR while simultaneously presenting it as the principal enemy of the “free world.”

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, that process deepened further. Historical memory became increasingly selective, shaped by geopolitical realignments and by a broader tendency toward historical simplification. The essential fact — that without the sacrifice of Soviet peoples the defeat of Nazism would have been incomparably more difficult and prolonged — slowly faded from much of Western Europe’s official commemorative culture.

Today, the European Union prefers to root its legitimacy in the narrative of Franco-German reconciliation, economic integration, and the liberal democratic values of the postwar order. That too is a political choice. But when history is reduced only to what serves the present, collective memory becomes impoverished.

The institutional Europe of today celebrates itself while drifting away from the concrete memory of those who paid the highest price in defeating the Third Reich.

Meanwhile, the Russian Federation continues to invoke the legacy of the Soviet victory as a central element of its historical identity, resisting what it perceives as Western attempts to relativize or silence the role of the USSR in defeating European fascism. The present, increasingly, attempts to rewrite the past retroactively.

Yet history demands greater rigor than temporary political alignments.

One does not need to glorify the Soviet political system to recognize the decisive role played by the Red Army in the destruction of Nazism. Historical truth should not depend upon contemporary ideological convenience.

In the end, May 9 reveals two Europes.

One Europe celebrates itself through institutions, treaties, and ceremonial language about unity. The other was built upon millions of dead — soldiers, workers, peasants, prisoners, civilians — whose sacrifice, little by little, risks disappearing from the official memory of the modern West.

And perhaps that is the deepest struggle of our time: not only the battle over territory or geopolitics, but the battle over remembrance itself — over who is allowed to remain visible in history, and who slowly vanishes into silence.