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Cold edge to V-E Day celebration
More than 50 world leaders will join President Putin on Red Square Monday to honour the USSR's victory over Nazi Germany 60 years ago.
More than 50 world leaders will join President Vladimir Putin on Red Square Monday for a huge military parade, featuring World War II tanks, aircraft and veterans, to honour the USSR's victory over Nazi Germany 60 years ago.
But controversy is sure to rage on the sidelines, with some eastern European leaders demanding Russia apologize for 50 years of post-war Soviet domination.
And some Russian war veterans say they may take the occasion to protest their shrinking pensions and social benefits under reforms introduced by Putin this year.
"For the Kremlin, it's a very difficult anniversary to manage.
There are a lot of discordant voices," says Sergei Kazyonnov of the Institute of National Security and Strategic Research. "But Putin will be hoping to get political dividends from this. It looks like the world is coming to him".
The 56 leaders who'll attend what Putin has billed as a day to celebrate "the joy of victory and reconciliation" include heads of the three main defeated powers of WW II -- Germany, Japan and Italy -- as well as many of the USSR's key allies in the conflict.
US President George Bush will be on hand, as will French President Jacques Chirac, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Western leaders might feel uncomfortable sharing the stand with some Kremlin invitees, such as Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Turmenistan's despotic Saparmurat Niyazov and Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish general who imposed martial law on his country at Moscow's behest in the 1980's.
The Russian public will have to watch the event on TV. Officials have announced that Moscow's downtown core will be sealed off by 30,000 police, with orders to admit only accredited guests.
Only a handful of Russia's 1-million surviving war vets were invited to take part in the Soviet-style military parade, which will include a massive display of tanks, missiles, artillery and a fly-by of vintage fighter planes.
Some veterans say they haven't forgiven the Kremlin for slashing their benefits and will find their own ways to protest on Victory Day. Twenty-seven million Soviets died in what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War.
Nearly 8-in-10 of all living Russians is descended from a war veteran, and Victory Day remains the only Soviet-era holiday that is universally honoured.
One growing source of tension among the foreign guests on Red Square is the pre-war deal between Stalin and Adolf Hitler that divided up central Europe.
Russian experts say Putin's main purpose in organizing the Red Square party may be to bolster his own flagging political fortunes by basking in the reflected light of the USSR's greatest moment.
