Victory Day is sacred, as sacred as Victory itself. In our time, when every death on the front happens online, when it has its own social media page and arrives directly on your mobile as a notification, even a hundred war casualties seem like a catastrophe.

Twenty-seven million! How can one even begin to imagine that? It means that in every family, there are the dead. Grandfathers and great-grandfathers killed on the fronts, women and children who perished from bombings and hunger. The Great Patriotic War demanded that every family sacrifice someone to it. People took up arms to defend their homes. Their very own homes, their families: their beloved wives, their children. There was no choice. The enemy attacked treacherously, without a declaration of war, starting with night bombings of a peacefully sleeping Kyiv. One had to take up arms and go to fight. And if one had to die, then to die so that one's wife and children could be saved and continue to live.

And they died. It was a true sacrifice: the unlived life flowed from the men, who became part of the earth by the millions, to their children. All that remained were black-and-white photos in the red corner, on the home altar of the spirits of ancestors who gave us all their strength, all their blood, all their time on earth.

Victory Day was a day of remembrance for ancestors and a day of life. Yes, warriors marched on Red Square, but these warriors were the continuators of the defenders' cause. Those who could come into the world thanks to the self-sacrifice of their fathers and grandfathers. And the cause they continued was the defense of their native land, their families.

Victory Day, in essence, is the Day of Ancestors, an ancient pagan celebration where mourning for the departed mixes with the joy that we ourselves are alive today—thanks to them. These feelings and meanings are understandable and accessible to everyone; they are so primal, so powerful that the sacredness of this celebration is felt by everyone—to the point of goosebumps; as if a stream of strength, of hot blood, flows from the distant past through each of us. And everything that this stream washes over becomes sacred too.

Places where blood was spilled turn into sanctuaries. Words spoken about the sacrifices of ancestors are sanctified—and empty slogans become effective incantations. State, military, and cultural symbols that politicians immerse in this stream are sanctified—and our hearts begin to beat faster at the mere sight of them. And the politicians themselves, partaking in it, become as if its priests.

Thus, anyone who encroaches on what is sprinkled with holy blood offends the memory of the ancestors. For everything that is sacred is infallible. It cannot be doubted. Believers are ready to tear apart those who encroach on their sanctities, so sincere will be their rage.

Therefore, the more sinful and soulless a politician, the more delightfully he splashes in the blood of our ancestors: for it will cover him with a Teflon shell, allowing him to deflect any criticism.

That is why the authorities raise the fallen from mass graves, why they make them march down the avenues of Russian cities hand in hand with the living. The voicelessness of the dead and the obedience of the living, following the shadows of their ancestors, tempt the costumed priests: could it really be possible to lure the living anywhere, make them do anything? The dead are voiceless, they march where the rumble of military orchestras and speeches from plastic podiums on blue screens call them.

It seems possible. And so the living are sent to die on the fronts of a senseless, unjust, aggressive war, convinced that it is their grandfathers who call them there.

But the ancestors implored not to repeat, and when the priests demand repetition, the very essence of the cult of Victory is perverted. The mission of those who perished on the front was to allow us to live, otherwise their sacrifice is meaningless. And if they do not protect us from death, but instead try to drag us into a new war, they turn from our defenders and protectors into restless dead, who thirst for the blood of the living, who want to drag their children to the other side. And when the Great Patriotic War is used to justify the Ukrainian "special operation," it turns out that the spirits of the ancestors are set against their own grandchildren, turning into brainless chain dogs ready to tear apart anyone their necromancer master points to, not sensing kinship, having lost all connection with new generations. It's a real horror.

The main emotion, the main underlying meaning that filled the cult of Victory with strength, is destroyed. The celebration of life, overshadowed by the tribute to the memory of the departed, turns into a ceremony of sacrifice, feeding the living to the dead. And the priests, who spoke on behalf of wise and noble ancestors, begin to spew the spells of their true god—the god of death. There is a meaning in serving this god: like public executions, sacrifices hypnotize the public and make it animalistically submissive. An effect known to all priests and rulers.

From plastic podiums, they demand death, they call for it to descend on the whole world in an atomic blaze, because the essence and meaning of this new cult is in death, in sacrifice for the sake of power alone, and valor is in committing suicide along with the whole world. The demons that have taken over our rulers have nothing in common with the shadows of our ancestors. Those who rule us, and those who rule them, for now timidly but ever more resolutely, are pushing the people into the furnaces of mobile crematoriums. Victory Day turns into the Day of Death.

Yet our ancestors wished for only one thing—for us to live.