On May, 25^th 1945 Joseph Stalin made a cel­e­bra­tory speech devoted to the end of the Russ­ian Great Patri­otic War. The Sec­ond World War was com­ing to an end, but the Soviet Union was done fight­ing. The Russ­ian troops had exited Ger­many and ahead lied a long road of rebuild­ing and reha­bil­i­ta­tion. So in Krem­lin, at the V-day Meet­ing, Stalin had said the following:

Do not expect me to say any­thing extra­or­di­nary today. I have a very sim­ple, very ordi­nary toast to make. I would like to raise a glass to health of those peo­ple who are low in rank and invis­i­ble in the hier­ar­chy. Of those who we con­sider to be the “small screws” of our huge state mech­a­nism — they might be small but with­out them us gen­er­als, mar­shals and other top army lead­ers wouldn’t have made it. They are plen­ti­ful, they are a legion, it is tens of mil­lions of peo­ple who have not been heard of — yet they hold us together, as the base holds the top. To their health!

Today we have brought to your atten­tion a frag­ment of the inter­view with Yelena Bon­ner, a human rights activist, a dis­si­dent, a writer, and a widow of the late Andrei Sakharov — dur­ing the war she was a teen and now, cour­tesy to the Internet-magazine Snob.ru, she tells us about her expe­ri­ence dur­ing the war.

So — We did not fight for Stalin or the Soviet Union. We fought because we had no other choice.

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