Tanks rehearsing for Victory Day parade this year in Moscow underneath "Peace" sign. Photo by koraxdc.

It's Victory Day (Den' Pobedy) when the old folks sing the Soviet song Den' Pobedy.

It's a day I remember Ivan Prokofyevich, my father-in-law and children's grandfather who, as he used to say it, "doshol do Kieva" — reached Kiev in fighting the Nazis. That's how all the Soviet veterans put it — they described the city that they reached in World War II, usually on foot.

No matter that his family was forced into collectivization, no matter if his wife's father was thrown into the GULAG and never seen again despite his partisan victories, no matter if his two sons were imprisoned as political dissidents, one of them dying after mistreatment in a psychiatric hospital. Ivan Prokofyevich took out his victory medals, some with the visage of the dictator Stalin, and wore them proudly. His widow lovingly laid them out on a velvet pillow at his funeral.

Or I remember the feisty little old Russian Jewish lady in Brighton Beach in the veterans' association I once went to interview with the Discovery Channel. As a 19-year-old girl, she had served as gunner's mate in a tank turret during the Sierge of Stalingrad and had watched her comrades die all around her. She described being driven by the Nazis to a river bank and feeling as if there was no way out. Somehow she survived.

The Soviets lost at least 20 or 25 million people in World War II; they lost at least that many from their leadership's own deadly crimes against humanity, who massacred millions, starting with the 1917 revolution (actually, even before that, if you count all the terrorist attacks from the revolutionaries). There's a day of remembrance for all those victims, too, on October 30, which was the Political Prisoners' Day started by the astrophysicist Kronid Lubarsky, a chronicler of the GULAG and its victims in the 1970s and 1980s, and himself a former political prisoner. But it gets a lot less attention.

The Great Patriotic War (as the Russians call it) is a very Sovietized and propagandized holiday, and continues to be so, and it is difficult to unwrap the real sacrifices of the peoples who lived under the  Soviet yoke at that time, and the exploitation of that victory to keep oppressive regimes in power, starting with the Kremlin.

For some, World War II (as we call it) is inextricably linked with the USSR, which they didn't want to see fall, and with communism, which they still support, as you can see from the kind of flags and banners that still show up at the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow.

Others are trying to start something "non-red," i.e. with the orange-and-black striped St. George Flag colours, which has a more ancient history with the Russian people, but which I'm not entirely sure isn't being exploited by nationalists without much tolerance for the non-Russians who once fought side by side with them in that Great Patriotic War (I want a second opinion on this, as the orange ribbon fad started under Putin).

The Uzbek government is among the Central Asian governments that have tried to take the Russian nationalism and Soviet Russification out of the holiday and indeed, out of everything associated with World War II — all as part of their own mythologizing of their own brutal regimes. This means that dictator Islam Karimov is tearing down or moving World War II monuments or renaming them or streets to make sure nothing looks too Soviet or Russian — both topics from an era when he was only a regional communist party secretary subordinate to Moscow, and not President.

These actions have predictably pissed off Russians, particularly Russian veterans; they also seemed part of a plan to keep Moscow at a distance, which isn't, of course, the worse thing.

So along comes uzmetronom.com, a pro-Karimov media outlet for rumours mainly leaked out of the interior ministry and intelligence services of Uzbekistan, pissed off at US Amb. George Krol for "getting it all wrong," as they claim, in a piece by Kozim Usmanov titled "George Krol Mixed up the USSR and Uzbekistan".

Krol is chastised for saying in a Victory Day speech that "the peoples of Uzbekistan and the United States" fought together in this "conflict."

That is, it should be not "Victory Day," as the Uzbek government has decreed that it be called "the Day of Remembrance and Honours" — sort of a Memorial Day — to disassociate themselves with the notion of a state that was victorious that they don't want to associate themselves with.

The pro-government UzDaily has his quotation, presumably from the original English:

The great victory we celebrate this week is not only your victory but our victory. The conflict that ended 67 years ago brought together many peoples and countries as allies in a common cause including the people of Uzbekistan and the United States of America. Both Uzbekistan and the United States sacrificed hundreds of thousands of sons and daughters to that conflict. Both our countries served as arsenals for our armies and refuges for many displaced by war.

Krol isn't "mixing up" the USSR and Uzbekistan as they claim. He has said "many peoples" and then "peoples of Uzbekistan and the USA". BTW, the Russian they are using looks correct:

Конфликт, который завершился 67 лет назад, объединил страны и народы, которые как союзники боролись за общее дело, среди них -  народы Узбекистана и Соединённых Штатов Америки

Uzmetronom.com takes issue with the fact that the word "conflict" is used instead of "war" — as if  it trivialized World War II to a skirmish.

Well, that does illustrate that for American diplomats, the euphemistic word "conflict" — used for actual wars from Libya to Afghanistan to Iraq that are never declared as wars as such — does really mean big bad wars. But there's also a historical use of conflict that simply means war, without minimizing it — although "war" is usually used for Wars I and II, as you can see from Google's history of word usage, at least in the books they scanned.

Usmanov also grumps that Krol hasn't understood "the official position" of Tashkent on how to interpret World War II, as follows:

We emphasize that the outright stupidity and strictly American primitivism of G. Krol was given away by the phrase "in recognition of the 67th anniversary of victory of the allies over fascism." The American diplomat is hardly aware of the official position on this question of the political leadership of the country where he is staying. Allow us to to fill this educational gap and articulate the position in our own words. So, Uzbekistan as a state did not fight Germany, so therefore, for Uzbekistan there is no Great Patriotic War. There was the Second World War into which the residents of the Uzbek SSSR were drawn in, since they were part of the USSR. That explains the re-naming of Victory Day to the Day of Memory and Honours.

Well, so what are we saying here, Uz? That Uzbeks don't think Nazi Germany should have been fought and they were dragged into it? That fascism shouldn't have been defeated? Or what, exactly? Why all this painstaking disassociation?

We all get it that independent Uzbekistan didn't exist, and it was only a constituent socialist republic of the Soviet Union. So what? There were Uzbek veterans and Russian and other ethnic veterans who fought and died in this war. There aren't only ethnic Uzbeks in Uzbekistan.

The Embassy staff were careful to make sure that the audience of 60 included a veteran named "Hasanov" and a veteran named "Aleksandr" who had even reached the historic meeting of US and Soviet forces on the Elbe.

Usmanov goes on to fume about something Krol said about Japanese prisoners-of-war. I can't find what Krol said, but Usmanov seems to accept the position — certainly disputed by most Western historians — that there were simply no Japanese prisoners-of-war on the territory of what is now Uzbekistan. Rather, again, Usmanov "helps" fill in the "gaps" in Krol's knowledge: "according to the official version of the political leadership of the country where he has been temporarily delegated by the US State Department, there were never any Japanese prisoners-of-war. (Usmanov seems at least a bit tongue-in-cheek when he tells us that those people who built the Navoi Theater were "repatriates".)

And…Temporarily?! I guess "certain forces" in the Uzbek government don't like Krol, even though he danced at their spring holiday like Snoopy.

Usmanov concludes, oddly, citing unnamed "experts" which smart people like himself nevertheless don't agree with, supposedly:

According to serious experts, the current US ambassador in Uzbekistan, unlike his predecessor, is more and more reminiscent of a mediocre actor from a provincial theater, trying with all his might to be liked by the respected public, instead of a serious diplomat of an authoritative state. We admit that the opinion is erroneous or prejudiced, but it has been formed and nothing can be done about it.

This is all a lot of vexation over nothing, and Krol didn't do anything wrong — what it does give us a glimpse of, however, is the neuralgic preoccupations of the last days of the Karimov regime.