The memory of the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War is very important for the modern preservation of a common understanding of unity, the head of the scientific sector of the Russian Military-Historical Society Yuri Nikiforov said, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza.
"Since our ancestors - Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Russians and Armenians - fought in the same Red Army, it was a common cause for them - to defend the USSR against the fascist aggressor. And if one look at the history of the battle for the Caucasus or the history of the battle for Crimea, there were a lot of divisions,which included immigrants from these Caucasian republics of the USSR," the historian noted.
"When we hold youth events, and there are representatives of the Caucasian peoples among the students in my audience, when they go out and say: "My great-grandfather died defending Stalingrad," his fellow students understand: these are our people. It helps us today to find additional mutual understanding, additional incentives for cooperation," Yury Nikiforov explained.
"We in Russia will never allow to say during any serious discussion that only Russians defeated fascism and took Berlin. We will not allow people to forget that not just Russians were in the Red Army. That is why the heroes are equally respected regardless of their nationality. In spite of the fact that today Russia is independent from the other USSR republics, we inherited the Soviet internationalist approach," the historian stressed..
In his opinion, this approach was successfully implemented in the recent film 'Panfilov's 28 Men'. "I think the authors of the film managed to show the modern young spectator that the people who defended Moscow understood that they were simultaneously protecting their native Kazakhstan," the scientific sector of the Russian Military-Historical Society concluded.
