"What were we fighting for?!" – veterans of the Great Patriotic War, the authors of the Great Victory are asking this question, when they see the attempts to justify Nazi collaborators by their own descendants, a veteran of World War II, a teacher of Moscow State University, Igor Tikhonov, told Vestnik Kavkaza.
"Of course, normal veterans are very negative about attempts to justify Nazism and its accomplices. Frankly, I do not even know these abnormal people who would think differently. We strangled Nazism in the 40s, and now it is raising its head again, like a hydra. No one among my colleagues and my peers are glad about this – we are upset, we all say one thing: "What were we fighting for?!" Igor Tikhonov said.
According to him, the nationalist aspirations of certain groups of people are indestructible, but this does not mean that nationalism can be tolerated.
He pointed out that we constantly need to struggle against the attempts at justification and glorification of Nazi collaborators, especially working with young people. "We have no doubt that the memory about us will stay, but another thing is that our number is getting smaller. There has always been support and sympathy for me from the Dean of the History Faculty, Sergei Karpov, but now it turns out that there are students of two courses who do not know me, and it would be wise to listen about the Great Patriotic War from a direct participant in it," Igor Tikhonov concluded.
