It wasn’t long ago that the medals covering their jackets brought profound respect and guarantees of relative comfort in their golden years.
That was before the end of the Soviet Union and before runaway inflation turned their life savings into dust and battered their pensions to a monthly level common to the impoverished.
Russia’s veterans of a war long past – men and women who stopped Hitler’s armies at the very gates of Moscow and St. Petersburg – still command a respect uncommon in most countries.
On special family occasions and days of national celebration, such as May Day and Victory Day, old medals are polished up and uniforms from earlier eras pressed.
The May 9 Victory Day commemorating the Nazi defeat, for instance, found thousands of veterans gathered on Red Square to watch today’s army parade past Lenin’s mausoleum and the Kremlin wall. Medals spanned their chests from sleeve to sleeve, symbols of uncommon valor in campaigns all but forgotten amid the harsh tribulations of life in modern Russia.
Acknowledging smiles and nods from passers- by, they posed for photographs and strutted on limbs that defied old wounds and advancing years.
Younger men in uniform caps that bore new Russian double eagles instead of the Soviet hammer and sickle stared in awe at medals representing a war that brought their nation honor and pride, not the humiliation spawned by disastrous modern conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
But the aging veterans’ plight in the New Russia has brought many to the brink of misery. Their average monthly pension is put at 300,000 rubles, roughly $52, and most complain of checks that arrive late, sometimes months after they were due.
A recent letter to the monthly publication Veteran provided a glimpse into hardships faced by World War II vets in Arkangelsk, who said they had not received their pension payments in more than three months.
“We are all 70 to 75 years old,” said the letter signed by 93 vets. “We lived through the war. We started working when we were 10, but our retirement is not a happy one. We live in a village, we must work our garden, equipment is expensive and we don’t even hope for a spade . . .
“There were promises to pay, but what did we get? Only lies and tricks.”
The complaint is a common one is Russia, where late in March hundreds of thousands of workers angered by unpaid wages went on strike, marching behind red banners in hundreds of cities across the nation. “Our patience has blown up,” said Ivan Ivanov, 60, a retired shipyard worker.
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called the strike “a vivid indication of the acuteness of the accumulated problems,” and said help was on the way. On Monday , President Boris Yeltsin said the “main thing” was to fulfill promises to repay pensions by July 1.
“In a country that lost 27 million people during World Waw II, where it is a safe assumption that nearly every man over the age of 70 has worn a soldier’s uniform, veterans’ issues — if the size of pensions is any indication — seem to carry surprisingly little weight in the halls of government,” wrote Sunny Bosco in the Moscow Tribune.
“Frankly, I feel deceived,” said a retired colonel named Sergei. “We are the forgotten.”
Sergei lives with his family in an apartment much smaller than the one he was promised when he retired from the army. He supplements his pension with pay from his job as a security guard, and envies friends who opted for the professional world while he chose a career in the military.
“It’s gotten to the point where I’m sad to say that I cannot advise my children to consider the army as a career,” he said.
Veteran questioned how it was possible to live on a monthly pension of 220,000 rubles ($38) paid to some vets.
“(It) isn’t even enough for food,” a retired soldier wrote in Veteran. “There is nothing left to pay rent. What about sheets, socks, shirts and vacation? What about soap and toothpaste? We elderly people would be glad to sit at home, watch television, read stories to our grandchildren and cook, but there is no money.”
It was a refrain echoed by a veteran in Red Square who identified himself as Vladimir.
“I’ve got my medals, but little else,” he said. “But I am alive — and today the sun is shining.”
