I am a professional soldier. I served my Fatherland, my people, for about 40 years. This period included Afghanistan, the difficult years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the confrontation with the terrorist threat. I was wounded three times.

There is not one day in my service that I would be ashamed of. The Russian military has always been derived its strength from its long traditions handed down from generation to generation. From General Suvorov to the present day, soldiers of the Russian army are guided by these rules among others:

 — A soldier is not a bandit. A soldier does not harm civilians. A soldier strikes the enemy with humanity no less than with weapons.

 — Act humanely with conquered enemy. The enemy who surrendered — he has mercy.

War itself is nothing but a crime, and in the course of wars people suffer and die.

I was born 10 years after the end of the Great Patriotic War. When the first man of the planet Earth, a Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin, overcame the earthly gravity, I was only six years old. I remember the ration cards, which my parents used to buy certain products in a shop at that time. At that age, I could not juxtapose these two events: the conquest of space and the ration cards. But with that material modesty, each of our families also contributed to the conquest of space. Two great victories in practically the same generation! This could be achieved only by the people aspiring to the future, and I am the heir to that heroic lineage of victors.

During my childhood we could not imagine that the tragic history of the Great Patriotic War with its tens of millions of ruined souls and broken fates could be freely interpreted, distorted, rewritten. We studied this period at school on the heroic deeds of people, often sacrificed, committed in the fight against an unsolicited enemy — the conqueror, we watched films about the war, and read books. History was taught to me by Natalya Ignatievna Chuprina, who during the war was a nurse. On May 9, the war veterans would put on their awards and we, children, saw in those who brought peace to mankind. For them it was a Victory achieved through much suffering, with tears in their eyes and we, children, saw those tears.

I was only able to answer this question in Afghanistan, where I served as a deputy commander of a reconnaissance troop. In one of the combat episodes, my reconnaissance team, operating in the mountains and in isolation from main forces, was surrounded by the dushmans, as we called the enemy. I was wounded, but continued to lead the fight. Realizing the difficulty of the situation, I pulled a grenade, half pulled out a safety check, and if the critical moment came, I would have put the grenade into action.

Each of these countries contributed to the Victory. We were aware of the enormous material assistance provided by the USA, Great Britain, Canada and other countries to the USSR, which was very necessary for the Red Army soldiers and workers on the home front. On the American R-39 "Aerocobra" airplane, which was delivered by the Land-Lease, fought three times Hero of the Soviet Union, the future Marshal of Aviation Alexandre Pokryshkin. We admired the feats of French pilots of the air squadron "Normandy-Nieman", the Yugoslavian partisans, the soldiers of the Polish Army.

The Great Patriotic War burnt my family as well. My mother’s brother Alexandre was a tank crewman. A young boy from a backwoods village in Vologda region died near Kursk in his first battle. My father-in-law, Alexei Filippovich, fought on the Karelian front, was wounded twice.

My mother and her two sisters, children then, worked next to the adults to bring victory closer.

In the Samara region there is a monument to the Volodichkin family, where before the war there were nine sons — all of them were taken away by the war. In the Arkhangelsk region, all seven sons of a simple Russian woman Kalista Pavlovna Soboleva did not return to their house. In Chuvashia region, Tatiana Nikolaevna Nikolaeva could not hug any of her eight sons after the victory. From North Ossetia, all seven sons of the Gazdaev family fell as heroes. Such examples can be cited on and on. How can this be forgotten!

World War II ended victoriously with the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and Japan. But even before the celebratory fireworks rattled, the recent Allies, the United States and Britain, were already making war plans against the blood-spilled Soviet Union, using nuclear weapons. A number of documents attest to this. The creation of similar weapons in the Soviet Union in 1949 has cooled down this militaristic aspiration, but the striving to play a dominant role in the world in all spheres has not weakened among the political elite of the United States. The North Atlantic military and political bloc, as an instrument of these aspirations became a reality. We studied this in school, too.

At the end of the XX century, our country faced multiple occasions of organized terrorist activity. I served 12 years in the anti-terrorist unit, and I know firsthand what the consequences of terrorism are for the people. Home explosions, hostage-taking and destruction, brutal executions to instill fear. Many of the terrorists' instructors and mercenaries were not Russian citizens. Financing for the activities of terrorist armed groups also came from abroad. Moral principles did not exist for these murderers. A vivid example that shocked the whole world was a terrorist attack on a school in a small North Ossetian town of Beslan in 2004. On September 1^st when all children start the year, the school with more than 1 100 children and their parents was taken hostage. The result was 334 dead, 186 of them children.

It’s been 75 years since that victorious May. Unfortunately, we, the heirs of the victors, have to defend this Great Victory from a massive attack by the falsifiers of history. In 2015, when we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Victory, my comrades and I deployed the largest replica of the Victory Banner at the North Pole — 1,156 square meters. When I was asked by journalists what it meant, I replied: "The small assault banner that our soldiers raised above the Reichstag, was seen by the entire world and understood as a symbol of unconditional victory over the hateful ideology of fascism. At present, however, this hydra is raising its head on the borders of the Russian Federation as a global terrorist threat. Therefore, on the "roof of the planet" we have deployed a replica of the Victory Banner as a reminder of the tens of millions lifes that burned in the flames of World War II and prevent such a scenario."

Julius Fucik wrote in his novel Notes from the Gallows: "Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the earth!"

I urge everyone to remember these lines and to live life in a manner so that "it is not painfully embarrassing to have lived aimless years". This is of course the timeless line from the great writer Nikolay Ostrovsky, the author of How the Steel Was Tempered.

The 75th anniversary of our common victory over evil in World War II is enough time to realize that preserving peace on Earth is the result of a common effort.