ON THE EASTERN FRONT

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There are few of them left nowadays, and they are mostly ignored. On May 9, however, elderly veterans of the Red Army will turn out all across the former Soviet Union to celebrate their victory 50 years ago over Nazi Germany. In Moscow and Kiev, in St. Petersburg and Nizhni Novgorod, authorities are organizing rallies and parades to honor the old soldiers. And the old soldiers, rows of military medals pinned to their civilian clothes, are reminiscing about the war, the friends they lost and the savage, tragic history of the country they saved. Their stories are of heroism and struggle, of joy and sadness.

But the Soviet Union was saved only to eventually decay and collapse. On this anniversary of V-E day, the old soldiers' children are assessing the past as well, but they have neither tragedy nor triumph to commemorate. Their stories are of disillusionment and despair.

ANNA ZOSIMOVA, 72, works as a school administrator in St. Petersburg. "It seems strange to say it, but those were good years," she says of the war, showing pictures of herself in her air-defense uniform-a dark-haired young woman with strong shoulders developed digging trenches during the 880-day siege of Leningrad. "I was young, and when you are young, you are happy. I loved to dance, and we used to have parties as often as we could. We worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, doing hard work, shovel work. But we had time to enjoy ourselves."

Zosimova recalls in particular the New Year's Eve of 1942 in the midst of the bitterly cold first winter of the siege -- the winter that starvation set in and an estimated 1.5 million Leningraders began to die. "We were allowed to go into the city," she says. "I took two friends from the place where we were digging and went to my uncle's apartment." There was no food, but they begged a handful of flour from a friend who worked in a bakery. Then they boiled water, added salt and mustard, and made the flour into small dumplings. "I got a tree and some decorations," she says, her face creasing with laughter. "We sang songs. We ate our soup. We had a celebration."

They returned to the trenchworks the next morning, New Year's Day. "We were crossing a bridge, and the Germans started shelling," she says. The smile fades. "One of my friends, her name was Galya, was hit. She died a little while later ." The smile is gone. Tears flow, moistening Zosimova's deeply wrinkled old cheeks.

Her daughter Lena Gavrilova, 42, is a teacher, and she believes it is important to understand the past. She only recently discovered what happened to her paternal grandfather, she says. He was denounced as a kulak in 1930 and was sent to Solovetski Island in the far north. "He died there. We don't even know where his grave is." She continues, "This is our history, and we need to respect it. We need to learn from it. But our politicians have forgotten that. I don't know for sure what's going on in Chechnya, the politics of it. When I see boys whom I taught coming back with limbs missing, crippled by war, I cannot understand the decisions that our politicians are making."