By CKR
RIA Novosti has a very cool web site leading up to Victory Day. Lots of links and photos, personal stories, maps, and a link to the official site for the 9 May celebration in Moscow. It's working through the history day by day. 
Yesterday, 30 April, was the anniversary of Hitler's death. I went to see Downfall, about Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker. It communicates the mental and physical claustrophobia of those last days very well. I kept thinking about a visit to the Soviet memorial at Marjamaa, just east of Tallinn.
I visited there with an American graduate student who was studying pre-WWII and Soviet memorials. The grounds are poorly kept, the eternal flame is out, and the memorial stones in the ground are barely readable after only 30-40 years of north Estonian rain.
The Soviets placed the memorial over a German cemetery. In the past few years, the Germans have renewed their memorial by placing a large stone with the names and birth and death dates of the Germans buried there. My friend and I began reading the names. The first was a woman's name. "Twenty years old," we said to each other and burst into tears. 
The very end of Downfall parallels our discovery of a sense of personal connection to the people who died. But I kept thinking about that day under cloudy skies all through the movie.