Over 100,000 residents of Perm took part in the Victory Day celebrations on May 9, 2018

Photo: Vitaliy Koksharov

The festivities dedicated to the 73-rd anniversary of the Victory in the WWII were held in Perm  under the slogan “Great Victories of the Great Country”

The Victory Day festivities in Perm started at 10 am on May, 9 in the Oktyabskaya Square with a commemoration parade of the Perm garrison, featuring 23 detachments, 20 military vehicles, a 500-member joint  choir, a cavalry group with horsemen dressed in a historic uniform of the Red Army, and vintage Soviet-time “Volga” cars brought by special aircraft from Yekaterinburg.  The event gathered 10,000 spectators watching it in the square and over 100,000 viewers in the Internet. The parade was followed by “The Immortal Regiment” social action, which has become a tradition of a growing popularity. “Immortal Regiment” is a public initiative, now becoming international, aimed at promoting personal memories of the generation of the Great Patriotic War: every year on May 9, the Victory Day, people march the streets of cities and towns carrying the photos of their relatives – war veterans, those who fought in the front line, those who worked for the front in the rear, who fought in partisan groups or in the Resistance, concentration-camps prisoners, those who survived through blockade, children of the war time. This year about 38,000 of Perm City residents took part in the march. 

The city’s most spacious area – the Esplanade - turned into a number of interactive locations filled with many events and organized in two major groups – “the Front” and “the Rear”. The residents and guests of the city had an opportunity to see open-air thematic museums exhibitions, to watch dog-handling club performance, to visit a “front-line cinema” and watch a film, learn to play games popular in the middle of the past century and taste the hot “kasha” (porridge). The daylong performance at the main festival stage featured actors of the leading Perm theatres and was topped by the concert of famous Russian pop singer Larisa Dolina. The events in the Esplanade were visited by over 39,200 people. 

The 7-minute long colourful fireworks concluded the festivities gathering around 15,000 Perm residents.