Participants of the «Immortal Regiment» action in Beijing, China. File photoBEJING, May 8.About 350 people took part in the «Immortal Regiment» action in Beijing on the day of the celebration of the 77th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War, RIA Novosti correspondent reports. Processions have been held in different cities of China since 2016. In the capital, the action was previously held in the Chaoyang Park in the east, but since 2019 the event has been moved to the territory of the Beijing Exhibition, which the Chinese built with the help of Soviet specialists in the mid-1950s. This year, due to anti-COVID restrictions, the Immortal Regiment marched through the territory of the Russian embassy for the first time. About 350 participants in the procession, including Chinese citizens, with portraits of war veterans marched in formation to Soviet songs of the war years. After the main part of the event, they honored the memory of the dead with a minute of silence.
"The fact that we are here today testifies to the preservation of historical memory, in the 21st century this is especially important and every year more and more important. The memory that we, living today, received from the hands of our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, we must carefully pass into the hands of new generations and bequeath them to pass this memory on,» said Russian Ambassador to China Andrei Denisov.
One of the participants of the Immortal Regiment, Chinese Chai Eli, born in 1938, who during the Great Patriotic War was in the Interdome named after E. D. Stasova in Ivanovo, told RIA Novosti that she had not missed a single procession of the Immortal Regiment in Beijing «My grandfather took part in the war, he fought in the Far East as part of the 88th separate rifle brigade, he was a battalion commander,» she said.
"Every time I took part in the procession, for us this is also the greatest holiday, this is the Victory Day, we stayed there (in the USSR. — Ed.) throughout the war, we know how it was", she added.
The action ended with a festive concert.»Immortal regiment» is an action that takes place in Russia and abroad to perpetuate the memory of participants and victims of the Great Patriotic War. It was first held on May 9, 2012 in Tomsk at the initiative of local journalists, and in 2013 it became nationwide. Immortal Regiment» through the streets of Caracas