ON THE EASTERN FRONT

By JAMES O. JACKSON ST./PETERSBURG

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."

Nor can she understand the economic and social changes of the emerging, non-communist Russia. "The breakup of the Soviet Union was the right thing to do. But in trying to regain our rights, we are discovering that we have no rights left. We are losing the essential benefits of a socialist society-the right to work, the right to a free education, the right to housing." The children in her classrooms may be able to adapt to the new system, she says, but her own generation is lost. "We're the discarded generation. Our mentality, our habits are of a previous era. If you're past 30, you have no future. You won't get a new job; you can't start a new life."

DMITRI ZATONSKY, 72, sits in his Kiev study beneath a portrait of his father. "I'm not sure the people in the West can understand what went on here," he says. "The history of this painting reveals something of it. It is a typical tale of our times." The portrait depicts a stern yet handsome man in the uniform of a high-ranking communist official of the prewar years. He had been a Bolshevik revolutionary, says Zatonsky. But he differed politically with Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union's early years. He was arrested in 1937 and called "an enemy of the people." He was summarily shot, one of more than a million to be executed in the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938. Zatonsky's mother was sent to the Gulag. His sister was expelled from university. He lived for the next two decades in constant fear of arrest and execution for the crime of being his father's son.

Nevertheless, when war broke out and he came of age, Zatonsky joined the Red Army. He fought all the way to Germany, suffering two serious wounds. He still carries a piece of shrapnel in his neck. "At age 15, when they took my father away, I fully realized what kind of state the U.S.S.R. was," he says. "But when the war started, the goal of the Soviet state and my desire came together: beat the enemy." After the war he fell in love with a girl who worked in East Germany. He could have escaped with her to the West, but knew the secret police would have killed his mother and sister.

His daughter Lena, also a school teacher, was born after Stalin died, in November 1953. Of the celebrations of World War II, she says she has no special feelings of pride. "What I remember most about the war is the movies," she says. "They were dozens of World War II movies, but they were so blatantly propagandistic. All the Nazis were portrayed as idiots, and the Soviets as great heroes. We had a phrase, kino nemetskoe, which is slang for a show so ridiculous you cannot believe it." Of the time after the war she says, "It was stable, we did not fear anything, there was not this tremendous sense of insecurity as now. The main thing is we do not know what will happen next here. Before, you could look ahead five years and see where you would be. Now it is unclear."

MARIA SPERANSKAYA gives a bleak recitation of war's reality. She is 86, a retired doctor in Nizhni Novgorod who served as a combat surgeon through the worst of the war. One of her duties was to inspect trainloads of newly arrived wounded. She decided which of them should be treated and which were so badly off that they must be left to die. "I was known," she says, "for my precision."

The hardest of her duties was identifying wounds that had been self-inflicted. "I had to make reports on the size of the wound, the distance of the weapon from the wound, the seriousness of the wound. Sometimes the boys would shoot each other in the arm, leg-somewhere that wouldn't maim, but would get them out of this gruesome war. If I identified such wounds, the boys were taken off and shot."

Speranskaya fell in love with another doctor. She became pregnant and had a daughter. Natalya Evdokimova is now 50, and she became a doctor too. She went through a particularly difficult experience in the waning years of Soviet power. In 1984 she was assigned as the personal physician to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. He and his wife Yelena Bonner were closely watched by the secret police. "[KGB agents] tried to accuse us of diagnosing Sakharov's condition as being more serious than it really was, or of trying to give him information and news," she says. "We were treated very badly. I have trouble cleansing myself of the memory."

Still, she also has trouble coming to terms with what has happened to the Soviet Union since then. The country her mother defended is gone-and with it much of what she associates positively with her youth. "The period of life we are experiencing now is a defeat for all the people who fought in that war and for those who grew up in this country," she says.

Her husband Grigory Evdokimov is similarly nostalgic for the past and angry about the present. "Factories worked; more was being built," he recalls. "I can't say we always had bread, but we lived. We all had ideals, and we all worked toward some purpose." Now, "the only thing people work for is money," he notes. "Something has been lost." Like most of his era, Evdokimov has little to say of Stalin and the terror. "Maybe some of the parents of my friends were dealt a blow by Stalin," he says. "But it was rude to talk about it."

Fifty years later, the Soviets who beat Hitler are coming to the end of lives as hard as any in a hard century. Soon enough, they will have peace. Their children will struggle on against an enemy they cannot even quite describe. --With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/ Kiev and Constance Richards/Nizhni Novgorod

With reporting by SALLY B. DONNELLY/ KIEV AND CONSTANCE RICHARDS/NIZHNI NOVGOROD