MOSCOW - After last adjustments to the bride's white gown and veil, the couple climbed a few steps and laid flowers at the foot of the soaring obelisk commemorating the victims and veterans of World War II.

"We came here because we are grateful to them for everything that exists today - for the fact that we exist today," said Yevgeny Isakov, 22, walking hand-in-hand with Olga, 22, his bride.

In a country where 80 percent or more of the populace are descended from war veterans, a visit to monuments such as this is still a rite of passage for Russian newlyweds 60 years after the war ended.

"The Great Patriotic War," handed down through three generations, is still very much alive in Russian memories.

With the Soviet Union gone, Russian scholars are free to make more frank assessments of the war, dictator Josef Stalin's conduct of it, and the extent to which his 1939 nonaggression pact with Germany cleared the way for Hitler to go to war.

But to Sergei Kramarenko, 82, a war veteran awarded with the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union, the history is simple: "It was a fight between God and devil, a fight between light and darkness."

"Hitler wanted to establish dominance over the entire world, to enslave all the countries of Europe. But the Soviet Union got in his way," Kramarenko said in an interview.

With much of the country left in ruins, and 26.6 million people killed, according to official statistics, many Russians feel that whatever faults may have existed, they are secondary to the sheer magnitude of the Soviet sacrifice.

Because of the pact with Hitler, the Soviet Union didn't come into the war until 1941, nearly two years after it began with the German invasion of Poland. But once in it, the Soviet Union suffered the most casualties and the Red Army fought most of the epic battles that turned its tide - Stalingrad, Kursk, and the battle of Berlin that sealed Hitler's doom.

Liya Smekun, a 22-year-old Moscow journalist, said that to her the war above all means the Leningrad siege, an ordeal experienced by her grandmother. The city since restored to its pre-Soviet name, St. Petersburg, was besieged for 900 days and more than a half million of its people died, most of hunger.

"All her life, my grandmother made me eat my meals to the last spoonful, to the last crumb. To her dying days she couldn't forget hunger," Smekun said. The grandmother lost her sister and 17 other relatives.

"We must be grateful to those people for everything that we have today; they made our sky a peaceful sky," Smekun said.

Soviet-era textbooks traditionally praised Stalin as the driving force behind Germany's defeat. But some of today's historians point to grave strategic errors.

While some historians have justified Stalin's pact with Hitler as his way of buying time to arm his country, others say he then failed to use that time and ignored repeated warnings that Germany would invade soon.

The war caught the Red Army off guard, killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the first days and leaving the rest unprepared for fighting. Stalin is also blamed for purging tens of thousands of his best officers before the war.

Historians condemn his decree no. 227, also called "not a step back," which obliged soldiers to shoot anyone caught retreating. Stalin had also declared that all captured Soviet soldiers were traitors for not killing themselves rather than surrendering. Once freed, hundreds of thousands of those POWs were sent to Soviet labor camps.

"The victory was achieved despite Stalin's leadership, not thanks to it," says Alexander Yakovlev, a war veteran who was a key architect of Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms.

"To me, Victory Day is not a holiday, because holidays are not celebrated on the bones of the dead," Yakovlev, who now heads the presidential commission for rehabilitation of victims of repression, told The Associated Press.

Nadezhda Popova, 84, another Hero of the Soviet Union, defends Stalin's tactics.

"Decree 227 was severe, but it was needed at the time," she said. "We won because we fought for our motherland, for Stalin!"

Another bitter legacy was the Cold War, which left many eastern European and Soviet countries feeling they had merely switched from one dictator to another - Stalin.

So sensitive is that legacy that even now, 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaders of two of its former republics, Estonia and Lithuania, refused invitations to the May 9 celebration.

In the long run, says Kramarenko, the veteran, it was the ordinary soldiers of the Red Army who ultimately made Europe the peaceful continent it is now.

"We fought for the truth, for freedom and independence," he said. "And we won. Europe is free now, free from labor camps, free from gas chambers, free to elect the governments they want to elect."