Russia: Chris Stephen, in Volgograd, joined the veterans on their pilgrimage to the wartime shrines and memorials that dot the battlefields of the city.
Stalingrad soldier-poet Alexander Rodionov has an unusual way of ensuring the memory of second World War heroism stays alive. He has made it his mission to tour schools reciting poems he has written about his wartime experiences.
Today he will join with thousands of other veterans across the country in what is likely to be the last great commemoration of the end of the second World War.
Moscow is grabbing the limelight, with 53 world leaders flying-in for televised parades, but for many Russians Stalingrad - since renamed Volgograd - is the place where the flame of memory burns brightest. It was here, in 1943, that the tide of war changed.
Until this battle the Germans were always advancing. After it was over and half-a-million men lay dead, they were always in retreat. Rodionov's mission is to make sure nobody forgets.
His own brush with death came on a bright summer day as he advanced through a cornfield. Suddenly gunfire broke out on all sides and a bullet slammed into the leg of the young artillery spotter.
"It was terrifying, you couldn't tell who was firing at who, the corn was up to here," he tells me, one hand held up as high as his shoulders. "There were Germans and Soviets in that field, all mixed up, all firing."
Rodionov was lucky. The bullet wound was not deep and he lived to fight on. Rows of golden medals on the chest of his dark jacket record the arduous campaigns he suffered through, as Soviet armies advanced through Russia, then Belorussia, Poland and finally Germany. "There were many battles, and I lost many friends," he says.
This weekend I joined him and other veterans on a pilgrimage to the shrines and memorials that dot this city.
Volgograd sits, long and narrow, curled around the western bank of the river of the same name, and to visit the memorials is to follow the story of the battle.
On the northern edge is a plaque to the female anti-aircraft gunners, the only troops available to hold the city when the panzers first arrived, and who were wiped out in the battle.
In the centre is the gigantic Mamaev Kurgan, the world's biggest statue, depicting a female warrior with sword outstretched. She sits on the highest spot in the city, fought over countless times by Germans and Soviets.
Fellow veteran Julia Fedorovna was a 16-year-old schoolgirl at the time. Her medals were earned when she stayed behind to help evacuate refugees, not easy when the river ferries were hit, spilling burning fuel on to the river. "That bombing was terrible, the sky was black, even the Volga was on fire," she remembers. "The Germans hit the candy factory, and rivers of liquid caramel came pouring out."
Stalingrad became a byword for suffering in the months that followed: Chances to evacuate the women and children were missed and many died in the ruins, or lived, half-starved, in caves on the river bank.
Further south, we stop at a stone memorial at Gift Mountain, actually a small hill named because it was given as a gift by a tsar. Veterans organiser Vitaly Ginnadevic, five years old at the time, watched his mother drag the bodies of dead neighbours into a mass grave in adjoining parkland.
This park is now a mess, trees overgrown and bare patches of earth where there should be grass. "They don't pay for the upkeep of most of these parks any more," he says. "They forget."
Like others, he says that even in the midst of horror, there was occasional humour. When the village library caught fire, his sister took him with her to retrieve books from the flames. Too young to read, he asked his sister which books he should choose, and she told him to find the most attractive. The result was that, while the library's stock of great Russian literature was left to burn, young Ginnadevic ensured his villagers would see out the war with the beautifully bound 55-volume set of the collected works of Lenin.
Despite the suffering, the mood in this city is one of forgiveness. By the eternal flame in the city centre, I watched a group of well-drilled Cossack army cadets in blue berets arranging themselves patiently to be filmed by a German television crew.
"We do not hate Germans, we hated the Nazis," explains Rodionov.
At each memorial visited by Rodionov and his comrades, local children formed a guard of honour, while each veteran - and The Irish Times - were given red carnations to place on the cold marble.
Rodionov recited some poetry, quoting from a poem called Memory. It translates as: "I cannot count all the soldiers in my division, friends who died in places of war, but we have one duty now, which is until death to remember them."
This is his creed. When war ended, Rodionov got a second mission, which was to rebuild the city. As a planner, and later head of the architecture faculty, he worked with limited materials. "The place was devastated," he tells me. "We had no money. There were only ruins. So we used the rubble to construct a new city."
He tries to inculcate the children not just with the memory of war but with the Stalingrad spirit that went with it. "I tell the young people that in life you need three things. First, to know what you need to do, second, to know who you are doing it for, and third to know why you are doing it. If you know these things, you are invincible."
It is this spirit that sets the veterans apart from many of the young. They may be old, but they radiate strength of character, in contrast to many younger Russians trying to navigate a path in a country uneasily stuck between communism and capitalism.
"You want to know how we launched winter offensives, even in the worst conditions?" asks Ginnadevic with a twinkle in his eye.
"Simple. When you have to do something, you do it."