And have you ever stopped parents talking to their babies all the time in that really loud voice?I do recognise, though, that Mozart has long had his baby-based supporters; what’s needed is a study of the effects of similar exposure to, say, Leonard Cohen, as I’ve seen what that did to most of my generation, and we were already 18. George Bush, too, will make the trip to Moscow.
But as significant as the list of those who will attend the event is the list of those who will not. The presidents of both Lithuania and Estonia have rejected their invitations, claiming that the end of the Second World War marked for their nations not a liberation, but the beginning of their 50-year domination by the Soviet Union. The President of Latvia, the third Baltic state, has decided to accept Moscow’s invitation – but only after receiving a letter this week from the US President that explicitly acknowledges the pain caused by Soviet rule.The Baltic states have just cause to be aggrieved about this ceremony – and in particular Russia’s role as host.

It is important to remember that the Soviet Union was not always an enemy of the Nazis – and that it was the secret Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 that first led to the Baltic states being incorporated into the Soviet empire. Under Communist rule, tens of thousands of “political enemies” were deported to Siberia. Such was the cruelty of Soviet rule that, when Hitler broke his agreement with Stalin and marched on Moscow in 1941, many in the Baltic regarded the German troops not as occupiers, but liberators. And after the war ended, of course, the Soviet terror returned.The Baltic states also have just cause to feel suspicious of modern Russia and its persistent refusal to denounce the Soviet annexation of their homelands. Their accession to the European Union a year ago was the culmination of their long and bitter struggle for freedom. It is understandable that they fear the autocratic direction Russia appears to be taking under President Putin.Yet it is also important to remember, as we approach this ceremony, that history is rarely a question of black and white moral absolutes.

Some elements within the Baltic states clearly worked hand in glove with the Nazi invaders. Latvia’s Waffen SS veterans still hold commemoration marches in Riga to this day. And we should not lose sight either of the terrible price that the Russian people – soldiers and civilians alike – paid to defeat Nazi Germany. It is perhaps too late to prevent this VE Day becoming a political event. But it must still be used, at least in part, to remember the past suffering of an entire continent.. In any democracy, this is a charmed moment: the point at which the campaigning ends and the responsibility passes to the people. In some ways, we are sorry the hustings have been dismantled so soon.

Against most expectations, this has been a far from boring four weeks. It has been a frantic, intense, argumentative and often fascinating contest; a hard-fought campaign that justified the battlefield connotations of the word. At the age of 17, he had joined War Resisters International, and in the Second World War appeared before a tribunal at Bristol where he was exempted from military service.His mother was killed in an accident during the wartime blackout, and this led to Martin taking on the editing of a book entitled In Search of Faith: a symposium, published in 1944. The impressive list of contributors included George Bernard Shaw, C.E.M. Joad, Sir Stafford Cripps, Olaf Stapledon, Mulk Raj Anand, Sir Richard Acland and the Rev Dr W.R Matthews. The book sold well and was translated into Dutch.But it is as a voice of the rural labourer that Ernest Martin best deserves to be remembered.

The Secret People (1954), a study of English village life, was complemented by Where London Ends (1958), an assessment of the role of the country town. In 1961 came The Tyranny of the Majority, an avowal of the need for democracy.The Shearers and the Shorn is an analysis, commissioned by the Trustees of Dartington Hall, of the town of Okehampton on the northern edge of Dartmoor, “in an attempt to find the roots of rural malaise, depopulation and discontent”. It was published in 1965, in which year Martin began a two-year Leverhulme Fellowship at Sussex University, studying the Poor Law.In 1972 he was awarded a civil list pension for his services “to literature and social history”, and it was about this time that he embarked on a programme of taped interviews with elderly men and women of rural Devon, supported by the Beaford Centre (an offshoot of Dartington). Oral history was virtually unknown within the county but this was an ideal project for Martin, with his background and as a native speaker of Devon dialect.For more than 20 years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, he was an Honorary Research Fellow in Rural Social Studies at Exeter University, but he never really seemed to fit that distinctly less than radical establishment, although it provided him with useful facilities.He had a lifelong advocacy against cruelty to animals, which was the core component of The Case Against Hunting (1959) – a book he wrote in just 14 days.Martin was immensely widely read and corresponded with many leading social and literary figures of his day.