The Remains of the Red Day II - An Endless Great Patriotic War
Photo: Nikolay Frolochkin, via Pixabay
2021 is a year of tragic anniversaries for the Russian-speaking world. The years 1921, 1941, and 1991 mark the bloody beginning, catastrophic climax, and surreal end of the Soviet story. Anatoly Grablevsky’s column ‘The Remains of the Red Day’ combines historical perspectives with contemporary cultural and political ones as he studies these three seismic events. He aims to explore how the past, by informing and determining the present, lives on in the Russian national consciousness to this day.
Eighty years ago, on 7 November 1941, over 25,000 men, 146 tanks, and 140 artillery paraded on Red Square to mark the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. Stalin himself opens the proceedings with a short speech, reminding the soldiers of the Russian Empire’s glorious military history and hailing them as liberators. After that, the parade only lasts an hour, but the soldiers do not return to their barracks: instead, they are marched off directly to the front, which is less than 18 miles away. In the next month, the fate of the world would be decided in the rapidly freezing outskirts of Moscow. The heroic defence of the capital, when the German blitzkrieg was finally halted, would become one of the iconic turning points of the war.
By the end of the war in May of 1945, it is quite simply impossible to overstate how deeply the Nazi invasion of 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) shook – and shaped – the Soviet Union and its people. Firstly, the unimaginably high human cost: 27 million people, dwarfing any other Western country. A quarter of the total population in the Soviet Union was wounded or killed in the space of 4 years. As a result of Hitler’s war of annihilation, practically no family in the entire USSR remained intact, although the impact in the western-most republics (Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia), which suffered the brunt of the fighting, was of course far more devastating, with hundreds of towns and thousands of villages wiped off the map.
As a result of the incalculable horror of the war, 1941-1945 began to be seen as nothing less than a holy war (‘the Great Patriotic War’) with its own mythology and superhuman heroes. The preponderance of the war in every Soviet heart was such that every ruler after 1945 sought to use the war for their political purposes. During Stalin’s lifetime, propaganda ensured that the victory would be synonymous with the ‘genius leadership’ of the Generalissimo. Even after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, where he denounced the dictator’s pre-war genocidal crimes as well as his criminal incompetence and paranoia which did more to lose the war than to win it, the extraordinary pride of victory still remained, and remains to this day, enmeshed with the ‘man of the steel’. Still, while de-Stalinisation proved to be only temporary, the flailing and corrupt Soviet leadership successfully managed to instrumentalise the living memory of the war to hold onto to power. Starting from the late 50s, and taking off in the 60s, the cult of the war began in earnest, both in the sphere of politics and art: the 9th of May, victory day, became - and remains to this day - one of the widely celebrated and beloved holidays in the Soviet and Post-Soviet space, revered even by those who hated the Soviet regime.
At the same time, a vast number of incredibly popular war films, such as the The Dawns Here are Quiet (1972), though overly romanticised, forged a new kind of sacred memory of the war for the new generation born after 1945. The film tells the story of a group of five newly enlisted women in Karelia that follow the seasoned Red Army sergeant Vaskov to take out two German scouts, only to discover that they are actually facing 16 German soldiers. These young women, most of whom had just started university, embody that unique Soviet type, so common in film, of overwhelming suffering on the one hand, and incredible, naïve idealism on the other: Rita husband’s was killed in the disastrous first days of the war; Zhenya, a ‘member of the Jewish nation’ has had her family exterminated in Belarus; Galia is an orphan who, like so many, lied about her age to enlist. Yet, despite the horror in their past, these women are shown laughing and singing and dancing in a banya (Russian sauna), and above all reciting patriotic and lyric poetry. Determined to get revenge on the ‘fascist animals’, they show incredible courage and light-hearted determination in the face of overwhelming odds, all dying heroically, and tragically, but gladly: Zhenya, the last of the 5 to die, comforts Vaskov with her dying words, “it’s obvious, it’s war, we were defending the motherland”. All that remains of the five are the little red stars of the Komsomol (the young Communist league), which are engraved on a monument to the girls. The film begins and ends with shots of the monument, 20 years later, visited by the aging Sergeant and Rita’s teenage son. Cult war films like this are still shown and widely watched every year on Russian television in the run up to the 9th of May as a kind of solemn devotion to the memory of Soviet Union’s ‘finest hour’.
In our own time, Putin has tried, for his part, to build unity and political consensus in Russia on the basis of shared historical suffering: he has symbolically sought to connect Russia’s greatest military triumph in the war with its current resurgence as global power, by putting on display the latest Russian military technology for all the world to see each year on the 9th May military parade. At the same time, he has been cynically instrumentalising the memory of the war for his own expansionist and revisionist aims: the intervention in Ukraine was justified in 2014 in large part by claiming to protect Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority against a new proto-fascist government, labelled as anti-Russian ‘Banderovtsy’, followers of the controversial wartime Ukrainian nationalist. As leader of a paramilitary Ukrainian nationalist organisation, Stepan Bandera saw the Nazi invasion as an opportunity to secure an Axis-aligned, but independent Ukraine. In 1941, he allied himself with the Germans and embraced their policies of ethnic cleansing towards Jews and Poles, but was later imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis for his independence aspirations. His role in Ukrainian history has long divided Ukrainian public opinion, with western Ukraine largely venerating him, while eastern Ukraine, historically under greater Russian influence, and with its larger Jewish population, has viewed him overwhelmingly negatively. Following the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014, local and central governments began rehabilitating Bandera as a hero of Ukraine, including by re-naming streets and public places in his honour, fuelling the passions of both sides of the conflict that had now broken out in Donbas.
The historian Markwick wrote ‘The Second World War has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union’ (2012). He wasn’t wrong: the war continues in the collective consciousnesses of entire nations. As Brodsky wrote in the war poem ‘And the Eternal Battle’, repeatedly recited by the five women in The Dawns Here are Quiet: ‘And the eternal battle. |We can only dream of rest. | And let nothing |dreams disturb”. Today, while the war has become the stuff of heroic myth and deadly delusion, and the Soviet Union itself fades into history like a collective dream (or nightmare), the battle over memory and legacy rages on in the post-Soviet space.