Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The irony, in these two cases, is that the Kiev and Sevastopol memorials stand on the territory of independent Ukraine, a country that is no longer part of the Soviet Union and whose links with Russia itself have been weakened since the Orange Revolution of January 2005. There is, in fact, no political home anywhere for the patriotism that these buildings commemorate. Some young Ukrainians, and certainly the descendants of populations in the west, round Lvov, resent the monstrous presence of monuments that celebrate a war that brought them nothing except pain. And this is also true in other former Soviet states. If the concrete had been lighter, if there had been less of it, the national governments in several former Soviet republics might have thought of clearing the great lumps away when they toppled the Lenins and Dzerzhinskys in their public squares. But the memorials are too massive, too heavy to dismember. Their removal might also leave a crater that could not be filled. Russia is not the only country that paid a high price for Hitler’s war. It continues to matter that Ukrainians were the national group that bore the largest number of civilian casualties on the Soviet side. In Belarus, too, some cities lost one in four of their population. Whatever the citizens of these republics think of Soviet power, the memory of those deaths remains important, and it is bitter and personal for the millions of survivors. Commemoration is not an irritant to be swept aside.

  For Russians, the story is slightly different, for this was largely Russia’s war, and certainly it remains a touchstone for those who are struggling, in the confused, post-imperial present, to find anything to celebrate in their country’s last hundred years. The Museum of the Revolution in Moscow is a good place to see how these tensions are playing out. Formerly a shrine to the achievements of the Communist Party, the museum was refitted after 1991, when the very idea of communist achievement had become an oxymoron. Today’s museum displays the bitter fruit of the utopian project. In one room there are photographs of queues; in another, scraps and relics from the Gulag. Two further rooms display a selection of the presents that Stalin received from comrades all around the world. The cabinets are stuffed with kitsch: painted china, woven rugs, cut glass and inlaid hunting knives. For some reason, the gift that his admirers in Mexico selected for the great leader was a stuffed, gold-plated armadillo, which stands on fragile golden feet in its glass case.

  Most of the exhibits in the museum are new, but two of its rooms have not been touched. The first houses formal cabinets of medals, portraits and regimental flags. The second, where the light is always low, is draped with camouflage netting. There are helmets and rifles caught up in the web, and recorded gunfire echoes in the gloom. ‘People seem to need it,’ the curator explained. ‘We have never been asked to change those rooms.’ The opposite may well be true; there may still be a real demand. Another Moscow attraction, the Park of Victory in the Great Patriotic War on Pokhlonnaya Hill, was under construction when communism fell. At that moment, some critics urged planners to allow the site to revert to pine forest.10 But the work continued, and the park is now complete, an eclectic fantasy of gold leaf and marble in the Disneyland style. Its vast war museum, which sprawls round the parade ground, is a white monster whose faux-classical colonnade would have delighted Mussolini.

  An industry has taken over the business of war commemoration. The beneficiaries of its peculiar economy are seldom veterans themselves. Instead, they tend to be state functionaries, soft-fleshed and middle-aged. Their self-importance is nourished by frequent anniversary dinners, large-scale planning meetings, and even by the arrogance of sixty-year-old triumph. ‘British,’ a woman in uniform remarked as she checked my passport at the door to the administrative block behind the museum in the Park of Victory. ‘They were on our side, weren’t they?’ I nodded meekly, biting back a comment about 1939. It is absurd to argue about decisions that were made by strangers who are so long dead. ‘You can go up,’ she said. ‘But it was not good that it took Churchill so long to open the second front.’

  To criticize this cult of patriotic war still sounds like carping. ‘If you do not like the war the way it was,’ the poet Boris Slutsky wrote, addressing the young, ‘try winning it your way.’11 It is a refrain that war veterans of many different points of view can echo. Soviet history has been a battleground since the archives were opened in the 1980s, but the soldiers claim to hold true to the real war. The Russian state, however, has abandoned the old dogma in at least one important way. Faced with the loss of an empire, and with it, of a mobilizing creed, Gorbachev’s successors in the Kremlin chose to turn to one of the ancient pillars of Russian identity, the Orthodox Church. ‘I call those politicians podsvechniki,’ a veteran quipped in disgust. He was punning on the Russian word for candle, svechka, and the effeminate associations of podsnezhniki, snowdrops. Today’s Russian leaders are always well-represented at church festivals. Vladimir Putin carries his pious candle at the great ceremonies in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, a building that is an exact replica of a church that his Bolshevik predecessors blew up in 1931. And just as they bless former agents of the KGB in their new role as statesmen, priests of the Orthodox Church must now pray for Red Army dead.

  Religious faith was not widespread among soldiers during the war. There were a few believers, but most used prayers and ritual gestures out of superstition, as spells, crossing themselves to ward off death. After two decades of godless socialism, most Red Army soldiers fought without looking for priests, and many rejected religion absolutely. It is incongruous, then, that today’s Park of Victory in Moscow should include a cathedral. Several hundred miles away, at Prokhorovka, the builders have just finished another, designed to look exactly like the kind of nineteenth-century Russian church that 1930s komsomols liked to demolish. In place of traditional frescoes, the walls inside are decorated with the names of the Soviet soldiers who died in the battle for Kursk. The vault is massive, too high to capture in a single photograph. The cruciform shape also defies the camera, for the church is a traditional one, octagonal within and built around a central dome. And though the lettering for every name is small, there is not one inch of plaster on its eight walls that is not covered in writing. The numbers overwhelm imagination, and the monument at least makes sure that visitors will be aghast. But every soldier’s name is now a hostage in the Russian church.

  The Orthodox Church’s claim might well have provoked a clash of dogmatisms, but few veterans have complained. Some even find that churches suit their taste more than the offerings of socialist realism that were favoured in the Brezhnev years. Incense and priests seem fitted to the grim business of mourning, and in its guise as the soul of their nation, the Orthodox Church offends today’s elderly far less than does pornography or the materialism of the new rich. But the new piety also has a way of troubling the very old. When they look back at the war, they remember how death seemed simple, part of the patriotic fight. The comrades of their youth died for a cause, whatever happened afterwards. By contrast, their own deaths, as they approach, have become confusing. It is hard to be sure what lives spent under communism mean now that the ideology has gone. It is even harder, for the grand old men, to make sense of post-Soviet death.

  It was Anatoly Shevelev who described this dilemma best. ‘My wife was dying,’ he explained. ‘She had throat cancer. They made her have nine operations in the end. She became a Christian believer because of that. I don’t have any time for it myself, I am an absolute atheist. I go to church sometimes because I like the music. But anyway, my wife asked me to pray for her. It was a problem because I don’t know a single prayer, and I hadn’t been to church, really, in my life. But when I came back from the cathedral that day and told her what I’d said, she threw her arms round me. She was so grateful that she wept. She knew, you see, that I’d done the best that I could.’

  Shevelev cleared his throat and began to recollect that prayer. ‘Dear God,’ he began, ‘forgive me that I have been an atheist all my life. Not because I chose to be but because from my childhood no one too
k me to the church. I was brought up in an atheist world. I admire the Russian Orthodox church, and these days I’ve started to value it, because if it had not been for the church, there would have been no Muscovy, and that was the foundation of our state. So I have no quarrel with the church really, and in my own defence, please remember that I, along with millions of other atheists, saved our motherland. By doing that, indirectly, we saved your Orthodox Church. I’ve come to pray for the recovery of my wife, please, God. And forgive me,’ he paused. ‘How did I finish?… That’s right. Forgive me because for my entire life I have been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’

  The changing context of politics has influenced the way that the war is commemorated and even imagined in today’s Russia. It is the same with soldiers’ memories, most of which also incorporate gleanings from later war stories, from cinema and poetry as well as from the distant past. The only evidence that has not changed – the depredations of mice, damp, insects, and sixty years of dust notwithstanding – is that of documents. Archival sources echo with authentic voices from the past, the idiom of soldiers and their government as it was recorded in the very midst of war. It would be a mistake to see these records as the bearers of objective truth. Whole areas of soldiers’ lives never found their way into print, including most front-line humour, many impious grievances and the details of excess and atrocity, but archived letters and other papers are a welcome corrective to the prim reverence that seems to surround most public discussion of the war in Russia. They offer the best means of understanding the character of the army and the spirit in which the soldiers fought, especially as these changed over time. The main problem is not lack of material but the need to follow shifts in meaning. Words and ideas that looked quite clear in 1945 often began the war with other connotations and darker prospects.

  A classic instance is the idea of the motherland. From Tolstoy onwards, all writers have noted Russian soldiers’ love for Russian soil. The same might be said for others – Georgians, for instance – although each culture differs in its sense of home.12 The concept is now clear enough again, at least for people who were never Soviet at all, but motherland, for the early Soviet generations, was a troublesome idea with no clear boundaries or single meaning. It may have been a village or a region, but it was also the entire space, a multinational empire in all but name, in which ‘we’ Soviets lived. Ethnic diversity, in Soviet culture, was more likely to generate confusion than pride. As with patriotism, the invasion of 1941 made things clearer, at least at first. Motherland became the space that the invaders sought to take from ‘us’. The arrogance of Hitler’s Germany, and its implied assumption that backward Russia would buckle and collapse, inspired real anger among Soviet troops, and that by itself helped some endure the first terrible weeks.13

  Strong as it was, however, the notion of the motherland would change. It continued to be something that a man could love, but Red Army soldiers learned new ways to imagine it as the war progressed. Peasants from rural backwaters came to glimpse the ruins of Pskov, to see the mountains of the Crimea, the cliffs along the Dnepr. Their sense of what they were defending widened as they marched and fought. It mattered, naturally, that after 1943 the march was westward, towards Berlin. Home must have seemed less glamorous before, when it was clouded by the enemy’s pungent smoke. From the beginning of 1943, as the army moved on from Stalingrad, the image of the motherland, an abstraction, acquired a fresh, intense connection with political geography. Soviet borders would soon cease to be distant ideas, becoming wide rivers and real hills instead. It was all ‘ours’, from the vineyards of the Black Sea to the dunes of the Baltic. But ‘ours’, at a time of intense national chauvinism, gradually came to mean ‘Russia’s.’ The idea that a republic in this great empire might choose independence, to the veterans who still gather in their close-knit clubs and associations, remains almost insulting.14

  At the time, beyond the myth, there were conscripts of other types, and many of the kind that had to be coerced and threatened. The myths of Ivan and of motherland take little account of western Ukrainians or even of the ragtag of Belorussian teenagers swept up into the colours in the summer of 1944. They take little note of ethnic loyalties that were not Russian ones, and none of simple reluctance to fight. The Red Army used threats and bullets to force many of the doubters into uniform and keep them in the field. Brutality, physical and verbal, was always part of front-line culture. Violence and terror were used after the war to quell insurgency across the Baltic and western Ukraine. These stories have re-emerged since the Soviet Union’s collapse, they are documented in archives, but most have yet to be explored by history. They suggest that some soldiers, the forgotten ones, must have been driven almost entirely by fear.

  At last there is some territory that anyone can understand, or so it is tempting to think. Fear seems so natural in this appalling world that someone who did not know the region’s history might use it in explanation of almost everything. But it is a mistake to assume that these Soviet people, survivors in a universe of violence, would respond like a nation used to peace. This is not to say that fear was unimportant – it was ubiquitous – or even that life was simply cheap, but in this brutal, lethal world, fear was relative. It had to be weighed, a habit that Red Army men had often learned from childhood. As deserters showed in 1941, for instance, mere threats were not enough when the Germans appeared more terrible than any commissar and death most certain under enemy fire. By 1944, the balance had changed, and it was clear that the Red Army had the upper hand in the regions where new recruits were being drafted. This was the era of the ‘1943 partisan’ and others who opted, despite justifiable fear, to join the winning side before it was too late.

  The war created a landscape where every choice was potentially deadly for soldiers and civilians alike. To join the army, ironically, may even have looked like a way of taming the nightmares. It was less dangerous, for many, than the genocidal regime of the Nazis. It was less unpredictable, and less brutal, than wartime labour camps. And above all, military service had a meaning, a value. This was clear enough in the case of members of guards regiments and the Communist Party, but the sense of collective purpose extended far beyond this small élite. The army scarcely bothered to train members of its punishment battalions, for instance. Indeed, its whole approach was calculated to humiliate them, to make them feel less than human. They could also be almost certain that their next battle would end in death. Some deserted, others panicked, and the vast majority would die. It is a testimony to the culture of the times (and to the power of the post-war hero myth) that some survivors should remember pride, a sense of purpose, amid their recollections of slaughter and fear.15 They were victims, outcasts, wretched men. But hatred of the enemy was a sure way – their own, not the army’s – of putting their fear and outrage to work.

  If fear was not enough to make men fight, then neither, on its own, was ideology. This, too, was something that would change, another word whose meaning needs careful reconstruction. The idioms of progress and morality were central to many Soviet people’s sense of themselves. Ideology encompassed a range of different things, not a simple and universal code. ‘We believed,’ officers, soldiers and surviving NKVD officers insist. Mikhail Ivanovich, the young OSMBON officer, believed for his entire life, which ultimately took him into the ranks of the KGB. Even at his death, in 2002, he demanded a communist funeral. His belief sustained him when he had to shoot at fellow Muscovites. It reinforced the physical strength that enabled him to complete a forced march across 150 miles of icy swamp behind the German lines. He was, in that sense, typical of other former peasants who found adventure and promotion through military service. It would be unwise to assume much love for communism among the rural population as a whole, but where the new ideas struck root, they could be embraced with a fanaticism that calls to mind the Inquisition or the new jihad. This kind of ideology was really faith, and it was ruthless and personal.

  Stalinist ideolo
gy had shaped the language of the time, becoming part of everybody’s universe by 1941. Even a semi-literate conscript would recognize a politruk and know what kind of role he played; even a peasant would have learned to pronounce the clumsy adjective ‘proletarian’. But the more formal, systematic kinds of ideological understanding of the pre-war era were accessible only to those with the education to grasp them. At the extreme, such beliefs now appear absurd. ‘Please send me something I can read,’ a wounded cadet wrote home from his hospital bed in 1941. ‘Something that’s not about the war. One of the classics, maybe Lenin’s “State and Revolution”.’16 The war itself exposed the naïveté, even the irrelevance, of bookish Marxism–Leninism. As the fighting unfolded, a new kind of understanding took hold, a cruder set of beliefs that almost any soldier could share. It was one thing to sign up in a haze of patriotism, after all, and another to go on thinking about classlessness and dialectics as the order came to rush the guns. No rifleman was likely to resort to Marx as the air started vibrating and the screams began.