Ivan’s War (71 page)

The myth of Ivan began in the midst of war. It was a product of the Sovinformburo, of wartime songs and poetry, and of the stories people loved to read. Even the troops, sometimes, imagined themselves as romantic volunteers, heroes who would do battle for the motherland. Real combat did not coincide with the ideal, but the propagandists’ wooden soldier was a useful figure to invoke before an operation and again when the survivors had to struggle with their exhaustion and shock. The simple hero and his skilful, selfless officers were models that gave the men a sense of purpose, glorified the brutal business of killing, and offered a cloak of indemnity for crimes that no one wanted to acknowledge. Given the soldiers’ love of irony, such mythic figures also – and simultaneously – served as objects for crude, self-deprecating jokes, for Ivan was not always master of his weapons or his body, let alone of the latest party directive. But though men mocked the stuffy rules and the solemnity, wartime propaganda keyed into some basic human needs. And it was just as important after the firing stopped. When the conscript army dispersed and soldiers rejoined the civilian world, the notion of the brave and simple rifleman gave them dignity, a public face, whatever private stories they kept to themselves.

The slogans that the men had used acquired an almost holy resonance with time. The Soviet motherland was an inviolable space, its people bound together in their loyalty. But the repetition of familiar words concealed real changes in their meaning. Patriotism, in 1941, was a radical, liberating, and even revolutionary ideal. The notion, in fact, received a moral boost when Hitler’s troops invaded from the west. At last, true patriots had an invader to repel, rather than shadow traitors conjured up by the secret police. The surge of faith in 1941 even revived the ghost of internationalism, for to be patriotic, in the Soviet sense, was once again to be the proud leader of the proletarian campaign for universal brotherhood. It was to be opposed to fascism, the very cruelty of which, as it became manifest, forced millions to place their hope in socialism. More immediately, patriotism was a matter of
self-defence, the collective struggle of the entire Soviet people against aggression. For those who entered into it – the majority of Russian, and probably even Soviet, citizens – the mood was self-righteous. ‘Our cause is just,’ Molotov assured the Soviet people in 1941. However far their army marched, and whatever atrocities it committed, most did not stop believing that.

Mass death and suffering rendered the patriotic impulse sacred. The worst outcasts of the post-war years were the supposed betrayers of the motherland. But while it lost none of the sanctimonious passion of 1941, the meaning of patriotic pride had changed by the war’s end. The cause turned inwards, focusing on Stalin’s state and also, above all, on Russia.
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Instead of aspiring to freedom, patriots would henceforth – wittingly or not – become complicit with the repression of minorities, large-scale arrests, and above all, a bleak and deadly dogma that had almost nothing in common with the libertarian promises that had drawn such crowds to Palace Square in the revolutionary months of 1917. The new Soviet patriotism would be used to condemn and exclude all kinds of dissidents in years to come. War veterans, many of them still intoxicated with the original idealistic brew and still breathing the old pietism, were trapped. They could not be unpatriotic and they could not stand against the government. This was the country (and, in the early post-war years, the leader) in whose name oceans of blood had been spilled. It did not take the veterans long to turn into conservative bastions of Soviet rule.

The process was not smooth, and there were always issues that made former soldiers boil with rage. Among them was a campaign launched by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, to cut the size of the army.
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Coming on the heels of his famous denunciation of Stalin, the so-called secret speech of 1956,
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which confused and appalled many ex-soldiers, the apparent betrayal of the armed forces caused widespread disquiet. But the Indian summer of the veterans’ long affair with their state was soon to come. Leonid Brezhnev, whose own war record would not have merited a footnote if chance – including the wartime loss of his more talented potential rivals – had not propelled him into the political élite, emerged as the Soviet leader after 1965. His dedication to Bolshevik ideology was slight, his drive for power far stronger. Rather than trying to revive flagging Soviet unity by appealing directly to revolutionary ideals, he saw the war myth as a way of rebuilding the nation’s faltering sense of purpose. The years of Brezhnev’s rule would turn into a golden age of concrete and hot air, a time of state-sponsored multi-volume histories of the war, of solemn speeches of commemoration,
hand-outs, new medals and the mass design and construction of memorials.
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The message was that the nation had fought as one, that young lives had been lost and that new generations owed the past (and also their current leaders) limitless loyalty and gratitude.

The veterans, now in their middle age, were called upon to play a patriotic role again. They had always gathered to remember the war, but now they were encouraged to go into schools, talk of their battles, and fire the romantic imaginations of young citizens.
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The idea was to bind a generation that had never known the war more closely to the Soviet ideal. A mythic soldier, the Soviet hero, returned to stake his claim upon the nation’s loyalty. This man was stern, moral, and unflinchingly courageous. In many stories, conveniently, he was also dead. Although most veterans remember the great anniversary of 1965, the twentieth year after the victory, as the high point of war commemoration, the historical phoenix that rose from Stalingrad and Kursk in the 1960s was emblematic, two-dimensional.
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And real pressures worked to keep it so. Once the official histories had been passed by the censor, for instance, it was forbidden to publish any fact about the war that was not already in print.
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The archives themselves, those cities of manila files, were closed to almost everyone, and certainly to scholars. Whole areas of wartime life, including desertion, crime, cowardice and rape, were banned from public scrutiny, and several specific crimes, such as the Katyn massacre, were buried under mountains of denial.
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In place of the truth, so complex and so comprehensibly human, the state built a glittering and specious edifice of myth.

Few veterans had much to gain by challenging this. For one thing, the myth suited them. Many used their war records as proof of character in the careers they later chose. War service, or at least the loyal kind, earned soldiers generous pensions, while denigrating what became known as ‘the great exploit’ would always seem like insulting the dead. The hero myth was also partly true, or true enough to make successive generations grateful. To rummage through it all in search of weaknesses and crimes might end in collective tragedy; it might even raise questions about the value of Soviet power itself. Brezhnev’s regime would never lack for foreign critics, and that gave its supporters an excuse to advocate strict unity at home. ‘War is war,’ the veterans would say. And then it would be time to sing the songs again, get out the photographs and reminisce. The shadows of the past were dispelled by the glamour of collective glory, the accusations dissolved into euphemism. After all, even Stalin had referred to rape, famously, as ‘having a bit of fun with a woman’.
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The set and props for Brezhnev’s remake of the war epic are still in use across his former empire. When it came to monumental masonry, Soviet output, even in the years of stagnation, was prodigious. The densest concentrations were clustered around former battlefields, and famous sites are still the best places to look for them. There is a granite monument, for instance, on the Sapun rise outside Sevastopol. It is composed of overbearing lumps of polished rock, like a prefabricated cathedral without a roof, or even like a giant crematorium, since gas jets feed a pallid line of eternal flames and pre-recorded music pipes out from loudspeakers hidden in the walls. Like most memorials, this one commemorates a triumph, the recapture of the Crimea, not the defeats of 1941. In Kiev, the scene of the Red Army’s great humiliation in the same year, a giant Mother Russia celebrates the city’s liberation in the same spirit. She towers over the banks of the Dnepr, her drawn sword raised to guarantee that she exceeds in height all other landmarks, including the nearby cupolas of the medieval Caves monastery. Her skirts swirl above another staple item of Brezhnevite mass production, the war museum. This one is the usual squat, graceless agglomeration of pointlessly extensive red-carpeted spaces. A visitor who is determined to see everything must walk for hours, mostly in semi-darkness, tramping the corridors that link the rooms where medals, blown-up photographs and guns moulder beneath the dusty flags.

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.
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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.’