For
Russians the Great Patriotic War will remain permanently etched into their
history because of the magnitude and ferocious nature of the conflict. The
Soviet Union took heavy losses and remains the country with the highest number
of World War II casualties. By the end of the war, the country was in a state
of ruin that would take years to recover from. Of greater importance to the
memory of the country is that despite their overwhelming losses, they won. Soviet
history henceforth is broken into two categories: Prewar and postwar. Prewar
Soviet Russia will be skimmed over with some acknowledgement of the excesses of
Stalinism. Postwar Soviet Russia will continue to be overshadowed by Russia’s
Greatest Generation. Looming tall above it all is Stalin. His leadership
before, during, and after the war shaped his legacy to the country. World War
II propelled the Soviet Union to a new Golden Age of Stalinism with changes in
political, social, and cultural development that would form the basis of
country until its fall in 1991.
The war caused the Soviet Union
to scrap its isolationism and became once again a major player on the world
stage. Prior to the war, the Stalinist state played a rather limited role in
international politics. This situation arose from Stalin’s insistence on
domestic policy over the foreign policy. Instead of following the plans of an
international Communist revolution as proposed by Leon Trotsky, Stalin
emphasized a domestic approach of “socialism in one country.”[1] Thus
under the auspices of Stalin, the Soviet Union focused on developing domestic
industrial production and bureaucratic state infrastructure. However, World War
II forcibly brought foreign politics back into the Russian sphere. Early in the
war the Soviets signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. The
pact was made to buy time for military preparations. That came to end in 1941 with
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Desperately
looking for friends, the Soviets turned to Great Britain and the United States
for aid. For the rest of the war the formerly denounced capitalist nations of
Great Britain and the United States became comrades in the “joint struggle of
democratic countries.”[2]
Together the leaders of the three countries: Joseph Stalin, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill became as known as the Big Three. They would shape
the geopolitical scene for the years to come.
In
the postwar world the Soviet Union became an international force to be reckoned
with. Its troops were instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and occupied Europe’s
eastern countries. As a sign of the country’s increased involvement in world
affairs, the Soviet Union joined the United Nations (UN) in 1945 as a permanent
member of the Security Council. Soon after, the Soviet Union was using the UN
platform as its soapbox for global policy. In 1947 the country went as far as
to pass a motion to “ban ‘agitators for war’ throughout the world.”[3]
Ironically just a year later, Stalin blockaded West Berlin in an attempt to
prevent the formation of a West German state.[4] Although
the Berlin Airlift circumvented the blockade, the Soviet Union’s new position
in world affairs as an antagonist to the West was a now quite clear. Equally
important was the domestic political changes in the country after World War II.
The
internal politics of the Soviet Union underwent a transfer of power from the leader,
or vozhd, to elites of the Communist
Party. In the early phases of the war the Red Army was effectively annihilated.
By December 1941, Soviet casualties had climbed to over three million and the
morale of the soldiers was in equally bad shape.[5] New
replacements brought in had to learn from scratch. It was these new replacements
that would form the backbone of the new Soviet government bureaucracy after the
war. They could claim that the success of the army during the war was result of
their own efforts rather than solely that of the state. This new government
bureaucracy shifted political power away from Stalin towards the party elites,
also known as nomenklatura. Stalin,
seeing the threat to his role as all-powerful vozhd, forbade recognition for military services and even denied
celebration of Victory Day as a public holiday.[6] However,
Stalin’s role in Soviet Union was coming to a close. In March of 1953, Stalin
died from a debilitating stroke. From henceforth, party elites such Nikita
Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev would run the show. Understanding their base of
power to be from their association to the Great Patriotic War, the nomenklatura promoted the celebration of
war veterans and Victory Day.
In
conjunction with the rise of Party elites was an increased in Communist Party
membership by the Soviet people. The war promoted party membership through the
intense patriotism of soldiers and their relatives.[7] Soldiers
willingly volunteered by the millions and wrote back home often about the “just
cause” of the battle against Germany.[8] The
Nazi invasion also strengthen faith in the party line by removing once
lingering skepticism about claims of an imminent capitalist threat. Excessive actions
of the previous years made sense in the face of a massive invasion of the
homeland. The increasing number of party members and rising status of party
elites fed off each others success.
Despite
the dramatic impact of the war, there is some support to the notion that World
War II was simply a continuation of past Soviet trends. Economic development of
the Soviet Union continued to focus on state control of industry via command
economy. Agricultural was in the hands of the state’s farms, which were
collectivized entirely by 1939.[9] The
productivity of the collectivized farms was poor and often incapable of meeting
the population’s needs. This agrarian issue would plague the Soviet Union for
years to come. Another legacy of the prewar period was Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.
The plans stressed the need to focus on heavy industry and industrialization in
general.[10] During
the war this emphasis on heavy industry paid off as the factories were easily
switched over to war production. However, this concentration of investment on
heavy industry came at the price of the Russian consumer. Russia’s consumer
economy was persistently ignored leaving many with a poor quality life from
lack of shoes to a diet consisting solely of wheat. All in all, Soviet economic
policies remained the same with the command economy to remain a feature of Soviet
Union until the Gorbachev presidency.
Nevertheless,
the dramatic transformation of Russian society and culture cannot be overlooked
as simply continuing past trends. The war marked a turning point in Soviet
identity and remains engraved into Russian history as central to the country’s
memory. Professors of Russian History concur. Stephen Lovell states that the importance
of the war and its glorification overshadowed
the Terror. Catherine Merridale describes the war as “Russia’s pride, and a
good part of its identity,” but attempts to demonstrate that the war’s nationalistic
cult like status is over exaggerated.[11] Kate
Brown discusses the war as a critical to the rise of racial nations with
“compulsion to organize populations and space by race.”[12] Jochen
Hellbeck’s interpretation of Stalingrad studies the motivation of Russian
soldiers to measure the level of nationalism. Timothy Johnston’s analysis of
the postwar Russian society demonstrates that war trauma continued to plague
the Soviets long after the war’s conclusion. Together these five historians
illustrate the far-reaching effects of the World World II on Russia’s society
and culture.
Kate
Brown illustrates how the war turned social developments within the country away
from celebrating cultural diversity and towards celebrating Russian nationalism.
Prior to the war the Soviet Union attempted to improve its borderland region,
known as the kresy. The area was
notable for “its extreme backwardness” in terms of illiteracy, barter economy,
and heterogeneous populations.[13] In
1925, Soviet officials aimed to retain their hold on the region by promoting
various nationalities within the area in a type of local rule administration. The
line of reasoning was that by granting various local nationalities a say in
governance, the Soviets could garner the loyalty of the populace. However with
the dangers of World War II on the horizon, Soviet officials began to target
specific nationalities, Germans and Polish, for deportation due to their
“unreliable” backgrounds. Furthermore the local committees rolled back the
nationality institutions they had just created in the 1920s.[14] These
deportations and policy reversals were not just occurring in the kresy, they were happening throughout
the Soviet Union during the war scares of the 1930s. In 1936 Finnish people
living near the Leningrad border area were deported. In 1937 there were “wholesale
deportations of Koreans.”[15] When
the war did begin in 1941, the deportation of these “enemies of the people” carried
on at breakneck pace so that “by the end of the war 1.5 million people had been
deported to Kazakhstan.”[16] Ultimately
it became evident that the only “reliable” populations of people were ethnicities
not living in border areas, namely ethnic Russians.
Jochen
Hellbeck further shows growing Russian nationalism in his book, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third
Reich. Newfound pride instilled in Soviet soldiers defending their
motherland was stained with tinges of racism. For despite the heroic resistance
offered by Stalingrad’s defenders against the Nazi invaders, Soviet command
“regarded non-Russian recruits, non-Slavs in particular, with suspicion,
believing them to hold nationalist aspirations.”[17] There
is a sense of irony here in that the Soviets just a few years prior were pursuing
a nationality policy. Now during the war they were afraid of the very
nationalists aspirations that they helped to foster! Considering the
government’s paranoia over possible “unreliable elements,” why would they
employ non-Slavs as soldiers? The Red Army employed non-Slavs as soldiers
because the Soviet Union was in a desperate life or death struggle and did not
care where more reinforcements came from. Thus, the other ethnicities were
given their chance to participate in the struggle for the motherland. However, it
was always clear that the non-Slavs were to be subordinate to ethnic Russians who
were assumed to embody the “communist ideal of the battle-conscious soldier.”[18]
Catherine
Merridale tries to separate the visibly growing nationalism from Communist Party
ideals in her article, “Culture, Ideology, and Combat in the Red Army.” She agrees
that the regime tried to harness patriotism by “reviving the notion of a
Russian, as opposed to Soviet, people,” but refrains from calling it genuine
communist nationalism.[19]
Instead she refers to Soviet patriotism as a “love for home village, family,
language and even … peasant religion.”[20] In
effect, Merridale claims that the love of one’s home, not communist nationalism,
was the main motivation of soldiers in their fight against Nazism. She goes
even further when stating that Stalin acquired his sacred cult of personality
through the “repetition” of slogans and songs.[21] This
reasoning is naïve if not outright sophistry. A simple repetition of songs and
slogans does not brainwash soldiers into worshipping Stalin. Rather the soldiers
actually believed in communist nationalism and came to see Stalin’s leadership
during the war as reason to worship him. Therefore, the state’s use of
“patriot” clearly coincided with both the people’s view of their homeland and the
veterans’ recollection of the word’s meaning today.[22] Why
else would the Soviet military award eleven million decorations to its troops?[23] The
soldiers reciprocated the party’s official ideology of nationalism because they
took pride in their achievements. The motherland was successfully defended; its
enemy’s completely crushed.
Stephen
Lovell analyzes how the memory of the war came to be shaped in the postwar Russian
culture. As stated earlier, Stalin first attempted to horde all the credit and
fame for the war to himself. However soon after his passing, veterans of Russia’s
Great Patriotic War began to carve their own stories into the state “narrative
of Communist triumph.”[24] Thus
it came to be that an entire generation of Soviets canonized the war. Both
Soviet leaders after Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, placed the
war close to their hearts. Khrushchev’s pride in his war record mirrored
Brezhnev’s own. In contrast to Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev did
not view the war as central to his understanding of Russia.[25] He
was too young to serve during the war and had relatives that suffered under the
Terror in prewar Stalin years. As a result Gorbachev, opened inquiries into the
Terror, something both Khrushchev and Brezhnev adamantly avoided. Gorbachev was
starting a second brief period of destalinization, but it soon petered out because
it “interfered too much with patriotic memory of the war.”[26]
Soviet citizens sanctified the war memory, placing it upon such a high pedestal
that it towered above all other negative aspects associated with the war and
before the war. This pristine war memory disintegrated in tune with the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, under Vladimir Putin the memory
has once again been revived to its former status and is perhaps one of many
reasons why he remains popular with the Russian public today.
While
Timothy Johnston’s cultural study does not directly focus on the war, he does
reveal Russian war trauma in postwar society. Soon after the end of the World
War II, there was a widespread war scare among the Soviet populations about the
outbreak of a new war against the Allies. These fears were fueled by Soviet
suspicion of Allied motives and war rumors. Although some of the war rumors
were spread disingenuously, a good portion of rumors were spread with actual
fear of another eruption of hostilities. Soviet citizens regularly acted upon
these rumors by hoarding food or money.[27] These
widespread fears and actions associated with them illustrated how World War II
traumatized Soviet citizens. They remembered how the government was woefully
unprepared during the German invasion of 1941. They remembered how the food
shortages accompanied each conflict from the Russian Civil War to the recent
Great Patriotic War. The war trauma was not just limited to the realm of fearing
conflict. In 1950 the World Peace Congress released a petition calling for a
universal ban on atomic weapons.[28] The
corresponding Soviet “Struggle for Peace” campaign was highly successful with
its impressive participation rates.[29] Here
the war trauma became evident once again as the Peace campaigns also served as
a medium through which Soviets could articulate their grief from the recent
war. Veterans, invalids, and mothers used their experiences from the Great
Patriotic War to convey emotional horrors stories. The trauma of the Great
Patriotic War is often overshadowed by the shine of its glory. In spite of that,
the suffering wrought by the war played its own special role in memorializing it.
World
War II transformed the Soviet Union into a new world superpower replete with
mythologized historical heritage and immaculate legacy. Lovell captures the sudden
metamorphosis of country in his introduction “World War II and the Remaking of
the Soviet Union.” The war memory was paramount to the country’s image because
it was reborn from the fires of disaster. Major leaders of the country would
continue to be haunted by the war regardless of whether or not they
participated in it. Whilst agreeing that the war is intertwined with Soviet
identity, Merridale argues that the soldiers on the ground encountered a war
different from that experienced by government officials. She tackles the
ideology of Soviet nationalism as one imposed from above via propaganda. Hellbeck
counters Merridale’s naivety with an inspection into her dubious method of
analysis. He points out that she discarded testimony that she deemed too
propagandistic.[30] Besides
cherry picking oral histories to review, she simply assumes that soldiers
speaking Bolshevik are brainwashed nonbelievers. For Hellbeck the testimonies
from soldiers at Stalingrad clearly demonstrated their belief in the
ideologies. The overall confidence of Red Army commanders also indicated
growing nationalistic pride within the army. Unfortunately, Russian nationalism
was accompanied by some distrust towards non-Slavs. Here is where Brown’s discussion
of the borderland comes in. Unreliable, non-Slavic ethnicities were deported
off into the wilderness and left to fend for their own. Russian nationalism thus
became an exclusive ideology reserved for ethnic Russians. There were
exceptions for non-Slavs who participated in the glorious defense of the
motherland. They were allowed to partake in the glory, but preferably from the
sidelines. Johnston approaches the study of World War II with an evaluation of
the postwar Soviet society. He examines how the trauma of the recent war lingers
on like a scar.
The
Great Patriotic War was an apotheosis of Stalinism. Never before had Stalin
commanded an enormous army of twelve million men occupying territory from the
Sakhalin islands to Berlin.[31] Never
before had the Soviet Union taken part in a massive war on the international
stage. Never before had Stalin come to be adored by the people of Russia as a
savior of the world. Communism triumphed over fascism. Stalin was at the height
of his power and cult of personality. After the war, Stalinism would decline in
tune with its founder. Yet its ideology left a permanent mark on Soviet Union. For
the war had laid the foundations of the Soviet Union’s culture, politics, and
society.
[1] J. Arch Getty and Oleg V.
Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and
the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), 25-26.
[2] Timothy Johnston, Being
Soviet : Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 129.
[3] Ibid., 142.
[4] Stephen Lovell, The
Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Massachusetts:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 257.
[5] Ibid., 5.
[6] Ibid., 8-9.
[7] Ibid., 6.
[8] Catherine Merridale,
"Culture, Ideology and Combat in the Red Army, 1939-45," Journal
of Contemporary History 41, no. 2 (2006): 311, 314.
[9] Catherine Evtuhov and
Richard Stites, A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces
since 1800 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 363.
[10] Ibid., 356-257.
[11] Merridale, 307.
[12] Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place, Kindle Ed.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), Introduction.
[13] Ibid., Introduction.
[14] Ibid., Chapter 5.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid., Chapter 7.
[17] Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad:
The City That Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs, 2015),
55.
[18] Ibid., 57.
[19] Merridale, 315.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., 317.
[22] Ibid., 314.
[23] Ibid., 321.
[24] Lovell, 7.
[25] Ibid., 9.
[26] Ibid., 11.
[27] Johnston, 138.
[28] Ibid., 145
[29] Ibid., 151.
[30] Hellbeck, 18.
[31] Lovell, 6.
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