The Second World War as the second foundation of the Soviet Union

University of California, Berkeley, Department of History
History 280: War and Memory, Spring 2007

The Second World War as the second foundation of the Soviet Union

by

Moritz Deutschmann

Contents

1 Introduction... 3

2 The Initial Silence... 4

3 The Expected Armaggedon... 6

4 The Memory Cult... 8

5 Heroes and Victims... 11

6 No More Blank Spots: the End of the Soviet Union... 12

7 War Memory and Post-War Soviet Society... 13

8 Bibliography... 15

1 Introduction

"No one will forget, and nothing will be forgotten". This classical Soviet slogan about the Second World War conveys many of the meanings of the Soviet War memory. First, it simply describes a reality: no country which has lost so many of its citizens in the War as the Soviet Union can forget, and still today, almost every family in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus and many of the other states of the former Soviet Union remembers parents and grandparents who were killed during the War. For a whole generation, the War was the formative experience of a lifetime, an unforgettable memory indeed, and although the number of veterans is diminishing, there still exist enough to tell their stories.
However, the saying also has political significance, as it crowns many of the countless War monuments which can be found everywhere in the former Soviet Union today. They were meant to set the memory of the Soviet victory in stone and to translate the lessons of the wartime experience to future generations. In order to achieve this, the state did not rely on the private memory of its citizens, but, especially since the mid-1960s, organized an allencompassing cult to commemorate the victory and to make it, together with the October Revolution, the second defining historical event for Soviet socialism.
At the same time, "no one will forget, and nothing will be forgotten" was also a typical Soviet slogan: what it said was quite different from reality. Many aspects of the War were indeed forgotten or, at least, the state tried to make its citizens forget them. There were no monuments for the Soviet invasion of Poland, the deportation of millions of people within the Soviet Union, or the soldiers who were lucky enough to survive German concentration camps, only to be treated as traitors and sometimes even ending up in the GULAG after their return to the Soviet Union.
But Perestroika and Glasnost′ finally added an ironic twist to this story of Soviet forgetting and remembering, because at the end of the 80s, the promise not to forget turned against the Soviet system itself. The opening of the archives has revealed most of the hitherto concealed aspects of the War. Newspapers were full of articles questioning the official narrative of the Soviet victory, thus undermining the political system as a whole. These intended and unintended meanings of "no one will forget and nothing will be forgotten" show how intimately linked post-war Soviet history and the memory of the Second World War are. In fact, there are few aspects of Soviet society after 1945 that do not relate, in one way or the other, to the War: from new relations between the state and its citizens, between countryside and city to generational structure and the nationality conflicts within the Soviet empire. In this paper, I would like to sketch out some of these relations and ask how collective memory of the War was connected to social change in postwar Soviet society.

2 The Initial Silence

A Soviet soldier who returned to his home country after 1945 held very conflicting feelings: on the one hand, the War had brought the death of many loved ones, unimaginable destruction, and years of extreme material scarcity which even overshadowed the harsh experiences of the 1930s.¹ There had been few times in Russian history where human lives seemed to be of so little value. However, the survivors were often also filled with a tremendous pride for their achievements-- a feeling that they were the true saviors of the motherland. In Vyacheslav Kondratev′s post-war novel, the hero remembers: "In the War we were the most necessary of the necessary."² There was a wide-spread feeling that this was truly a people′s war, not the achievement of Stalin alone. At the same time, the War brought limited relaxation to many repressive policies, for example in the regime′s relation to the Orthodox Church. For some, the disastrous year 1941 thus appeared as a spontaneous de- Stalinization and was even greeted as a period of relative freedom.³
A certain distance to the regime was especially common among the soldiers who had left their home country for the first time and experienced how much richer even the devastated Poland was than the Soviet Union. After returning to the Soviet Union, many soldiers expected to be rewarded for their sacrifices and hoped for political relaxation and fast economic recovery. A network of veterans emerged, i.e. in the so-called "Blue Danubes" pubs, where veterans talked openly about their War experience and cultivated the spirit of the front experience.⁴
However, these feelings did not translate into any serious political threat for the regime. The soldiers of 1945 did not become the new Dekabrists, as the wide-spread comparison between the "Great Patriotic War" and the Napoleonic Wars would have suggested. All political aspirations were overshadowed by the private concerns of the soldiers who had tremendous difficulties returning to civil life, restoring relations with their often decimated families, and finding work and housing.

[...]

1 For an overview of the post-war years compare: Fitzpatrick, Sheila: Postwar Soviet Society. The Return to Normalcy 1945-1953, in: Susan Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, pp. 129-156. Zubkova, Elena: Obshchestvo i Reformy 1945-1964, Moskva 1993.

2 Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, pp. 21.

3 Tumarkin, Nina: The Living and the Dead. The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York 1994, pp. 65. This is especially true for the intellectuals, comp. Bonwetsch, Bernd: War as a ``Breathing Space′′. Intellectuals and the "Great Patriotic War′′, in: Robert Thurston / Bernd Bonwetsch (eds.), The People′s War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, Urbana 2000, pp. 137-154.

4 Comp. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, pp. 28.