21 Some, such as the results of the 2000–1 competition, have been published. See Rossiya-XX vek, sbornik rabot pobeditelei (Moscow, 2002).
22 Oksana Bocharova and Mariya Belova, a social scientist and an ethnographer respectively, at different times also carried out interviews alone, as well as staying in touch with veterans after the interviews. In several cases, the result was a correspondence that continued for months.
23 Cited in John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (London, 1980), p. 109.
24 For a discussion, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994).
25 The surviving fruits of those interrogations and enquiries, which I was able to consult thanks to the help of German colleagues, are archived in the military section of the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg.
26 Donald S. Detwiler et al. (Eds), World War II German Military Studies (24 vols, New York and London, 1979), vol. 19, document D-036.
27 Russian Combat Methods in World War II, Department of the Army pamphlet no. 20–230, 1950. Reprinted in Detwiler, vol. 18.
28 The observation, by Lt-Gen Martel, applied to Soviet troops in 1936. Cited in Raymond L. Garthoff, How Russia Makes War (London, 1954), p. 226; see also ibid., p. 224.
29 Some people used this designation to answer the question on ‘nationality’ in the census of 1937. At the other extreme were individuals who answered ‘anything but Soviet’. See Catherine Merridale, ‘The USSR Population Census of 1937 and the Limits of Stalinist Rule,’ Historical Journal, 39:1, March 1996, pp. 225–40.
30 This democratic army – or quasi-democratic one – is the subject of Mark von Hagen’s Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca and London, 1990).
31 David Samoilov, ‘Lyudi odnogo varianta: Iz voennykh zapisok’, part 2, Avrora, 1990, no. 2, p. 51.
32 See Bartov’s important book The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London, 1985).
33 First discussed in the 1940s, the theory was placed in the policy agenda by the work of Shils and Janowitz, op. cit.
34 This argument is developed in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army.
35 See Chapters 3 and 4.
36 Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 173.
37 The problem did concern post-war authorities. See Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), especially pp. 214–24.
1
Marching with Revolutionary Step
Whenever people think that they will have to fight a war, they start to try to picture what it will be like. Their stories seldom correspond to reality, but forecasting is not the purpose. Instead, the idea that the boys will soon be back or that the enemy will be destroyed with surgical precision, like the myth that it will all be over by Christmas, serve to foster a confident, even optimistic, mood at times when gloom might be more natural. In 1938, as the momentum for large-scale war gathered, the citizens of Stalin’s empire, like Europeans everywhere, attempted to allay their fears with comforting tales. The Soviet vision of future conflict was destined to inspire a generation of wartime volunteers, but the images were created deliberately by a clique of leaders whose ideology had set them on the path to international hostilities. The favoured medium of communication was the cinema. The epic struggle of utopia and backwardness played out in moving pictures, black and white. Stirring music reinforced the mood. At other moments, Soviet people opened their newspapers to columns of portentous diplomatic reportage; their country was preparing for battle. But though the news that citizens could read was full of threat, films were designed to inculcate the view that the people’s vanguard, the Red Army, was certain to triumph.
The greatest epic of the time was Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, an anti-fascist parable of Russian victory over German invaders. Although it was set in the thirteenth century, in the age of Slavic princes and Teutonic knights, Eisenstein’s great spectacle, released in 1938, made direct reference to the politics of the 1930s, even to the point of adding swastikas to some of the Teutonic knights’ shields and standards. The message was not one that Soviet audiences, attuned to every nuance of state-controlled propaganda, would miss. For all its deliberate sermonizing, however, the film, which boasted a musical score by Sergei Prokofiev, was destined to endure as a classic of Soviet cinema. Inferior productions with similar themes have stood the test of time less well, but in the 1930s, their audiences were rapt. On the surface at least, Alexander Nevsky was set in the deep past. For cinema-goers who preferred to look forwards, another film, Efim Dzigan’s If There Is War Tomorrow, also released in 1938, foretold Russia’s victory in the face of a future invasion, the one that kept people awake at nights.
Efim Dzigan set out to reassure. The impact of his hour-long film was created by blending fictitious action with clips of genuine newsreel, splicing documentary footage into an unfolding fantasy of effortless victory. The message – resolute and stoical but also full of hope – was strengthened by the repetition of a musical refrain with words by the popular songwriter Vasily Lebedev-Kumach.1 If There Is War Tomorrow struck so live a chord with Soviet audiences that they went on watching it after the real war began. By the winter of 1941, the invader had overrun a third of Soviet territory. The planes that droned across Dzigan’s black-and-white screen had been destroyed, the tanks burned out, the brave soldiers corralled in prison camps. It was no longer possible to dream that this war would be over soon. That winter, the audiences crowding into old schoolrooms and empty huts included evacuees from Ukraine and Smolensk, people whose homes were now in German hands. As they huddled together, relying on each other’s breath for warmth, they needed patience as the hand-cranked dynamo was turned. But all the same, a spell seemed to be cast.2 This film was not about the war, but faith. That faith, and the images that sustained it, was part of what defined the generations that would bear the brunt of Russia’s war. In the terrible years ahead, people would hum the music from this film to keep their spirits up. As they marched across dusty steppe, as they strummed a guitar by the light of a campfire, it would be Lebedev-Kumach’s song that soldiers often sang.
The film’s action opens in a fairground, probably the newly opened Gorky Park, Moscow’s Park of Culture and Rest. The Kremlin towers are visible in the distance, each topped with a glowing electric star. It is night, but the city is full of jollity, with ferris wheels and fireworks and young people strolling about with ice creams in their hands. This is the socialist paradise, and it is a place of well-earned leisure, happy couples, brightly coloured food. There is an innocence about it, crimeless, sexless, blandly without sin. In this land, Stalin and his loyal aides do all the worrying so that the children of the revolution can be free. But their freedom is under threat. The film cuts to the Soviet border, where fascist troops, ant-like, are climbing into tanks. There is no chance that we will sympathize with them. These are not the seductive species of villain but absurd buffoons. Their officers wear large moustaches, look pompous, and move with the bow-legged gait of cavalrymen. The infantrymen crawl, the airmen stoop. Throughout the action they speak German, but they are more like cartoon Prussians from a children’s book than leather-booted Nazis. Even the swastikas on their helmets and collars are slightly eccentric. This is picture-book fascism, not the real thing.