‘The heroism of Leningrad siege survivors,’ Granin and Adamovich wrote, ‘was perceived by Stalin and his inner circle as the expression of the city’s freedom-loving spirit, its rebellious nature, its excessive, and at times threatening autonomy.’ Alexei Kuznetsov, a blokadnik who was the Leningrad Party Secretary, allowed himself to get carried away in a speech he made in 1946, in which he proclaimed that the fame of St Petersburg had by then overshadowed the legend of Troy. He was executed some years later. The Siege of Leningrad did not finish when the war ended, it was transformed into a political blockade. The ‘disgraced city was surrounded by suspicion, all initiatives were squashed, the city was not allowed to reclaim its nobility, its achievements, its cultural significance’. Leningrad’s ‘inferiority complex’ was created and painstakingly maintained by a series of the newly installed, plebeian-minded Party officials (most imported from elsewhere). The idea was to turn Leningrad into an ordinary regional centre; in the expression that would emerge later, ‘the great city with a regional fate’. Leningrad was punished for imagining it was special and for having ample evidence to prove that indeed it was. Yet this punishment, this campaign of ostracism, paradoxically (or maybe inevitably) worked to strengthen the perception of its separate fate. For the city’s intelligentsia it was one more proof (if any was needed) that their city was unlike other Soviet cities, that it was not really Soviet and not really Russian, but its own country, a universe unto itself.
In St Petersburg, the most breathtaking and poetic of cities I know, I find myself coming back to the war over and over again. I struggle to explain to Billie why on their wedding day newlyweds, as tradition dictates, carry bunches of flowers to war memorials. Why Marina is close to tears in telling us how, during the war, a group of female sappers risked their lives disarming mines plastered all over a monument to the poet Alexander Pushkin. Why in the suburb of Pushkin ( formerly Tzarskoe Selo), exhibitions in the lavish tsar palaces are accompanied by black-and-white stands documenting the extent of the palaces’ destruction during the war. Why Misha Senior, driving us around the city, eager to point out all the places linked to Dostoyevsky (isn’t it what all the tourists want?), keeps bumping into sites and objects that intervene in his impromptu literary tour, forcing him back to the subject of the war.
Even though Misha, Marina and I were born almost three decades after the end of the war, it has left its mark on us through its continuous and omnipresent evocation. We too can say, with the historian Svetlana Aleksievich, that, ‘War was always remembered, at school and at home, at weddings, christenings and wakes. Even in children’s conversations. We did not know the world without war, the world of war was the only one we knew and the people of war were the only people we knew. Till this day I do not know any other world or any other people.’ The ‘cult of the war’ has not disappeared along with the Soviet Union, quite the contrary. Indeed, the victory against Hitler, writes sociologist Lev Gudkov, remains ‘the only positive reference point for the national consciousness of post-Soviet society’. In public opinion surveys in recent decades, Russians’ belief in the war and the Soviet victory as the most important historical event of the twentieth century has only grown. So much is at stake in terms of national identity that every attempt to reassess the war in either general terms or through a particular episode inevitably produces a massive public backlash. In an instant, those who dare to get close and personal with the war are accused of desecrating the memory of the dead, of attacking that which is most sacred to millions of people and (this one is always a winner!) of spitting in the face of those survivors and veterans still living. The Soviet Union’s victory in the war, writes Gudkov, ‘does not just crown, but also kind of cleanses and justifies the war, at the same time foreclosing its dark side from rational examination’. And, equally, the dark side of the wartime leadership is foreclosed too. The victory works backwards to rehabilitate post-factum not only the war, but Stalin himself and the ‘excesses’ of his regime that made this victory possible – millions of his own people shot, deported, thrown into camps and dispossessed.
Russian journalist Aleksandr Minkin speaks of the cultural stranglehold of the war on post-Soviet society with wonderful simplicity: ‘The victory in the Great Patriotic War is for everyone (both for the government and the people) the only available foundation on which their heart can rest.’ All the remainder is ‘a litany of terrible catastrophes, cruelty, famine, disintegration’, but in the defeat of Fascism the nation finds true joy. Perhaps most crucially, Gudkov tells us, the Great Patriotic War in Russia has become the ‘surrogate for culture – the field of meaning, in which the most important themes and scenarios of the present day are played out’. The war is central to any form of cultural and historical meaning-making. In other words, it remains the measure of most things. But when the war is ‘the surrogate of culture’, cultural values become defined almost entirely through the prism of ‘the highly strung, ecstatic situation’ and so we get, not necessarily in this order, ‘heroism, self-sacrifice, national mission, the quest for redemption’ and the persistent idea of Russia’s special destiny in the world. (These ideas work just as well within the template of religion; unsurprisingly, religion is everywhere in the post-Soviet world.) When the extraordinary is deemed to be of highest value, the ordinary becomes not only diminished or despised, it becomes a corrupting, alien force. And so we end up with a whole nation of people who do not quite know how to be civilians, people who, in the words of Aleksievich, ‘have lost the ability to distinguish war from peace, survival from life’. She writes, ‘We either fought in the war or were preparing for the war. We never lived any other way.’
10
A TRAIN PLATFORM SOMEWHERE
Under dictatorship everyone is scared of the question and under democracy – of the answer.
Under dictatorship there is more ballet and humour, under democracy – more travel and robberies.
As to the large-scale animal fear – just as much in both cases.
Under dictatorship you can be knocked out from the top, under democracy – from the bottom…
So while our freedom does differ from dictatorship, the difference is not so stark as to be clear to a little-educated person such as, say, a writer or a military officer.