Over the years the holiday grew bigger, yet there were fewer veterans and fewer tears; until there came a moment, some ten years ago, when I realized that 9 May had ceased to exist for me as a national holiday and had become simply a time for private reflection, of a tatty photograph of a young grandpa in his uniform as a Signals Major, and of his grave in the Khimki Cemetery, just outside Moscow; of a few nostalgic wartime songs by Mark Bernes and Klavdiya Shulzhenko[9] or the film Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, about the shooting up of a Belarusian village by the fascists. Probably the point that caused my personal split with the holiday was the St George ribbon (the orange and black ribbon handed out to people on the streets on the eve of 9 May, in the colours of the medal ribbon of the Order of the St George Cross, a Russian military award); or, more accurately, it’s not the ribbon itself but the cult surrounding it, poured out in a flood of banality and jingoism. So today I want to ask the question that the film director Michael Moore asked once of George Bush Jr: ‘Dude, where’s my country?’ And I want to know: ‘Where’s my Victory?’
For Russia, 9 May is the fulcrum of the twentieth century. At one edge there was the War of 1914 and the year of revolutions, 1917, and at the other, 1991, the year the USSR collapsed. But the culmination of Russia’s terrifying twentieth century, the huge sacrifice, the peak of the Soviet Union’s might, from where it began its inexorable decline, was 1945. Victory Day is incontestably the single true memorial day in our modern calendar, as opposed to the newly invented Day of National Unity on 4 November, or Russia Day on 12 June. It is a day that was not invented by the propagandists, but came through suffering, and was paid for in blood. That is why the 9 May celebration is the most exact indicator of the age, the mirror that reflects the history of every postwar generation.
Over the course of seventy years, this holiday has changed radically, depending on the times. Stalin was afraid of the Victory, just as he was afraid of those who had served at the front, the victors. He was terrified that they would reveal his criminal cowardliness in June 1941 (after his faint-hearted disappearance for a week at the outbreak of war, when Politburo members Beria and Malenkov turned up at his dacha, Stalin was convinced that they had come to arrest him); his strategic failures; and the unacceptably high cost of victory. It is no coincidence that at the celebratory banquet on 24 May 1945, in a rush of unexpected openness, he turned down the eulogy being paid to him and instead proposed his famous toast, ‘to the health of the Russian people’, and to their patience, which allowed them to forgive the mistakes and mismanagement by the government and not to overthrow Soviet power. Eight million frontline soldiers, five million Ostarbeiter (Soviet people relocated for work in Germany) and almost seventy million people who lived in territory that had been occupied by the Germans were a dangerous and uncontrollable force for Stalin, especially the frontline soldiers, who feared neither the NKVD nor the Gestapo, and on whom the magic of Stalin’s power – the magic of fear – had no effect. From 1947, 9 May was no longer a public holiday (they made the 1 January a holiday instead), and a new fierce wave of terror was rolled out across the country, from repeated arrests and deportations of whole peoples to a cultural reaction known as zhdanovshchina[10] and a battle against ‘cosmopolitanism’, which simply covered up a campaign of state-sponsored antisemitism. Many victorious frontline soldiers, partisans and people who had been in German prisoner-of-war camps were simply shipped off to the East without even the chance to catch their breath, sent to camps or deported. Once again, just as after the Polish invasion in 1612 and Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, the Russian people had risen up and saved their pathetic leaders from defeat – and yet again, they submissively returned to the yoke of slavery.
During Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, many of these people returned, and with them a different, more human memory of the war developed. Moreover, Khrushchev himself was not particularly complimentary of the General Staff, starting with Marshal Zhukov. It is in this period that ‘the Lieutenants’ prose’ appeared, by writers who had been at the front, such as Vasil Bykov, Daniil Granin, Grigory Baklanov and Viktor Astafiev; and the most perceptive films were made about the War, like Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (winners, respectively, at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals). A little later, at the start of the 1970s, the classic Soviet films about the war were made: The Belorussian Station and The Dawns Here Are Quiet. Along with Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, Babiy Yar, and everyone’s favourite song, Do the Russians Want War?, based on the words of the same poet, these books and films created a new canon of understanding of the Great Patriotic War, in which two Soviet generations of the 1960s and the 1980s grew up: full of pride and bitterness, humane and peace-loving. For many decades, the Soviet people were repeating like a spell or a prayer: ‘As long as there’s no war.’
With the coming to power of Brezhnev, the 9 May holiday underwent yet another transformation. From the time of the twentieth anniversary in 1965, when for the first time since 1945 there was a military parade on Red Square and a reception in the Kremlin Palace, 9 May began to take on the trappings of a semi-official state cult. Once again, the day was declared a holiday. Memorials were unveiled (in 1967 Brezhnev opened the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beside the Kremlin Wall); veterans found their place in the Party-Soviet system; multi-tome generals’ memoirs began to be published (including those of Zhukov, having been brought back from disgrace); and epic films were made: the genre of memory moved from the lyrical to the epic. According to the historian, Nikita Sokolov, the idea to turn around the popular memory of the war and show it not so much as a victory for the people as a victory for the Soviet system, to show the effectiveness of socialism, came from the chief Communist Party ideologue, Mikhail Suslov. The living memory of the Victory was carefully painted in rosy hues, pouring on the balm of speeches and the concrete of monumental sculptures, such as the intimidating memorial complex at Malaya Zemlya near the city of Novorossisk on the Black Sea, where Brezhnev himself fought in 1943. The whole cult of Malaya Zemlya, puffed up in the 1970s and crowned by the General Secretary’s book, is a good illustration of the talentless propaganda and the folk cynicism it provoked, such as in the well-known joke of the time: ‘Where were you during the war? Did you fight at Malaya Zemlya, or were you just sitting around in the trenches at Stalingrad?’
This dualism of the people’s memory and concrete officialdom carried on through the years of perestroika and into the 1990s. On the one hand, the time of glasnost revealed new facts about the carelessness and lack of talent of the Soviet military leadership. New evidence came to light about pointless sacrifices, and alternative interpretations appeared about the Second World War (such as by the revisionist writer, Viktor Suvorov), which cast doubts on the glittering image of the USSR as an innocent victim of fascism and a defender of peace. On the other hand, the bronze myth grew and strengthened, definitively formed in 1995 by the megalomaniacal and ridiculous Victory Memorial on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow, for the sake of which the hill itself and the park already there had to be razed, thus destroying a legendary place of memory in the capital.