The Perils of a Simulacrum

Today's Russian authorities tarnish the victories of yesterday

Anna Ochkina

One day in 1975, our 1A class had a grand surprise - veterans of the Great Patriotic War came to visit us. Let me make a reservation right here: that terrible war that divided our world and the twentieth century in half was known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet mass consciousness. To even understand the conflict between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union as only one part of the Second World War is already to experience a moment of education, to inaugurate a conscious attitude to history. But in ordinary historical consciousness, in conversation, in personal memory - there was only the Great Patriotic War. So, first-graders were to meet the veterans, and I was the host of this meeting, for which I had prepared a grand poetic text. I well remember my excitement during my preparation beforehand; it was the first time when I could not fall asleep at night from excitement.

By my current perspective, the veterans were quite young people, about fifty years old, but to eight-yeard-old me, they seemed like ancient old men. I was also struck by some of them spoking about their schoolchildren. How, I thought, could such old people can have children of school age?! I automatically considered them old: they had fought in the war, and that was so long ago. This was an interesting moment in the consciousness of my generation - for those born twenty to twenty-five years after the war, it was considered to be distant history. The reason for this lay probably both in the aftermath of intensive post-war reconstruction and also in the peculiarities of Soviet propaganda. The war remained in memory and culture, but the core of our propaganda, as well as the state's policy for culture and education, was to emphasize the peaceful quality of contemporary life.

1975 was the year that serious questions about the power of the Great Victory began to be raised. By the way, my generation was raised during the peak of the propaganda about the feat of the Soviet people, and many of us took it very seriously. Remember, in their promotion of their preferred image of the war, and in dissemination of the symbols of victory, the Soviet government used not so much the methods of propaganda but rather the more subtle tools of arts and culture.

Obviously the Brezhnev leadership could not refuse the opportunity to use the great victories of the recent past to cover up the lack of bright successes in the present. But this propagandizing lost its significance and was eclipsed by the more poignant truths that could be found in the many films, books, poems, and songs about the war.

Artistic imagery inspired by the war had become an essential element of Soviet culture and Soviet identity. It was not the image of aggression, greatness or grandiose victories - it was the image of individual stamina, personal bravery, and of difficult moral decisions made in unbearable, inhuman conditions. The best Soviet war books and films are those about people, their destinies, their suffering, and their courage, and about the certainty that every effort must be made to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. Pacifist pathos was an integral element of the socio-cultural memory of the Great Patriotic War. That is why the image, symbols and heroes of the war have become images for culture, public consciousness, and civic awareness to a much greater extent than any propaganda.

Post-Soviet cinema in Russia could not find its own voice for a long time, as it tried to follow rapidly changing, vague ideological trends. Of course it was necessary to condemn communism, while bloodthirsty “special officers,” inhuman penal battalions, “blockade detachments,” deceitful political officers, and courageous priests all appeared in the war films.

At a certain point, the current political regime decided to exploit this military theme by using the memory of the Great Victory to strengthen its own legitimacy and popularity. Heroic films began to appear, glorifying the greatness and invincibility of the Soviet army. However, the viewer was still attracted by films about people, about personal suffering, and individual exploits in the war. Such films did appear, but only a few of them, and they did not latch onto the mass memory of war and victory in the minds of post-Soviet society in Russia. This time, propaganda did its job, discarding “useless” artistic explorations and promoting a simple version of historical events in which the USSR fought with everyone else and defeated them all. And now modern Russia, the heir of this victory, is again alone in its war with the whole world.

Symbols of greatness, invincibility, and confrontation with the whole world are important for modern Russian propaganda. Indeed, contrary to all historical facts, ideas are spreading in Russian society not only that the victory in World War II was exclusively an achievement of the USSR, but also ideas about the relationships of all the other European countries with Nazi Germany. Allegedly, the Second World War was a battle between Soviet warriors of light against all the Western countries, who suddenly sided with evil. In response to the rare arguments of reason - what about, for example, the conferences of the allies at Yalta, the joint signing of the act of surrender, the UN, and so on - supporters of the “everyone against the USSR” version of history answer without hesitation: they later defected when we had already begun to win. The fact that Great Britain and France entered the war with Germany on September 3, 1939, a week after the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact between the USSR and Germany, like other historical facts, is simply ignored.

The Soviet artistic version of the war was exclusively humanistic and pacifist. Therefore, despite the romanticization of military history, and the discreet lack of emphasis on certain unflattering facts, this version was true. By socratic standards, truth is good. And every symbol and every image, therefore, was perceived as true.

Today in Russia, the celebration of Victory Day is still accompanied by Soviet military songs and films, but what do these familiar images of the Soviet military saga symbolize now? The ideological distortion of the war is needed by today's Russian authorities, not to educate the people on humanism and pacifism, but solely to justify their own repressive domestic and aggressive foreign policy. By socratic standards, we have here pure untruth.

The Second World War - including the Great Patriotic War - was a historical period of the most severe struggle between humanism and anti-humanity. This struggle went on at the fronts, went on in the rear, and unfolded within each person involved in this war. That time humanism won; this is the historical truth, and only this is worth celebrating.

In today's Russia, Victory has been made a reason for hatred, a justification of aggression. They distorted the very meaning of that period of history, both the victory itself and the hopes of the world for peace that was associated with it. It is now a pure simulacrum, around which ritual dances are arranged, which do not even perform a consolidating function. The simulacrum is not very convincing, but extremely harmful.