The Second World Was and Russian National Consciousness

The Past and Present Society
The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness

Author(s): Geoffrey Hosking
Source: Past & Present, No. 175 (May, 2002), pp. 162-187
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600771
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THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND
RUSSIAN NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS*
Russians today are divided about many things, including t

own imperial past, as was demonstrated by the controv
surrounding the funeral of Nicholas II and his family in J
1998. If there is one national achievement, however, which
Russians can unite in remembering with pride, it is their vi
over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Yet, curi
enough, the surge of patriotism which the war provoke
never been properly interrogated by historians. On the wh
we have taken it for granted that Russian patriotism had
lain latent behind the Soviet mask, ready to burst forth in resp
to the German invasion. But what kind of patriotism w
Russian or Soviet? If Russian, ethnic or imperial? And had
Soviet state fostered it or impeded it?
This lack of specificity is curious, since many other aspec
Russian national identity have been closely analysed in rec
years. Historians have laid growing emphasis on the distin
between the ethnic (russkii) and imperial (rossiiskii) aspect
Russianness, which is roughly the same as the distinction be
'English' and 'British', or between 'Turkish' and 'Ottoma
a 1997 publication I suggested that Russian empire-building
the sixteenth century onwards had impeded Russian na
building, that the rossiiskii had stunted the russkii. The Ru
people remained in many ways alienated, both in the ethn
civic sense, from the imperial ruling class.1
The split between the russkii and rossiiskii had not been f
healed by 1917, and it was a major cause of Russia's defeat
disintegration in that year. Allan Wildman's study of the co
of the Russian army suggested that the soldiers did have t
* I am grateful to Susan Morrissey, Wendy Slater and Steve Smith, to the R

Centre seminar at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Univ
College London, and to the graduate history seminars at Cambridge Universi
the University of Edinburgh for helpful comments on earlier versions of this
1 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London, 1997); s
Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvilkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte,
(Munich, 1992); Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals
(London, 2000).
C The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2002
RUSSIAN NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 163
own brand of Russian patriotism and tried to embody

soldiers' committees, but that ultimately those commi
apart because of sharpening class conflict and the relativ
of demotic nationhood.2 More recently, S. A. Smith ha
that the peasants who formed the majority of the arm
their own concept of the Russian nation, with which th
fied strongly, but that that identification, 'while steadily g
was critically impeded by the government's failure to g
rights of citizenship', so that in the decisive engagemen
national identity ultimately yielded to class identity.3 D
has made a similar point, contrasting the success of th
government in getting a grip on soldiers' mutinies in
the Russian government's failure to do so. The French
he argues, could be persuaded that it made sense to fight
republic, because it genuinely was in some sense the
really were 'citizen-soldiers'. The Russian soldiers could
similarly persuaded.4
In the present article I argue that between 1941 and
russkii and the rossiiskii, the ethnic and the imperial (n
neo-rossiiskii or sovetskii form) came together as never
and indeed never subsequently. In many ways this is su
since in the period 1917-41 the Russian people had b
by a regime far from committed to developing their
identity, in any form. On the contrary, the Soviet Uni
outset was a resolutely internationalist state, and its a
establish the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat.
Soviet leaders were positively hostile to the idea of Ru
sidering it to be a 'prison of the peoples'. They endeav
raise the national consciousness not of the Russians, bu
non-Russians, through programmes of education and af
action, while deliberately creating ethnically labelled no
administrative territories. At the twelfth party congres
Bukharin argued that 'the essence of Leninism in the n
question means above all struggling against the fundame
vinism which exists here, Great Russian chauvinism', a
therefore it was necessary to discriminate against Russi
2 Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. (Princeto
S. A. Smith, 'Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World
Comment', Slavic Rev., lix (2000), 328.
4 David Moon, 'Peasants into Russian Citizens? A Comparative Pe
Revolutionary Russia, xix (1996).
164 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 175
would thus be given the chance to 'pur

viously oppressed peoples'.5 The doy
Mikhail Pokrovskii, claimed that 'the t
a counter-revolutionary term'.6
During the 1920s and for much of th
Russians accepted this outlook, believing
messianic goals of the Soviet state justif
suppression, of Russian identity. This w
ist phase of Soviet consciousness. So at
paradoxically, it could be argued that s
with one form of Russian self-identification. Russian national
feeling itself readily takes universalist and messianic forms.
During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the notion
of Rus' as the re-creator of the Eastern Christian ecumene and
the guarantor of the true Christian faith throughout the world
had been widespread and popular. During the later seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries the Church Schism and the reforms of
Peter the Great had suppressed, but not destroyed, this popular
messianism, and I would argue that it re-emerged in the early
twentieth century in the form of Marxism, which was a new kind
of universalist and messianic movement promising to create a
better society throughout the world.7
Reading diaries and letters written during the 1920s and 1930s,
one gains the impression that many Russians, including some of
the relatively poorly educated, took a pride in their country as
the natural home of the world's poor and exploited, as a country
committed both to social justice and to technological moderniza-
tion for the benefit of everyone. Significantly the word 'Russian'
seldom appears in their discourse: ethnic identity simply did not
5 Dvenadtsatyi s"ezd RKP(b), 17-25 aprelia 1923 g. [The Twelfth Congress of the
Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), 17-25 April 1923] (Moscow, 1968), 613.
6 See A. I. Vdovin, V. Iu. Zorin and A. V. Nikonov, Russkii narod v natsional'noi
politike: XX vek [The Russian People in Nationality Policy: 20th Century] (Moscow,
1998), 109.
7I have set out the argument for this assertion in Hosking, Russia: People and
Empire, pt 2, ch. 1 and pt 4, ch. 2. For an analysis of Soviet Marxism in the context
of messianic trends in Russian history, see Vatro Murvar, 'Messianism in Russia:
Religious and Revolutionary', jl Scientific Study of Religion, x (1971); David G.
Rowley, ' "Redeemer Empire": Russian Millenarianism', Amer. Hist. Rev., civ (1999);
Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After
(London, 2000). For a presentation of Soviet Marxism as a messianic movement
transforming society in its own image, see Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class,
Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000).
seem important to them.8 In this way internationalist, me

socialism amalgamated with a non-ethnic imperial Russiann
generate a distinctively sovetskii outlook.
During the 1930s, however, the Soviet state itself beg
moderate its internationalism and its commitment to the non-
Russian nationalities, and to re-emphasize the Russian contribu-
tion to the greatness of the Soviet Union. In the schools the
history of the tsars was taught once more, not simply as an
account of rapacious exploitation of the people, but also as a
heroic past from which a great state had been born. Stalin rebuked
the internationalist poet Dem'ian Bednyi for 'indiscriminate slan-
der' against the Russian people, and reminded him that 'there
are two Russias: revolutionary Russia and anti-revolutionary
Russia'. In a speech of February 1931 he asserted that: 'In the
past we had no fatherland and could not have one. But now that
we have overthrown capitalism, and power lies with the people,
we do have a fatherland, and we shall defend its independence'.9
The officially sponsored revival of pride in Russia is a familiar
story, which need not be further expounded here,"1 but it should
be emphasized that the resultant outlook was definitely neo-
rossiiskii and not russkii. It was statist and supranational in outlook,
and regarded the non-Russian Soviet peoples as being honorary
and subsidiary Russians, rather as most English colonial rulers
regarded the Scots in the nineteenth-century British Empire. It
still aimed ultimately to build socialism throughout the world,
but that socialism was now to have a Russian imperial face and
to speak in the Russian language."
The bastion of this neo-rossiiskii outlook was the Soviet Army,
which in 1938 finally abolished ethnic and regional units, while
Russian became the sole language of command.'2 The army's
8 A valuable collection of such testimonies is contained in Veronique Garros, Natalia

Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen (eds.), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the
1930s (New York, 1995); for a detailed analysis of one diary, see Jochen Hellbeck,
'Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939)',
Jahrbiicher ffir Geschichte Osteuropas, xliv (1996).
' Vdovin, Zorin and Nikonov, Russkii narod, 125-31.
10 It was first set out in N. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline
of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946).
" D. L. Brandenburger and A. M. Dubrovsky, '"The People Need a Tsar": The
Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941', Europe-Asia
Studies, 1 (1998).
12 David M. Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History (London,
1992), 91-2.
Russianness remained markedly interna

the mid-1920s it had been offering its r
programmes which encouraged individu
own rodina (home town or village and s
map and to see it as part of a broader te
the USSR, and finally the internationa
which the USSR would one day eman
were also taught to think of themselves as
the imperialists of all countries, who w
could. For that reason the Soviet milita
major war, but expected it to be a class
enemy territory, relatively brief and w
krov'iu), since the proletariat of the en
overthrow their rulers and welcome in t
that in the late 1930s, as the Japane
mounted, military strategists were startin
view and to prepare for a protracted wa
possibly partly on Soviet territory.'4 Lit
the broad Soviet public, however.
The recruitment and education program
were part of a broad pattern of urbaniz
of a kind which in most European coun
national identification during the late nine
eth centuries. During the 1920s and 19
except the elderly and marginalized, had
and had thus become inheritors of their
case of non-Russians this usually meant
culture as well as that of Russia, and in
a written culture where none had previ
duction of social security benefits, the
care and housing, however imperfectly
whole Soviet population a sense of belo
nity - in other words, a kind of passiv
in the neo-rossiiskii Soviet republic.
Both ethnically and civically, then, the i
sovetskii nation was beginning to take
different ethnic groups was being gathe
sovetskii political authority to form an
"3 Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dict

Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 (Ithaca, 1990), 28
14 Glantz, Military Strategy of the Soviet Union, 57
nation state which in its size and diversity might have r

contemporary India. But this was happening in a highl
form, under an internationalist banner and in a foresh
and chaotic manner. The 1930s were a period of whirlwi
change, during which most ordinary workers, peasa
employees were preoccupied with the immediate pro
everyday life and even survival. Besides, Stalin's terror
undermined community and social cohesion, at least for the
state elites and professional people, though it did not d
the messianic universalism of Soviet intellectuals.
That was the background against which the German invasion
of June 1941 must be seen. This was the long-awaited war all
right, but it turned out to be a very different one from what the
Soviet public had anticipated. It took a while for the unforeseen
to sink in. Initially there were still illusions that the Soviet Union
was fighting an international class war. Moscow factory workers
are reported as expressing incredulity at the Germans' rashness:
'Who do they think they're attacking? Have they gone out of
their minds? ... Of course, the German workers will support us,
and all other peoples will rise up ... It will all be over in a
week'." Even a sophisticated intellectual like Lev Kopelev was
prone to such illusions. As he remarked in 1979 in a conversation
with the German writer Heinrich B611: 'When the first reports
of the war came in on 22 June 1941, I must admit honestly, I
was so stupid that I was delighted. I thought "This is the holy
war, now the German proletariat will support us, and Hitler will
be overthrown immediately" '.16
Front-line soldiers also took some time to realize what had hit
them. One noted in his diary on 20 July 1941, after destroying a
German tank and capturing the crew:
What naive philanthropists we were! In our interrogation we tried to get
them to express class solidarity. We thought talking to us would make
them see the light, and they would shout 'Rot Front!' ... But they
guzzled our kasha from our mess-tins, had a smoke from our freely
offered tobacco pouches, then looked at us insolently and belched in our
faces 'Heil Hitler!'17
"5 John Barber, 'Popular Reactions in Moscow to the German Invasion of June 22,
1941', Soviet Union, xviii (1991), 6.
16 Heinrich B611 and Lew Kopelew, Warum haben wir aufeinander geschossen?
(Munich, 1984), 14.
"7 E. S. Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke: istoricheskii opyt Rossii [The
Psychology of War in the 20th Century: Russia's Historical Experience] (Moscow,
1999), 263.
Once it became clear that the Nazis were wag

tion against the Soviet Union, this mood
though the Soviet state remained committ
nationalism, most of its citizens came to s
not between imperialists and toilers, but
Germans. The Russian-Jewish novelist an
Il'ia Erenburg, who had kept the Soviet p
the struggle of the International Brigade in
realized in the first days that this wa
different kind of war.
I suddenly felt that there was something very

the soil. I was sitting on a Moscow boulevar
unattractive woman with a child. Her features
to me, as she said 'Peten'ka, don't be naughty, t
that she was a member of my family [chto on
die for Peten'ka.'8
This feeling of being a large family, not d

was articulated by Stalin in his first b
peoples, on 3 July 1941, when he supplem
Communist mode of address, 'Comrades!'
term, 'Citizens!', with the words 'Brothe
was even perhaps here an echo of the
Orthodox priest to his parishioners.
Erenburg became the most vehement
view of the war, as a national struggle
Russians and Germans. He wrote in Pravd
a German in the course of a day, then yo
... If you have killed one German, kill a
us so much joy as the sight of German
Erenburg had double reasons for hating
Russian poet Konstantin Simonov express
ments in his poem 'Kill him!', published
If your home is dear to you where you were

If your mother is dear to you, and you cannot bea
slapping her wrinkled face ...
18 Il'ia Erenburg, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh

Volumes], 9 vols. (Moscow, 1967), ix, 274.
'9 I. V. Stalin, Works, suppl. vol. ii, ed. Robert H. M
20 Anatol Goldberg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Writing, Poli
(London, 1984), 197.
If you do not want to give away all that you call your Homelan
Then kill a German, so that he,
Not you, should lie in the earth ...
Kill a German every time you see one!21
Ethnic hatred became the dominant sentiment among s

and officers, especially as they moved westwards from t
of 1943 and saw with their own eyes the destruction the
had wrought on their villages and people. When Sovi
reached German territory early in 1945, Lev Kopelev as a
officer did his best to revive the party's internationalist ide
to restrain his men from looting, raping and killing am
civilian population. He was pursuing the line approve
party leaders: G. F. Aleksandrov, head of Agitprop, wr
example in Pravda on 14 April 1945: 'Hitlers come and g
the German people are here to stay'.22 All the same
superior officers accused him of 'engaging in the prop
bourgeois [sic] humanism ... rescuing Germans and w
the morale of your own troops . . . criticizing in an una
manner your commanders, our press and articles by Co
Erenburg'. The attitude of most Soviet officers was: 'Fi
send Germany up in smoke, then we'll go back to writ
theoretically correct books on humanism and internati
But now we must see to it that the soldier will want to
fighting. That's the main thing'.23
Hating the Germans generated stronger attachmen
Soviet Union. It took some time, though, at the beginnin
war before this feeling took hold. In the early months
people were aware only of disasters and privations and
uncertainty and foreboding about the future. They
bewildered and resentful that the Soviet leaders had not
better. Many people concluded that they had been dece
again, that their army was inferior to that of the Germ
21 Konstantin Simonov, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verses and Narrat

(Moscow, 1945), 5-8. Symptomatically, in some re-editions of this poem, w
editorial policy was once again in a more internationalist mood, the word
was replaced by 'Fascist'. See Konstantin Simonov, Sobranie sochinenii v sh
[Collection of Works in Six Volumes], 6 vols. (Moscow, 1966), i, 88-90.
22 Quoted in Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World W
Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001), 164-5.
23 Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought, ed. and trans. Anthony Austi
1977), 10, 53.
that the Soviet Union would soon los

collectivization of agriculture, the deku
the devastation of the pre-war officer
profound bitterness and conflict inside
Nazi-Soviet Pact had left a residue of co
Moscow many young men refused to v
failed to report for duty.24 In Novembe
round Leningrad, the NKVD reported a
ing: 'If the Germans come, we shall ha
Soviet power remains, we shall all starv
from the local branch of Gosplan co
doomed to constant defeats because the
any ideal worth fighting for. The peasa
for the kolkhozy, as the ideal of collecti
December the notion was quite widely
sense to rebel against Communist le
Leningrad to the Germans in order to
as the Wehrmacht approached, the N
factory worker as complaining: 'We don
home front. People are embittered and
will be conflicts which will complicate
bloody and debilitating'.26
Her prophecy about the war was correc
was no popular rising against the Soviet
lated from occupied areas, both in the new
it became obvious that the Germans me
a 'war of annihilation', and that Soviet
survive had no alternative but to resist th
In these circumstances the idea of the
the small town or village where the
became all-important. It had been down
24 V. F. Zima, Mentalitet narodov Rossii v voine 1

Russia's Peoples in the War of 1941-1945] (Moscow,
1941-1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty [Wart
and Archive Documents] (Moscow, 1995), 50-5.
25 N. A. Lomagin, V tiskakh goloda: blokada Leningra
spetssluzhb i NKVD [In the Grip of Famine: The
Documents of the German Secret Service and th
147-8, 157, 165. Security police reports would, of
rumours: that is what their authors are paid to do.
26 M. M. Gorinov, 'Budni osazhdennoi stolitsy:
(1941-2 gg.)' [Everyday Life in a Besieged Capital
Muscovites (1941-2)], Otechestvennaia istoriia (1996)
1930s as a concept which belonged to the past, used

mental, old-fashioned poets like Sergei Esenin. Simi
everyday life, had been despised as something to be o
transformed in the new way of life which science and
were constructing under the inspiration of party ideo
there was an abrupt reversal: the accustomed homelan
of life were perceived as having a new value, precisely
they were under such terrible threat. The Leningrad
Berggol'ts, who was already thoroughly disillusion
Communism by 1941 and shared many of the doubts an
ments of her fellow Leningraders, nevertheless reflec
wonderful that the concept of the Homeland (Rodina)
so much closer to the ordinary person, has become so i
to save the life of one's friend in combat - that mean
for one's Homeland'.27
Thoughts of family life were now especially treasured. During
the 1920s Soviet policy had aimed to undermine the family as the
basic unit of society. Although by the mid-1930s the leaders had
abandoned that intention and had begun to rehabilitate the family,
it remained true that before the war home and hearth had been
subordinated to public meeting places and public duties.
Courtship and conjugal love had been valued not for their own
sake, but rather as part of the process of building socialism. Now,
by contrast, Simonov's lyric poem 'Zhdi menia i ia vernus''
('Wait for Me and I Will Return') extolled the act of simply
waiting for the loved one as the supreme human duty. Published
in Pravda and front-line newspapers in January 1942, it was an
instant success. Soldiers would cut it out and send it to their
sweethearts at home, and some of the improvised replies were
also published.28
Individual love was now officially approved both for its own
sake and as part of the life of the traditional community. The
long-established life cycle of the village and the influence of
ancestors were even evoked in forms gently provocative to Soviet
atheism, as in the words of another very popular poem by
Simonov, 'You Remember, Alesha, the Lanes of Smolensk':
27 Ol'ga Berggol'ts, 'Iz dnevnikov' [From the Diaries], Zvezda (1990), no. 6, 171.
28 Katharine Hodgson, Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World
War II (Liverpool, 1996), ch. 2; Robert A. Rothstein, 'Homeland, Home Town and
Battlefield: The Popular Song', in Richard Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment in
Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995).
As if, around every Russian village,

Protecting the living by crossing their ar
And gathering in assembly, our ancestor
For their grandchildren who no longer b
As Lisa Kirschenbaum has put it: 'R

emerged as key constituents of Soviet
The demands of war added a new dim
of women into the community. Of co
theory women were considered the
too, they already had the vote, enjoyed
rights as Soviet men, and were able to
their contribution became even more c
correspondingly raised. In factories wo
of all kinds, including the heaviest, to
for the front. By August 1941 they a
cent of the labour force in the Kirov W
of all doctors and virtually all nurses
women. There were women's units in
of the defenders of Kiev and Odessa in the autumn of 1941. Male
prejudice did not altogether evaporate, though: there continued
to be unkind quips about 'powder-puff regiments', and some
commanders apparently considered pregnancy a breach of mili-
tary discipline.32
In wartime public discourse, however, women figured largely
as defenders of hearth, home and family. Take, for instance, a
letter sent from Cheliabinsk to the front and published in
Komsomol'skaia pravda in November 1941:
My beloved! Now during the long nights and evenings I sit for a long
while near the cradle with our little one and think of you . . . Where are
you now? One thousand kilometres away is the city about which the whole
world is thinking [presumably Moscow]. And you must be there now
with your artillery men. Probably you're sleeping very little. And sharing
makhorka [shag, coarse tobacco] with your friends and remembering us -
me, your little boy, your ChTZ [Cheliabinsk Tractor Works].33
29 Simonov, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, 77-9.

30 Lisa Kirschenbaum, 'Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II
Propaganda', Slavic Rev., lix (2000), 828.
31 Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'War and Society in Soviet Context: Soviet Labor before,
during and after World War II', Internat. Labor and Working-Class Hist., no. 35
(Spring 1989).
32 John Erickson, 'Soviet Women at War', in John and Carol Garrard (eds.), World
War II and the Soviet People (New York, 1993).
33 Kirschenbaum, 'Local Loyalties and Private Life', 828.
It is impossible to know whether this letter was genui

composed in the editorial offices of Komsomol'skaia pr
the very appearance of such letters confirmed a new offici
and it is quite certain they were popular with the pub
and hearth now validated the war, and vice versa. O
most popular war posters showed a middle-aged woma
out a military draft form and summoning the hesitant to
The heightened sense of community, military and civi
and female, was accompanied by a new acceptance of w
already before the war been a highly authoritarian and
style of leadership. Even at MIFLI (the Moscow Ins
Philology, Literature and History), a bastion of cosm
free-thinking intellectuals, collectivism and discipline
welcomed. As a former student later recalled:
We all wanted to be together, not to struggle alone with our bewilderment,

and we wanted someone firm, intelligent, aware to tell us what to do, to
organize and direct us ... That is how, incidentally, the party acquired
such authority in Russia, because it could direct the mass of people in the
desired direction."35
Similarly, Viktor Nekrasov, author of popular war novels and an

inveterate nonconformist, later confessed: 'We forgave Stalin
everything, collectivization, 1937 [the terror], his revenge on his
comrades ... And we, lads from intelligentsia families, became
soldiers and believed the whole myth with a clear conscience.
With open hearts we joined the party of Lenin and Stalin'.36
One finds the opposite reaction too. The historian M. Ia.
Gefter, who was a young Jewish intellectual in 1941, asserts that
a kind of 'spontaneous de-Stalinization' took place as a result of
the defeats of the war's first months. And looking back dec-
ades later, the former front-line soldier Viacheslav Kondrat'ev
declared:
There was one strange thing about the war: we felt ourselves freer than
in peacetime ... If you were lucky and you got to the enemy's trenches,
then you had to show that you could think for yourself. There no one
commanded you and much was in your own hands ... In a sense you
34 Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and
Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 265.
35 Iu. A. Poliakov, 'MIFLI 1941 (vospominaniia o M. Ia. Gellere)' [The Moscow
Institute of Philology, Literature and History, 1941 (Memories of M. Ia. Geller)],
Voprosy istorii (1999), no. 7, 110.
36 Viktor Nekrasov, 'Tragediia moego pokoleniia' [The Tragedy of my Generation],
Literaturnaia gazeta, 12 Sept. 1990, 15.
even felt you had Russia's fate in your hands: i

of being a citizen, responsible for the Father
These apparently contradictory sen

reconciled. Feeling oneself free and
during a terrible war with a strong sen
desire to be firmly led. As a woman, in
Catherine Merridale, expressed it by co
'We knew our motherland, we knew St
were going'.38 At the front line such emo
greater intensity, along with the bindin
radeship, which remained the strongest m
most, Soviet Army men who survived
them wrote in December 1945 to the fianc
Life at the front brings people together very
one or two days with someone, and you know
his feelings in a way you would never know t
a whole year. There is nothing stronger than
nothing can break it, not even death.
These feelings of solidarity and shared

in forming sovetskii patriotism. The S
them during the war by restoring som
Its treatment of agriculture offers an e
able-bodied young men to the armed fo
cultural workforce consisted mainly of
women and children. Furthermore, a g
was lost to the invaders for much of the war. To offset these
handicaps, the regime permitted a good deal more freedom for
rural households to cultivate their private plots, both for con-
sumption and in order to sell the produce from them on the
private market. In some regions the zveno or 'link' system was
widely adopted, under which a dozen or so collective farmers,
usually with a family as nucleus, would take complete responsibil-
ity for a plot of land throughout the year, decide what to grow,
deliver a proportion of the yield to the state, and consume the
37 Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World
War II in Russia (New York, 1994), 65; Viacheslav Kondrat'ev, 'Paradoksy frontovoi
nostal'gii' [Paradoxes of Front-Line Nostalgia], Literaturnaia gazeta, 9 May 1990, 9.
38 Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London,
2000), 272.
39 E. S. Seniavskaia, 1941-1945: frontovoe pokolenie [1941-1945: The Front-Line
Generation] (Moscow, 1995), 85-6.
rest or sell it for profit on the private market.40 This t

even encouragement, of market forces proved far more s
than the Bolsheviks' draconian prohibition of them dur
civil war a quarter of a century earlier, and probably d
to enable villagers and less institutionalized urban dw
survive at all.
In the same spirit, the public media were allowed to become
more open, diverse and truthful. This did not happen immedi-
ately. During the early months the continual defeats, encircle-
ments and retreats and the huge resultant casualties were reported
evasively. But the Soviet media agency, Sovinformbiuro, gradu-
ally learnt that it was important in all-out war to gain the trust
of the population. On the radio live talk shows and live reporting,
which had been banned in 1937, were resumed in the autumn of
1941. Except in matters of military security, censorship was
eased, and unit commanders were instructed to provide facilities
for war correspondents. Sometimes they reported directly from
the front, with noises of battle in the background. A series of
daily broadcasts, Letters from the Front and Letters from the Rear,
helped to keep soldiers and civilians in touch; many people lis-
tened regularly in the hope of hearing news of a relative or friend
with whom they had lost contact.41
In Pravda the emphasis shifted from preaching ideology, leader-
ship and party discipline to reporting directly on the lives and
feelings of ordinary citizens, evoking their personal motivation
to fight for their families, friends and native land. Praise was
awarded to the skill, initiative and conviction of ordinary soldiers
and workers as much as to the quality of military and political
leadership.42 In the army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda, Erenburg
claimed as early as October 1941 that 'all distinctions between
Bolsheviks and non-party people, between believers and
Marxists, have been obliterated ... They pray for the Red Army
in old churches, the domes of which have been darkened so that
40 Iu. V. Arutiunian, Sovetskoe krest'ianstvo v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny [The

Soviet Peasantry during the Great Patriotic War], 2nd edn (Moscow, 1970), 84-5,
350-3; John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social
and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London, 1991), 99-104.
41 James von Geldern, 'Radio Moscow', in Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment
in Wartime Russia.
42 Jeffrey Brooks, 'Pravda Goes to War', ibid., 9-27.
they should not attract German pilots.

for the Red Army'.43
As the last sentences imply, official pe
ended, and the Soviet leaders permitted
churches. In 1943 they restored the Rus
ate, and allowed the re-establishment o
three theological academies, so that a re
recreated. Analogous steps were taken in
lished faiths. These concessions to trad
to sustain social solidarity among a popu
rible ordeal. The constant fear and unce
fallen comrades and family members
unashamed revival of religious feeling,
and older people, but also among soldie
All the same, the concessions to the ch
change in Soviet spirituality, which had
ist messianism with atheism. They were
Communist true believers, who had be
faiths had been, or soon would be, tho
supplanted. When Christian believer
opening of their churches, they evoke
which was archaic, traditionally Russia
classes. 'The open churches in Moscow
conducting services in unison and offe
over the enemy. Therefore why shouldn
labouring kolkhozniki be part of that
succinctly: 'The internal battle is ove
are united'.45
Permissions to revive parishes and reopen churches were given
grudgingly, even after Stalin met the leading hierarchs of the
Orthodox Church in 1943, not least because local officials, aghast
at what they were being asked to countenance, obstructed the
process as long as they could. Reports from all over the country
show that members of the League of Militant Godless were
bewildered and resentful, even outraged. Some people linked the
new policy with the restoration of military ranks and insignia.
43 Louise McReynolds, 'Dateline Stalingrad: Newspapers at the Front', ibid., 34.

44 Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke, 238-48.
45 Daniel Peris, '"God is now on our Side": The Religious Revival on Unoccupied
Soviet Territory during World War II', Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian
Hist., i (2000), 106.
One soldier is reported to have commented: 'Epau

reappeared, and now the churches are open. It only
chains and whips to return and we really will have th
back!'46 Altogether, the new religious policy signifi
regime was moving away from messianic universa
towards a more traditional, pragmatic great-power ou
on neo-rossiiskii imperialism.
If one had asked a Russian soldier at the time what he meant
by Russia, he might well have pointed to the extraordinarily
popular narrative poem by Aleksandr Tvardovskii, Vasilii Terkin,
which had been appearing in front-line newspapers in instalments
for much of the war. The image of Russian patriotism projected
in it differs considerably from what would have been expected
before the war. Terkin is a very ordinary soldier, a simple peasant
lad, with minimal education and no interest in science, technology
or industry. He is completely apolitical: the text contains no
mention of the Communist Party or even of Stalin. Terkin's
attachment to his country centres on his home province of
Smolensk, and at one point he gets into a dispute with another
soldier from Tambov, who boasts that the feats of Smolensk
people cannot match those of the Tambovtsy. Yet Terkin is also
proud of the fact that he is fighting to save Russia (the emphasis
is on Russia rather than the Soviet Union), and indeed the whole
world, and he sees the struggle as the fate he shares with all
Russians.
The hour has come,

Our fate has caught us.
Today we answer for Russia,
For the people,
For everything in the world.
From Ivan to Foma,
Dead and alive,
We together are we,
The people, Russia.47
He appears to have no family of his own, but feels his unit to be

a family, and connects to Russian villagers as to a larger family,
epitomized by the elderly couple for whom he mends a clock as
his unit passes through. After he has done so, he drinks with the
husband, who is a veteran of the First World War, and thus
renews the symbolic link with Russia's previous wars.
46 Ibid., 115.
47 A. T. Tvardovskii, Poemy (Moscow, 1950), 119.
Viewed in the light of pre-war prolet

even in its neo-rossiiskii phase, Terkin
figure, closer to the fantasies of the ninet
than to anything Lenin or Stalin might
was the hero Soviet soldiers liked to re
time, and Tvardovskii's Book about a So
in their knapsacks. The censorship occa
some minor aspect of the text,48 but in
green light because of its obvious popula
was in no sense anti-Soviet; it simply r
Russian national identity which had bee
in the public discourse of the inter-war y
in fact, for the first time since 1917, the
of the russkii.
Cumulatively, the wartime changes of
feeling, held by most Russians and n
social class, that they belonged to a s
determined by its Russianness. Rogers
that national identity can take shape q
speaks of 'nationness' rather than nation
izes it as 'something that suddenly crys
ally develops, as a contingent, conjun
precarious frame of vision and basis for
action'. " I suggest that during 1941-5
in that way, as an amalgam of ethnic and
and sovetskii elements. In 1945 the USS
huge compound nation state than ever
out, ever after.
As if to give symbolic form to this ne
in 1943 the Soviet state reintroduced th
ranks as they had been in the tsarist ar
shoulder straps to match, and a series
officers, including those of Aleksan
Kutuzov.51 It also dissolved the Comi
48 See the Glavlit instruction of January 1943 in Reve

Documents in English Translation, ed. Diane P. Ko
(Washington, DC, 1997), 172.
49 On the reception of Vasilii Terkin, see A. L. Grish
[The Works of Tvardovskii] (Moscow, 1999), 40-5
so Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationho
the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 20-1.
51 Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945 (L
embodiment of the old proletarian internationalism, an

in place of the 'Internationale' a new national anthe
opening words celebrated in archaic language the c
Russia being at the heart of the USSR:
An unshakeable union of free republics

Has been united by Great Rus'.
Long live the country founded by the people's will,
The united, mighty Soviet Union.52
The same concept was confirmed by Stalin when he sp

Kremlin banquet of Red Army commanders on 24 May
I drink above all to the health of the Russian people, becau

outstanding nation among all the nations which make up the So
I drink to the health of the Russian people because in this
deserved general recognition as the driving force among the
the Soviet Union.53
Since, within half a century, the non-Russians had se

the Soviet Union had fallen apart, one is bound to
happened to this Russian-led solidarity? One answer is
at the height of the war, the regime was already mak
serious mistakes which were to undermine the new-found national
cohesion.
One policy which aroused bitter resentment among Soviet citi-
zens was the abandonment of prisoners of war behind German
lines. The regime left captured Soviet soldiers to their fate, refus-
ing to give the International Red Cross any help or information
to make possible the delivery of food parcels or correspondence.
As a result most Soviet prisoners suffered extreme neglect, espe-
cially during the early months of the war. As a commissioner of
the German Ostministerium reported in the autumn of 1941: 'No
one was concerned about their fate; they had been declared
outlaws by their own government'.54 In 1943, in reply to a papal
enquiry about Soviet prisoners of war, the Soviet ambassador in
52 N. Popovich, 'Sovetskaia politika po ukrepleniiu russkogo patriotizma i samo-

soznaniia (1935-1945 gg.)' [Soviet Policy for Strengthening Russian Patriotism and
Identity (1935-1945)], in Rossiia v XX veke: istoriki mira sporiat [Russia in the 20th
Century: A Symposium of Historians from all over the World] (Moscow, 1994).
53 Stalin, Works, suppl. vol. ii, 203.
54 K. Kromiadi, 'Sovetskie voennoplennye v Germanii v 1941-om godu' [Soviet
POWs in Germany in 1941], Novyi zhurnal, no. 32 (1953), 194.
Turkey told the nuncio that the Sovie

information about them, since it regard
Since the Germans treated them as Un
of their own government was virtually
some two to three million POWs captur
first six months of the war, only about
the end of that time. During the war as
Soviet citizens were captured at one ti
half of them survived until the end of th
One way in which Soviet POWs could
by volunteering to serve in the Germa
volunteers were assigned as auxiliaries
commanders, since Hitler was determi
ation of Russian national formations, e
Some of his officers, though, reckone
of winning the war would be greatl
Russians fighting on their side for pa
anti-Communist conviction. In the summ
to their cause General Andrei Vlasov
during the encirclement of his unit on
encouraged Vlasov to believe that he m
a Russian national liberation army, whic
of Germany in overthrowing Stalin an
Vlasov is a kind of touchstone for the dilemmas of Russian
patriotism during the Second World War. In December 1942 he
issued the Smolensk Declaration, which set out a political pro-
gramme for a free Russia independent of Communism, or, as
Vlasov himself put it, 'a new Russia without Bolsheviks and
Capitalists' - since he believed the British and Americans were
ganging up with Stalin to exploit the Russians. It is interesting,
then, that Vlasov accepted many of the aims of Communism: the
ideal of protection from exploitation, social justice, the right to
work, education, leisure, and a secure old age. His Declaration
also promised the unrealized civil rights guaranteed in the 1936
Soviet constitution, such as freedom of speech, conscience, assem-
"5 V. B. Konasov and A. V. Tereshchuk, 'K istorii sovetskikh i nemetskikh voenno-

plennykh (1941-1943)' [A Contribution to the History of Soviet and German POWs
(1941-1943)], Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (1996), no. 4.
56Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen
Kriegsgefangenen, 1941-1945 (Bonn, 1991), 128; V. N. Zemskov, 'K voprosu o repatri-
atsii sovetskikh grazhdan' [On the Issue of the Repatriation of Soviet Citizens], Istoriia
SSSR (1990), no. 4, 26.
bly, and so on. On the other hand it also called for

terror and forced labour, the abolition of the collectiv
and the relegalization of private manufacture and
Remarkably, for a political programme published u
sponsorship, it contained no trace of anti-Semitism. W
tell for certain, but it seems probable that such a prog
resembled more closely the aspirations of Russians at t
than did the policies of the Communist Party. At any
Second World War Russian emigres interviewed at Har
the late 1940s, certainly not pro-Soviet in their general
expressed similar appreciation of Soviet welfare progr
while criticizing precisely the aspects of Soviet rule wh
proposed to abolish."5 His political vision also seems
provoked a positive response in the few occupied towns
in the spring of 1943: Smolensk, Mogilev, Bobruisk and
Politically, Vlasov was in an impossible situation. T
never any real hope that Hitler would allow him to form
army, not at least until the final months of the war,
mission was already hopeless. His Smolensk Declaration c
statements which were patently untrue, such as: 'Ge
waging war not against the Russian people and their Ro
only against Bolshevism', or 'Germany does not wish to
on the living space of the Russian people or on their na
political liberties'. Those joining his movement were re
take an oath of loyalty not only 'to the Russian people
'to Hitler as the supreme commander of all anti-B
forces'.60
Few Soviet officers from the POW camps were pre
join him, partly to avoid taking such an oath, and partl
they could see his cause was doomed. Some 165,000
Soviet servicemen served at one time or another in the
armed forces or police. This represents less than 2 per
the total number of Soviet citizens who fell under enem
during the war - a remarkably low proportion, consid
57 Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement (

1986), 206-9.
8 Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily
Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).
59 Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement, 46-50.
60 V. Shtrik-Shtrikfel'dt, Protiv Stalina i Gitlera: General Vlasov i russk
tel'noe dvizhenie [Against Stalin and Hitler: General Vlasov and the Russi
Movement] (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), 190.
appalling alternatives.61 Vlasov's proj

Russian state was thus crushed between the millstones of Stalinism
and Nazism.
All the same, the regime reacted with extreme distrust towards
all Soviet citizens returning from captivity or from occupied
territory. As early as the Finnish war of 1939-40 special NKVD
filtration camps had been set up to receive and investigate re-
turnees, before deciding on what their subsequent status should
be. In December 1941, as soon as the Soviet Army began to
reconquer occupied territory, these camps were reactivated, and
their number greatly increased during 1943-4, when large
swathes of territory were being recovered. Conditions in them
resembled those of strict-regime labour camps. Many of them
were located in industrial and mining areas, and those detained
there were often required to carry out heavy manual labour.62
By December 1946 some 5.4 million returnees had been
through filtration camps, 1.8 million civilians and 3.6 million
military personnel. Investigations were conducted by the NKVD,
the NKGB, the military procuracy and by a new counter-
intelligence organization, SMERSH (short for smert' shpionam,
'death to spies'), set up to detect agents infiltrated into the USSR
by foreign intelligence services. Their work sometimes took sev-
eral years, and, for some of the investigated, resulted in execution
or long prison sentences. Even those not subjected to criminal
penalties suffered discrimination: many were not allowed to live
in Moscow, Leningrad or Kiev, and had to report regularly to
the NKVD. Some were deported to work in industry and con-
struction in special settlements in the far north and in Siberia. As
a lingering token of mistrust, right up to the end of the Soviet
Union, all citizens applying for a job, education or a living permit
had to fill in a questionnaire which asked, among other things,
whether they or their relatives had lived abroad or on occupied
territory during the war.63
61 V. P. Naumov, 'Sud'ba voennoplennykh i deportirovannykh grazhdan SSSR:
materialy Komissii o reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh repressii' [The Fate of Soviet
POWs and Deported Citizens: Materials of the Commission on the Rehabilitation of
Victims of Political Repression], Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (1996), no. 2, 95-6.
62 Ibid., 92-4, 97-100; the arrival in the labour camps of convicted returnees is
described in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, 3 vols.
(London, 1974-6), i, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, 79-92.
63 Naumov, 'Sud'ba voennoplennykh', 101-3; V. A. Zolotarev and G. N.
Sevast'ianov (eds.), Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, 1941-45 [The Great Patriotic War,
1941-45], 4 vols. (Moscow, 1999), iv, Narod i voina [The People and the War], 133-5.
The regime's distrust extended to the partisans, that is

who fought for the Soviet cause from behind the Germ
The Soviet leaders had not anticipated fighting a partis
and had not prepared cadres to direct and run it from
ground in case of foreign occupation. Although Stali
address of 3 July 1941 called for the development of p
combat in occupied territory, in practice the Soviet lead
cautious about encouraging it during the early phase of
worried about sanctioning the formation of armed band
their control. During the autumn of 1941 they gave pr
the creation of a network of underground party and NK
and emphasized that partisan units should be formed u
personal supervision of responsible leaders from those c
found, however, that local people and scattered Red Ar
deep in the German rear were setting up their own
detachments with or without supervision, and so has
equip these units as far as was practical, while retai
maximum of supervision over them. For that purpose a
Staff of the Partisan Movement was set up, attached to
Army. It had its own representatives in each army fro
were supposed to keep contact by radio with partisan
ments behind the lines in their area. The Central Staff was led
by the Belorussian Communist Party's first secretary, P. K.
Ponomarenko: command was thus vested in a prominent nomen-
klatura figure from the republic with the greatest number of
partisans. The NKVD had its own osobyi otdel (special depart-
ment) in each partisan detachment, partly to provide security
against enemy infiltration, but partly also undoubtedly to keep
an eye on the partisans themselves and on local people. For the
same reason political commissars were appointed to each detach-
ment; they were kept on with full powers even after their equiva-
lents had been downgraded in the Soviet Army in October 1942.64
From the summer of 1942 there were probably some 150,000
partisans active in the German rear, especially concentrated in
Belorussia and northern Ukraine, where the swampy, wooded
terrain favoured their activity. There is no doubt about the effect-
64 Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, iv, 132-5; Bernd Bonwetsch, 'Sowjetische
Partisanen, 1941-44: Legende und Wirklichkeit des "allgemeinen Volkskriegs"', in
Gerhard Schulz (ed.), Partisanen und Volkskrieg: Zur Revolutionierung des Krieges im
20ten Jahrhundert (G6ttingen, 1985), 107-15; John A. Armstrong and Kurt DeWitt,
'Organisation and Control of the Partisan Movement', in John A. Armstrong (ed.),
Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison, 1964), 121-35.
iveness of their operations: parts of Bel

under their control, and even elsewhere
troops and supplies was under constant
had to divert some 10 per cent of its m
to guard supply depots and communicat
the same, most partisans had to underg
authorities at the end of the war, and u
strate their unbroken loyalty - obviou
confused circumstances - they could su
In this way, many of those who had fough
Germany, and in the most adverse circ
full integration into the patriotic commun
Even more damaging to the prospect o
Soviet community were the series of d
both just before and immediately aft
republics, western Belorussia, wester
among the Germans, Crimean Tatars,
Chechens, Ingushes, Balkars and Karach
well known and does not need to be
certain aspects of it should be emph
aimed not just to rid sensitive territory
people, but sometimes actually to annih
involved. In the Baltic republics 'only
the population was deported in 1940-1,
tuals and professional people, those wh
political parties or independence movem
or so were deported after 1945, mostly
collectivization.67 After the occupation
Belorussia in 1939, some 900,000 peop
half as prisoners and half as 'special set
technically not in confinement but req
locations and to report regularly to the
per cent were Poles, 30 per cent Jews a
65 For a summary of scholarship on the partisa

Partisanen'; Leonid D. Grenkevich, The Soviet Partisan Movement: A Critical
Historiographical Analysis (London, 1999).
66 Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (London,
1970); Alexander Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet
Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York, 1978).
67 Romuald J. Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence,
1940-1990 (London, 1993), 42-3, 99.
and Belorussians.68 In Moldavia there were some 90,0

in the wave of arrests and deportations which imme
lowed the annexation of 1940, and even more in the
tion and famine of 1946-7: probably some 115,00
starved and some 16,000 families were transported to
Kazakhstan.69 In all these regions, moreover, agri
collectivized, industry was nationalized, and culture
tion were brought under Communist control and cen
the established Soviet pattern, without any considera
specific features of the peoples involved.70
In other cases entire peoples were transported. Thi
without any concern for their health during the jour
many died of cold, hunger and untreated disease.
survived were resettled in regions wholly unfamiliar
for example the Caucasian mountain people in the
plains of Kazakhstan - so that it was difficult fo
re-establish their economic life, and they were depriv
tion or any public media in their own language. In e
policy was attempted genocide, through physical mo
cultural deprivation.71
These peoples, understandably, reacted with ext
Russian and anti-Communist embitterment, and also
of collective victimization which rendered them irreconcilable to
continued Soviet rule. They brought a new mood to the post-
war labour camps. Where pre-war inmates had cringed before
the guards and criminal 'trusties', these new contingents imported
a feeling of ethnic solidarity and moral outrage which made them
impossible to infiltrate or manipulate. In fact, they began to
organize the murder of informers in their midst. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn records that in the camp where he was confined the
murders began when anti-Soviet partisans arrived from Ukraine:
Other forms of human association now bound people more closely than
the work teams artificially put together by the administration. Most
important were national ties. National groups - Ukrainians, United
Muslims, Estonians, Lithuanians - which informers could not penetrate,
68 Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western
Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988), 187-99.
69 Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture
(Stanford, 2000), 93, 96.
70 Misiunas and Taagepera, Baltic States, ch. 3; David R. Marples, Stalinism in
Ukraine in the 1940s (London, 1992).
71 Conquest, Nation Killers; Nekrich, Punished Peoples.
were born and flourished. No one elected the

tion so justly satisfied the claims of seniorit
no one disputed its authority over its own n
In that way the regime itself called in

forms of social solidarity during an
Khrushchev the policies of national vic
and many of the deported were allowed
lands, but the memory of attempted g
legacy of bitter resentment. These peop
unreconciled to both Soviet and Russian domination. In the end
they made a major contribution to the eventual collapse of the
Soviet Union: the Baltic republics were the first to declare their
secession from it, and the outcome of the Ukrainian referendum
of 1 December 1991, heavily influenced by west Ukrainian atti-
tudes, finally frustrated Gorbachev's attempts to save the Soviet
Union. Finally, the Chechens have given post-Soviet Russia its
most protracted and insoluble conflict. All these developments
are legacies of mistakes - indeed terrible crimes - committed
by the Soviet leaders before, during and immediately after the
war.
As for the Russians themselves, the incipient civil inst

granted to them during the war - a free agricultural m
the reopening of churches, the somewhat freer and mo
taneous media - were withdrawn or emasculated after it.73
Especially damaging to the forging of civic solidarity among
former soldiers was the policy of either banning regimental and
veterans' associations or subjecting them to strict party control.74
Furthermore, Stalin indicated in 1946 that it would be inadvisable
to publish memoirs on the war, because it was too early to take
an objective view of it. That was in effect a prohibition of them,
which lasted some ten years; even after it was revoked, memoirs
were heavily edited and censored.75 Memories of the war were
to be strictly rationed and shaped to the purposes of the regime,
not articulated as part of authentic social memory.
Where memory is not validated in the public media, when it
cannot be periodically reinforced by the spontaneous exchange
72 Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, iii, trans. H. T. Willetts, 235, 240.
7 The erosion of incipient civil institutions after the war is well treated in Elena
Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: politika i povsednevnost', 1945-1953 [Post-
War Soviet Society: Politics and Everyday Life, 1945-1953] (Moscow, 2000).
74 Ibid., 35-7.
75 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 104.
of personal recollections in the community, then it beco

mented, insubstantial and cannot function as an underp
national identity. That was an especially serious ma
country where there were so many deaths to be mourn
much suffering to be assimilated. In the Soviet Union,
became instead part of the official narrative, deployed t
and bolster the regime, and otherwise to be treated wit
suspicion. As a result, the russkii and the sovetskii drif
again.
In one sense, the outcome of the war did confirm the millennial
outlook of the Communist Party's convinced believers. It is true
that the perfect society had not been built, and there was no
prospect of its being built, but on the other hand, the Soviet
Union had averted the apocalypse, in the form of Nazi victory,
and had saved Europe from it too. That was not a bad second
best, a genuine international mission accomplished against enorm-
ous odds. But that very success had a strange effect on Communist
millenarianism. The centre of gravity of the symbolic life of the
Soviet state, and therefore of Soviet society too, shifted from the
future to the past, from expectation of the distant and somewhat
ghostly anticipated triumph of socialism to remembrance of the
very real and undeniable victory of Soviet arms in what everyone
could agree in calling 'the Great Patriotic War'. This fixation on
the past combined with the fracturing of national identity, both
russkii and sovetskii, generated by the regime's own policies, to
hollow out the spiritual life of the Soviet peoples and to undermine
their sense of community. In that way the Soviet regime gradually
negated its own greatest triumph and prepared the way for its
own eventual downfall.
University College London Geoffrey Hosking

School of Slavonic and East European Studies

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The Past and Present Society

The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness

Russians today are divided about many things, including t

* I am grateful to Susan Morrissey, Wendy Slater and Steve Smith, to the R

C The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2002

own brand of Russian patriotism and tried to embody

would thus be given the chance to 'pur

seem important to them.8 In this way internationalist, me

8 A valuable collection of such testimonies is contained in Veronique Garros, Natalia

Russianness remained markedly interna

"3 Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dict

nation state which in its size and diversity might have r

Once it became clear that the Nazis were wag

I suddenly felt that there was something very

This feeling of being a large family, not d

If your home is dear to you where you were

18 Il'ia Erenburg, Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh

Ethnic hatred became the dominant sentiment among s

21 Konstantin Simonov, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verses and Narrat

that the Soviet Union would soon los

24 V. F. Zima, Mentalitet narodov Rossii v voine 1

1930s as a concept which belonged to the past, used

As if, around every Russian village,

As Lisa Kirschenbaum has put it: 'R

29 Simonov, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, 77-9.

It is impossible to know whether this letter was genui

We all wanted to be together, not to struggle alone with our bewilderment,

Similarly, Viktor Nekrasov, author of popular war novels and an

even felt you had Russia's fate in your hands: i

These apparently contradictory sen

These feelings of solidarity and shared

rest or sell it for profit on the private market.40 This t

40 Iu. V. Arutiunian, Sovetskoe krest'ianstvo v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny [The

they should not attract German pilots.

43 Louise McReynolds, 'Dateline Stalingrad: Newspapers at the Front', ibid., 34.

One soldier is reported to have commented: 'Epau

The hour has come,

He appears to have no family of his own, but feels his unit to be

Viewed in the light of pre-war prolet

48 See the Glavlit instruction of January 1943 in Reve

embodiment of the old proletarian internationalism, an

An unshakeable union of free republics

The same concept was confirmed by Stalin when he sp

I drink above all to the health of the Russian people, becau

Since, within half a century, the non-Russians had se

52 N. Popovich, 'Sovetskaia politika po ukrepleniiu russkogo patriotizma i samo-

Turkey told the nuncio that the Sovie

"5 V. B. Konasov and A. V. Tereshchuk, 'K istorii sovetskikh i nemetskikh voenno-

bly, and so on. On the other hand it also called for

57 Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement (

appalling alternatives.61 Vlasov's proj

The regime's distrust extended to the partisans, that is

iveness of their operations: parts of Bel

65 For a summary of scholarship on the partisa

and Belorussians.68 In Moldavia there were some 90,0

were born and flourished. No one elected the

In that way the regime itself called in

As for the Russians themselves, the incipient civil inst

of personal recollections in the community, then it beco

University College London Geoffrey Hosking

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