Translated material
War Dotted Line: 1941-2000
War Dotted Line: 1941-2000
Publication date: May 6, 2000
June 22, morning - afternoon - evening
"One more mall!"
War
This Victory Day...
Wrap the Reichstag for me, please
Publication date: May 6, 2000
June 22, morning - afternoon - evening
"One more mall!"
War
This Victory Day...
Wrap the Reichstag for me, please
Yuri Rakovshchik
June 22, morning - afternoon - evening
In June 1941, I graduated from the 10th grade of school 167, which was located in Degtyarny Lane, connecting Tverskaya and Malaya Dmitrovka. I applied to the Moscow Energy Institute - as an excellent student, I was accepted without exams.
That summer, my father, who had not been on vacation for 15 years, nevertheless decided to take advantage of it: he had just undergone appendicitis surgery and was planning to go somewhere to a sanatorium - for example, to Kislovodsk. Therefore, my parents did not expect war...
We had a receiver on which we listened to the news - they were then called “Latest News”. On the morning of the 22nd, one of our friends called our parents - we turned on the radio and heard Molotov’s speech. In our communal apartment, a separate cell with a window facing the wall of the neighboring house was fenced off from my parents’ room. I remember myself looking with vague anxiety at a piece of bright blue sky.
A little later, Volodka Zinoviev, the secretary of our Komsomol bureau, called me to school by telephone. Until late, the guys and I carried books and other things from the basement so that the basement could be used as a bomb shelter.
On the same day, martial law was declared over the Moscow radio network, and a blackout was introduced in the city. I don’t know how unprepared citizens covered their windows on this longest day of the year, but for quite a long time we walked along the nearby streets and alleys, checking whether light was visible from somewhere. The center was not just residential - a family lived in each room, and therefore in each window there was an orange lampshade hanging above the table (in fact, more often it was just yellow).
Probably, besides my peers, only historians remember that in the spring of that year, Hitler’s deputy in the party, Parteigenosse Rudolf Hess, suddenly landed in England, at war with Germany, with goals incomprehensible to everyone.
A scandal of this magnitude always generates a desire to comprehend it. Hitler's attack made this desire concrete: whose side is England on now?
Late in the evening I sat down at the receiver, relying on my rather approximate, but still knowledge of English. And I heard - no more and no less than Churchill's historic speech.
I understood exactly one phrase, but at that moment it was the main one: “We will bomb Germany.”
A week later, boys from three parallel tenth grades were already traveling in country cars near Vyazma to dig anti-tank ditches. It seems that I studied in 10-A, because my friend Vitya Averbakh (the son of an already executed critic and the daughter of Bonch-Bruevich, who was imprisoned in the camp) was from 10-B, and from B was another friend, Zhenya Pasternak, the son of Boris Leonidovich.
We returned miraculously after the Germans broke through near Yartsevo.
Mom sewed 200 rubles into my lining and the address of our friends in Novosibirsk.
Efim Dinerstein
"One more mall!"
It has long been said that “when the guns speak, the muses are silent.” I don’t presume to dispute this truth, but it seems to me that it still requires adjustments.
There is a small city in Poland called Sopot, which became famous in the post-war years for its pop song festivals. I remember it because it was adjacent to villages with very poetic names: “Grosse Katz” and “Kleine Katz” (big and small cat). I don’t remember now which of them our unit was located in, and it’s not that important. Another significant event happened on a warm spring night. A short distance separated us from the Germans, and we tried not to spoil each other’s mood with alternating firefights. Suddenly, a propaganda van drove to the front line and, without any entertainment, “Dark Night” performed by Mark Bernes sounded. Before the last sounds had died down, a demand was heard from the German side: “Noch eine mall!” ("Again!"). No one was surprised when this demand was repeated again. After listening to the song for the third time, the Germans then quietly listened to Rokossovsky’s appeal with a proposal to surrender. I cannot judge how effective it turned out to be, since the battles for Gdynia were very stubborn, but the Germans clearly appreciated the music of N. Bogoslovsky and the singing of Bernes.
I also remember another episode that testifies to the power of the “muses”. The officers were given a so-called “supplementary ration.” The most valuable equivalent in it was tobacco (soldiers were given shag). I didn't smoke and gave it to my soldiers. Therefore, they waited for him, preparing ahead of time for the upcoming pleasure. But one day the unexpected happened: it turned out that none of them had even a scrap of newspaper for a cigarette (German newspapers were used for other needs). Everyone began to turn out their pockets and suddenly it was discovered that Sergeant Naugolny still had a neatly folded part of the newspaper. But when it was unfolded, it turned out that this was an article by I. Ehrenburg, and he could not part with it, although he was an ardent smoker.
And how we were waiting for the continuation of “Vasily Terkin”! The war really equated the “feather” and the sword,” and this should not be forgotten.
Rebekah Frumkina
War
(From the book "About Us - Diagonally")
I remember the pre-war spring with some special feeling of newness, openness and light. The reconstruction of the even side of Gorky Street was basically completed. Before the holidays, drawings and plans for further construction were, as usual, displayed in huge mirrored display cases. My dad and I slowly moved from storefront to storefront, and dad told me exactly where all this would be built. The launch of the next metro line was also an event - we always went to see each new station.
That spring my father was sick a lot. The move to the dacha was postponed. For the first time I spent the end of May and June in the city. I had just learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle and was enjoying making circles on the fresh asphalt in the square opposite the Mossovet.
Another favorite pastime was wandering the alleys between Nikitskaya (Herzen Street) and Gorky Street. I usually went to school through these alleys, so I was allowed to walk there alone. The reconstruction did not affect these places. In the courtyards of small two-story houses there were benches and lilacs were blooming. On the stone gate of one of the mansions was engraved: “Free from standing” (with a solid sign). This was, as I found out later, Ogarev’s house.
One day, on the dark gray building of the German embassy, I saw a large flag with a white circle in the middle, in which a huge black swastika was inscribed. I returned home in fear and told my dad that there was a flag with a fascist sign hanging in Leontyevsky Lane! (That’s what the children called the swastika back then.) Dad explained to me that they were probably having some kind of holiday there and that it was supposed to be that way.
The premonition of trouble, which, as I later realized, my father had lived with since the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was not transmitted to me. And this despite the fact that I still remember Pravda with a photograph of Molotov walking along the airfield next to Ribbentrop, and my dad’s indignation that Molotov was walking next to him.
Our neighbor on the landing was Matryona Zakharovna, a widow who sometimes came to dad for advice. She raised her daughter Lida alone, a wonderfully beautiful girl a little older than me, who also studied music. One day in June - it was a day off, the 14th - she came to us and told my father that she was going with Lida to visit relatives in Belarus, in Orsha. Dad smoothed out yesterday's Pravda, folded into four, and showed Matryona Zakharovna a small note in the right corner of the first page. The note was called "Refutation of TASS". It said that all reports that there was a concentration of German troops on our western borders were lies and provocation.
At that moment I was standing behind my father’s back, leaning against the high (for me at that time) back of the chair on which my father was sitting, and therefore for the rest of my life I remembered this newspaper page and my father’s words: “Don’t go, Matryona Zakharovna. This is war.”
Matryona Zakharovna finally left and ended up under occupation. I remember her after the war - gray-haired and completely broken. Lida spent almost two years in the underground, covered with hay. While checking to see if anyone was there, a German soldier pierced her hand with a pitchfork. The hand healed, but there was now no hope for a musical career.
Nevertheless, even my father did not think that everything would happen so quickly, because on June 21 we finally moved to the dacha. This was a serious undertaking: although we had our own dacha, nothing was left there except furniture for the winter and they even removed the electric meter. They cooked on kerosene stoves and therefore from the city, in addition to pots, basins and other utensils, they brought kerosene in huge, almost as tall as me, braided bottles. Dad was driving with a truck, because mom never remembered the roads, and my nanny and I were driving by train. Mom also came by train, but after all of us, having tidied up the apartment.
The most important person on the day of arrival was electrician Vdovin, a quiet man in a tunic, with a completely red face from drunkenness. On the morning of the 22nd, dad went to pick him up at the end of our village to the buildings then called “barracks.” He returned alone and said that someone’s radio was playing loudly and he heard something, from which it followed that Molotov seemed to be speaking. You could find out something more definite from our neighbor Luzhetsky - he had a radio receiver, a rarity in those days. Luzhetsky lived diagonally from us, very close to the station. Dad took my hand and we walked out of the gate. Before we had time to turn towards the Luzhetsky fence, a out of breath man in a beret appeared on the road, who, as he ran, shouted to dad what and when the Germans bombed.
Turning to return home, dad said to me: “Please don’t surprise mom.” I don’t remember at all what happened next on this and many subsequent days. <...>.
The first stage of our evacuation was Dzerzhinsk, a small industrial city near Gorky. It took us a long time to get there, on an old paddle steamer. On the way we learned that Moscow had been bombed. We stayed in Dzerzhinsk until the end of October 1941. I must think that then my childhood ended. The girl who crossed Gorky Street only with her nanny was left alone in an unfamiliar city. I went to some school, went down to the shelter myself if there was an alarm during the day, helped take the little ones there from the kindergarten that was in our yard.
Dzerzhinsk was built around chemical plants and in this sense could be considered the then analogue of some Naberezhnye Chelny. In addition to the factories themselves with their containers filled with explosive substances, there were huge warehouses of chemical weapons all around - I don’t know which one exactly. The city was often bombed, everything around was on fire, but I didn’t feel much fear - due to my youth and stupidity. I was truly horrified when panic began in Moscow on October 16th. My father went to Gorky on official business on the 18th. The entire highway was crowded with people leaving Moscow on foot. Somehow a ragged man emerged from this slowly moving mass. Dad recognized him as his old comrade, Rashkovsky. Both of them, according to their father, burst into tears. Rashkovsky walked for the second day...
Sergey Kazennov, Vladimir Kumachev
This Victory Day...
On the eve of the 55th anniversary of the victory of the USSR and the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War, many assessments of this event are appearing, and the range of assessments is wider than ever. In essence, we are dealing with attempts, more or less qualified, to adapt the Great Victory and, as they said recently, its “world-historical significance” to the needs of current politics. There are also primitive, “ice-breaking” motifs that have set the teeth on edge, but therefore have not gone out of use - who was ahead of whom in their insidious plans, speculation about the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, Yalta, etc. And as a conclusion, there was a struggle between two evils and the victory of one of them, which divided Europe for decades and delayed the development of mankind.
Another block of assessments is attempts at a more “civilized” understanding of the Victory as a Victory of the People, as opposed to the destructive policies of the “wise Leninist”, capable only of expansion, window dressing and cruelty. Thus, an attempt is made to decompose history into separate components, some of which form a new interpretation of the events of more than half a century ago, and of the 20th century as a whole, while the other part is recognized as an anomaly, a cost of history - and is discarded as unnecessary.
Both of these approaches were extremely popular in the second half of the 80s and throughout the 90s. They organically fit into the policy and ideology of dismantling the communist system, the former USSR and attempts to integrate the “new Russia” into the world economic, political, and ideological space. Unfortunately, this policy of the “Great Leap Forward”, the desire to jump from the “totalitarian past” into a democratic tomorrow, sanctified by universal human values and new approaches to understanding history, turned out to be largely unrealized. Including, by the way, due to a simplified, inverted reading of the events of half a century ago, which works to break Russian society (and the entire post-Soviet space), its historical consciousness, and not to unite it.
Recently, a third approach has been receiving a “residence permit” in Russian historical science and political science, which consists in the desire to give an objective and comprehensive assessment of the Victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. With an eye both to the implementation of this event in solving current political problems by Russian government structures, and to providing a certain ideological and political “background” for the future in the course of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.
For this approach, a number of important points should be noted that can really be useful in building a new ideological paradigm of the Russian State. Alas, the realities are such that after the dismantling of the communist doctrine, an ideological, spiritual vacuum was formed, which was filled in the most bizarre way. And the emerging ideological mutant often carried a negative, destructive charge. The need to make a radical change in this state of affairs also concerns the geopolitical aspect of assessing the Great Victory, its role for understanding the path traveled, the prospects for the development of the USSR/Russia and for a correct understanding of the world process as a whole.
Moreover, the last question is of utmost importance. Even today, at the turn of centuries and millennia, there are heated discussions in the world not only about our recent past, but also about further development paths and means of their practical implementation. This fully applies to the sphere of interstate, intercivilizational relations, the search for partners for coalition interaction, as well as the search for opponents to ensure internal unity, etc. Another aspect is the assessment of the most rational combination at different historical periods, in different conditions, of the two main sides, competing and complementary methods of economic policy and development - liberal market and state mobilization.
The significant result of the Victory is that politically, civilizationally diverse, even antagonistic forces at the time of great trials, faced with the Obvious Challenge of Obvious Evil, were able to find mutual understanding and implement a coordinated policy. Another thing is that this idyll could not last forever; anyway, Fulton, Korea, the Berlin and Caribbean crises, Prague, etc. were ahead. The forces of the “grand coalition” were too heterogeneous and multi-vectored. Which, we repeat, does not in any way detract from the ability of the united nations to demonstrate common sense and the instinct of self- and mutual survival in times of testing. And this experience may still be useful to humanity in the future. Moreover, Russia, located at the junction of civilizations, on the intercivilizational Eurasian fault, will certainly turn out to be an important player in the future, regardless of which development scenario will prevail.
Our Victory is reproached for the fact that it, in fact, predetermined the emergence of a bipolar world with corresponding power attributes and structures of confrontation in the central areas and on the geostrategic periphery. Which, supposedly, seriously delayed the development of the world, contributed to its militarization and gave rise to most of the contradictions and confrontations that today “civilized humanity” is forced to sort out (for example, in the Balkans). Firstly, these conclusions do not correspond to reality, and secondly, was there an alternative to the division of the world in the mid-40s, unless one saw it as a third world war? Even today, the world, in the conditions of economic and political globalization, is not able to develop a scheme for controlled, conflict-free development - the existing contradictions are too serious and cannot be resolved. In the middle of the 20th century and throughout its second half, the bipolar world was, of course, the lesser of the evils; it provided a certain stability (by many estimates - no less than today), a state of balance. The bipolar world has, as it were, mothballed, “frozen” the imperfect system of interstate relations, social relations in general until better times, when humanity would be able to use its ambitions, capabilities, and talents for purposes other than waging world wars. Moreover, an imbalance during, for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis or the events of 1968 in the absence of bipolar deterrence would certainly lead to large-scale, irreversible, destructive power conflicts. Thank God it passed then.
Regarding the dividing lines on the planet that appeared as a result of our victory, the following can be said. Did humanity, its “enlightened avant-garde”, have economic, political, military, finally, technological, and ideological (and does it, by the way, still have it today) capabilities for implementing global integration processes in the interests of humanity, and not just a group of selected countries and elites? ? Let us remember that even Europe has been moving towards its current integration for half a century - and it still has enough problems (and after Kosovo they will only increase). So maybe the situation that developed after 1945 was the lesser of evils from the point of view of the processes of globalization and the formation of a new world economic and political order?
As for our internal problems, we will ask the same question - was there an alternative to the mobilization economy with collectivist thinking in the post-war years (we will not touch on the reasons, they are multiple and, as always for Russia, contradictory)? Did Russia have a different historical experience? And it’s not about the Soviet decades. The pre-Soviet experience of Russia, including, of course, the period of the “heyday” of Russian capitalism, was deeply totalitarian, and therefore unsuitable as an experience. Russian society, by the way, is still totalitarian in many ways even today - politically, economically, mentally. Therefore, it is at least puzzling to see the conjectural assessments of some current Russian politicians and political scientists who argue that several “peaceful,” democratic, rather than totalitarian-Soviet, decades would have given Russia for its development. Russia would not have possessed them for well-known internal reasons, not to mention external reasons. Who from the outside would have allowed Russia such an experiment if it had been successful, at least in the same post-war years? By the way, this is not at all a rhetorical question for today’s Russia - who abroad needs its reconstruction on a new basis as a great power? So the Victory did not strengthen or even consolidate the “special path” of our Fatherland in the then contemporary world; it only formalized what was already destined geopolitically at that time. Russia needs to free itself not from the “consequences” of the Victory, but from many other things that sit deeply both in itself, in the Russian mentality, and from prejudice towards itself on the part of the international community. Another question is whether this will succeed, due to objective reasons, and whether it should be done thoughtlessly.
Today Russia is experiencing a serious systemic crisis; the question of its survival, both at the individual level and as a nation-state, is at stake. Moreover, it is very significant that there is no ideological core, so necessary for pursuing purposeful policies, foreign and domestic, including in the matter of state building, economic transformation, self-identification and unification of the nation. In their search, shouldn’t we turn - at least in some aspects - to the Victory, the experience of achieving it and the post-war restoration of the country? And it seems that Victory today is increasingly in demand by power structures precisely as a symbol of unity: not only as a common memory, but also as an important tool for the politics of the present and future. Another question is that it is still necessary to critically understand why any victory, especially our Great Victory, is always achieved by Russia through such extreme efforts, through such sacrifices and such sacrifice, incomprehensible to the civilized world.
And one more important, rather difficult question. We are talking about the fate of the post-Soviet, or more precisely, North-Eurasian geopolitical space. Today it is obvious that it is not just a random product of imperial-Soviet policy, it is an objective reality, the formation of which has natural cause-and-effect parameters. The fact that together we managed to defeat external expansion and stop the attempt to redivide the world at the expense of the USSR and the peoples inhabiting it must also find its theoretical justification and be verified by today's events. What helped us survive - barrier detachments and Order 227, some mystical force or indestructible geopolitical constants, a special North Eurasian mentality, a powerful spatial and moral rear, other features that have amazing stability over time and firmly, forever welded the peoples of the former USSR into an indivisible whole. And isn’t this the deep basis of Victory? And since the former Soviet republics with their problems are not very welcome in the world community, and if they do wait, then on special conditions and, nevertheless, as second-class partners, the problem of reintegration sooner or later, in one form or another, will still be on the agenda . And centrifugal forces in the post-Soviet space will inevitably be replaced by centripetal ones. Awareness of this, by the way, is the key to qualitatively new opportunities for resolving many current conflicts within the former USSR.
A lot of useful and relevant things can be found and tried to be understood in our Great Victory, with a correct, careful and deep reading of it, in order to solve pressing current and future problems of the development of the new Russia and its functioning in the world community. You just need to really see the true need in this - and not use the holy name of Victory to serve momentary political interests, condescendingly patting on the back the victorious veterans who are still with us.
Sergey Romashko
Wrap the Reichstag for me, please
This story began quite a long time ago. Back in the 70s, an American artist of Bulgarian origin, Christo, developed a design for packaging the Reichstag. Christo was already packing everything - he even packed a small island. The Reichstag stood half-abandoned right next to the wall that separated two worlds, tearing the country and the city apart. And the packaging of the Reichstag in these conditions was inevitably filled with a very definite political meaning, even if this was not originally intended. It was not possible to implement the project at that time (which is typical); only sketches remained depicting the building covered with a huge curtain.
The idea was realized only in 1996, when almost nothing remained of the Berlin Wall. Why this happened and how the Bundestag made its decision is better to talk about this another time. Now there is only one thing: of course, the Reichstag actually wrapped in silver fabric looked completely different from how it would have looked two decades ago. Now it was more of a tourist attraction (one of the politicians who supported the project said so: a lot of tourists will come, and that’s great, otherwise the treasury is empty...), the meaningful acuity has disappeared.
Recently, the paintings by Viktor Nikolaev, who prepared the “Reichstag” exhibition (the curator of the project is Alexey Mikheev), exhibited at ROSIZO, were included in the game. Viktor Nikolaev acted with the same captivating simplicity as Christo in Berlin. He took photographs of the packed Reichstag taken by German photographer Georg Wilde and began to draw over the photographic image. A multi-layered structure has emerged - a kind of palimpsest in which Nikolaev’s colors do not destroy the photographic layer, but clearly show the relativity of Christo’s claims to a significant transformation of reality.
The exhibition was hardly planned for Victory Day. But this is how it happened, and it is difficult to get rid of some thoughts and associations - they are too persistent. For example: why didn’t Russia react in any way to the Reichstag packaging? After all, this building was one of the symbols of Victory for decades. Of course, one could say that now is not the time, but in other similar (and even less significant) cases, unrest can be strong. Perhaps because this building has long become a mythology in Russia, the essence of which does not lend itself to any external material influences, even if they are as impressive in scale as Christo’s? That Reichstag, with the red banner, entered another dimension, having nothing in common with the gray, squat colossus at the Brandenburg Gate, which continued to exist, albeit thrown out for a while from active political life, almost turning into a ghost. But this was a completely different ghost than the ghost of the Reichstag of Victory - that Reichstag therefore had no real dimension, since it simply served as a stand for the banner hoisted on it, which itself floated somewhere outside of space and time. All these intersections and divergences of the real object and the political-symbolic prominences that appeared around it every now and then build a semantic image of the Reichstag as one of the magical crystals of German - and not only German - politics of the twentieth century.
But now the Bundestag sits in the Reichstag. But this will not surprise us. We have Yekaterinburg in the Sverdlovsk region, and St. Petersburg in the Leningrad region. And we ourselves run around with passports that say: USSR. In our dispute with Christo, we once again managed to “shod the English flea” and prove that we can achieve more than Western Europe without any special technical tricks. We've always had problems with packaging. But there were - and remain, as Viktor Nikolaev showed - their own, unexpected decisions. It’s just the fate of Lefty that worries me.