Time to end the war

Putin uses the second world as a source of political legitimacy. About the militaristic cult and about healthy memory as two different approaches to the past - historian Konstantin Pakhalyuk

Over the past decade, the Russian state has intensively exploiting the memory of the Second World War. The cult of victory turned into a real civil religion, not only prohibiting inconvenient questions about the past, but also using heroic images for modern political needs, including to justify aggression against Ukraine.

But all this instrumentalization of the Great Patriotic War cannot cross out the efforts of many people, independent organizations and volunteers who are still trying to maintain a living and healthy memory of the tragedy of the people.

Myth and rent

Throughout the 2010s, the state consistently turned the memory of the Great Patriotic War into the main Russian myth. This war is in the experience of almost every Russian family, and it would be strange for the state to miss such an opportunity. Question for purposes.

In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin called for formulating the “national idea”, but there were no substantial proposals. And the more authoritarian the state became, the less it needed a serious conversation about values. Throughout the 2000s, democracy and human rights have been finally turned into abstraction, which, alas, did not respond in the hearts of many people. But appeals to the past, especially to the Second World War - yes, they took for the living.

The story turned out to be the very public language, with the help of which it is possible, without burdening yourself with obligations, to bring something ideal, elevated to a rather cynical political life. And even answer the sacramental question: what connects us all, so numerous and diverse, on one sixth of the land. The first “wars of memory” of the mid-2000s-with Georgia, the States of the Baltic and Ukraine-revealed the potential of the rhetoric “protection of memory”. And within Russia there was enough extravagant theories, and even the liberal media willingly published the rejected by the world academic science of the Rezanists (authors who, following Viktor Suvorov-Rezun, believed that the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR was a preventive blow). Some well-known pro-government historians have just made a name for their exposure to second-rate publicists in the 2000s.

The system of memory policy, and with it the cult of the Great Patriotic War lined up gradually. It was based on a simple construct: "We are those whose ancestors defeated Nazism."

He became a source of symbolic rent for the ruling class: he opened a monument, a museum, talked about victory, met with veterans - and now you feel not a temporary worker, but a great statesman.

The most important element of this system was the image of a modern enemy, external or internal, attempting "on our ancestors." Often “incomprehensible youth” appeared and “incomprehensible”, which “must be instilled” by patriotism.

The number of participants in the game grew: for the regions, the memory of the war is the possibility of additional federal financing, for the "right" public and cultural figures - a source of grants and subsidies. Yes, and RVIO was created in 2012 for the same purpose: if one of the oligarchs, for example, Viktor Vekselberg or Andrei Kozitsyn, will want to show himself a patriot-this is an organization through which loyal feelings can be testified.

Civil Cult

The streets of the cities were surrounded by all new monuments and memorial boards (only 3750 were installed on the facades of schools!), Museums opened, graffiti were drawn, videos spinning along street screens, thematic trains rode in the Moscow metro. But substantial issues were not interested in power, and therefore all this violent activity was largely barren.

How many times since 2010, officials stated that they finally financed the “new film”, which will shut up the “Schindler list” and “Save the ordinary Rain” for the belt. Further with the pomp, “Tired of the Sun 2”, “Stalingrad”, “Panfilovtsy” or “Zoya” were released on the screens. Who is reviewing these films today? Yes, there were financially successful projects, for example, the T-34, withdrawn to a greater extent with private money. There were simply worthy films: for my taste, for example, “Paradise” by Andrei Konchalovsky, “Anna's War” by Alexei Fedorchenko . You, the reader, probably also have your own list, but what made of it a common new classic for most Russians?

New heroes also did not appear. Yes, in view of a good relationship with Israel, they remembered the Holocaust and Alexander Pechersky, the leader of the uprising in the death camp Sobibor. They shot the film of the same name, included in the textbooks, put busts. Yes, an important topic for Russian Jews, remembering how for decades the Soviet government sought not to distinguish either their suffering or feats. However, did the Pechersk hero become a Pechersky hero? It is hardly. With a large pomp in 2020, the Rzhevsky memorial was opened.

Yes, thanks to advertising, he became a recognizable monument, but not a new symbol: none of the initiators of the installation was even thought about what kind of idea he should carry.

What idea could this monument be carried?

For decades, the battles near Rzhev existed a rather amorphous image of heavy, unsuccessful and bloody events, intentionally forgotten by the Soviet state. The monument seems to be designed to restore justice. And the lyrical image of the soldier bowing his head could potentially become a starting point for understanding. But he was not there! Is Rzhev a combination of battles or still one battle? Historians are inclined to the first. The battle of Moscow, Stalingrad or Berlin - everything is clear here: “defended the capital”, “broke the ridge of the Wehrmacht”, “finally defeated Nazism”. By ear, military leaders, examples of heroes. And Rzhev? What stories - large or small - lie behind him? Alas, the authorities needed a monument, not a meaningful story about the event itself.

Without contradictions and communism, but with multimedia

Looking back, we can distinguish three key trends in the work of the state with the memory of the Second World War, for Soviet patterns reduced to the Great Patriotic War.

The first is the avoidance of any contradictions, a serious conversation about the essential, be it totalitarianism, injury to war, moral choice, man and system. The typical response of the authorities: “Everything was, we do not deny anything”, but this non -negative was also meant silence.

The Red lines outlined gradually. The justification of Nazism, the identification of Stalinism and Hitlerism is legislative. The conversation about the price of the victory and responsibility of the state for losses is mediocre. Let us recall the campaign against the “rain” in early 2014 in response to the question specified on the air whether it was possible to save the inhabitants of Leningrad by handing it over. Yes, the wording is unsuccessful, but the problem is deep: did the party leadership do everything to avoid mass hunger? In 2016, they were not allowed to defend the doctoral dissertation to Kirill Alexandrov, who dared to claim that mass collaboration was a form of social protest against Stalin and his repression.

The second is the consistent purification of the memory of the war of the ideology of communism. The state and the heroic people - to leave, Stalin - also, communism, and even more so internationalism - to remove or reduce to slogans. The sensational films "Zoya" and "Panfilov" are the best examples.

The third and most importantly - more and more stimulate collective emotions, erasing the line between the past and the present. Sergei Ushakin successfully called this "affective management of history." The fewer veterans, the more reconstructors at public events. On May 9, they were supplemented by the processions of the Immortal Regiment. Multimedia blockbusters from RVIO, moving around Russia. In 2020, the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, rebranded as the Victory Museum, opened the new popular exhibition "Victory Roads", which is entirely consisting of halls-decorations. The visitor moves from the first day of the war - for all the battles, partisan glades, and blocker Leningrad - to the submissive Berlin. And the topic of Nazi crimes was needed by the state only because of emotionally strong images. The invention of the genocide of the Soviet people in the early 2020s was only a logical continuation of this line.

Justification of authoritarianism

The way the state and intellectuals-conservatives worked with the memory of the Second World War, led to the justification of authoritarianism, and to the desire to revise the post-Soviet order by military means.

Firstly , all growing attention to the events of the past gave rise to imperial nostalgia. There are no tears about the “lost lands” - it is enough to recall every hour about how “we freed our Kyiv / Minsk / Vilnius from the Nazis, without explaining why these cities later turned into the capital of sovereign states.

Secondly , although the Second World War is an exceptional, radical era, examples for literal imitation were borrowed from it. The authorities always said: “We need samples for the education of a new generation”: collective heroism, work in the rear for wear, self -sacrifice of Cosmodemyanskaya or Karbyshev. But what does this have to do with life in the 21st century? No. Looking at the history of the Great Patriotic War in search of regulatory samples - the idea is not only dubious, as with other eras, but also dangerous.

If you perceive such a unique era without proper distance, then the desired historical experience turns into a broken compass.

When you are anti -resistant to such an unconditional evil as Nazism, which launched the Holocaust car, was going to destroy the USSR and at least 30 million of its inhabitants, it is not up to sentiment. But clarification of the logic of decisions made then, whether it is the signing of the Molotov -Ribbentrop Pact or the introduction of barriers, is gradually led to accept it as proper. And to the idea that it is allegedly right to act in any situation. The subjective world of people who make decisions, and the understanding of historical processes are different things.

“Time was difficult” quietly turned into “the war will write off everything” and “the forest is chopped - chips fly”. And further - the constant searches for the parallels between today and the day before yesterday, the equalization of Hitler with the collective West, Ukraine and the “Bandera”, calling the traitors of all those who disagree with the policy of the state. This rhetoric, giving a real false sense of extreme, appeared by no means in 2022.

Thirdly , the authorities arranged emotional swings to citizens, “uniting” either around parades and “immortal regiments”, then around the appointed enemies that are somehow not so speaking about history. Emotional overload made a calm conversation impossible, gave rise to irritation about the “not those statements”, “not those memorials”. With one hand, the state increased the degree of intolerance, raising the habit of digging to those who say “something wrong”, on the other, declared Russians “the heirs of victory”, playing the complacency of supporters. And with the third, officials themselves flew in response for German weapons on monuments or Mannerheim's memorial plaque, every time with a malicious smile: since they called the defenders of history - if you please correspond! But are the stupid words of foreign politicians so important? Are errors on monuments that are easy to fix so much?

And a mixture of radicalism with passivity after February 24 had its fruits: most Russians conditionally agreed with the outbreak of a full -scale war against Ukraine, but did not hasten to "fulfill their duty."

Memory of a normal person

However, putting the point on this would be wrong. The described above is related to memory policy, to public scandals around history. But for a public word -block, the important and significant that was made by historians and enthusiasts both independently and with the participation of the state was often lost.

The Immortal Regiment was successful for the reason that many participants saw in it their personal way to pay tribute to the ancestors.

Since the late 2000s, the Ministry of Defense allocated funds for the creation of the largest databases “The Feat of the People” and “Memory of the People”, thanks to which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Russians deepened family memory through appeal to personal documents of fought relatives. We somehow forgot today that many front-line soldiers did not particularly talk about wartime, and the children and grandchildren inherited brief stories and letters-triangles.

Historiography gradually developed, having made a qualitative leap in the 2010s. Some rushed into the archives, trying to reconsider the history of hostilities on the Eastern Front, going beyond the discussions of the 90s, hesitated between the "always victorious Red Army" and "flooded with corpses." So the phenomenon of socio-scientific historiography appeared , attentive to front-line details, but alas! -For the most part, deaf to socio-political analysis. Already academic researchers, mainly associated with the Higher School of Higher Professional Education or European University in St. Petersburg, were in a deep dialogue with foreign historiography, developing a social approach to the study of war.

In general, the state stimulated interest in the history of World War II, and this led to the fact that about a dozen central publishers established the translation and publication of the work of foreign authors, contributing to the penetration of new approaches to the topic. Even the current discussions about the fault and responsibility have originated at least with the discussion of the translations of Hannah Arendt, where the Gifter magazine was one of the sites. Sacramental from the Medinsky “scrambled”, addressed to the neglects of the Soviet legend of Panfilovites, all participants in the discussions, including conservatives, accepted the same way on their account.

Yes, the state abused the installation of monotonous monuments. However, even if you take the RVIO, of about three hundred monuments created in 2013–2021, most of the rather modest obelisks in cities and even villages associated with local events.

Another falling link is the search movement, which in the 2010s began to be more and more supported by the state. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers remained immersed for decades after the end of the war. Sometimes it was possible not to dig in order to find someone's remains in the places of battles. The Rzhev old -timers told me the story of how the boys played football with skulls of soldiers. According to official figures, only in 2012–2021 the search engines raised more than 218 thousand soldiers, establishing the names of 12.5 thousand people according to archival data.

Undoubtedly, the tragic side of the war was gradually replaced by a heroic myth. However, in the 2010s, the Russian Jewish Congress, together with the Holocaust Center, erected more than 90 monuments in the places of executed Jews, annual commemorative events began to be held on January 27 (International Memory of the Holocaust Victims). In the Kaliningrad region, marches of the memory of the victims of executions in Palmniken have long been regularly held, in Rostov-on-Don there was a tradition of commemoration of those killed in the Zmievsky beam.

In the early 2020s, they began to recall another forgotten category of victims-about people with disabilities, who were destroyed with no less sequence than Jews. And all thanks to the project of the German historian Irina Ribrova, who not only gathered around her a network of interested researchers, but also pushed them to conduct memorable events in forgotten places of executions.

If you go to the exposition in the Museum “Smolensk during the Great Patriotic War”, you will see a whole hall dedicated to the occupation, and there - the killings of Jews, the executions of the gypsies, the resistance, and the history of one of the righteous peoples of the world. South, already near Bryansk, go to the Hatsun memorial complex, created in the 2000-2010s. This is the village, which was destroyed by the Nazis in October 1941. Yes, the memorial space there is oversaturated with the Orthodox symbol that is not related to the event, however, pay attention to the main exposition, where the focus of the occupation is not the horrors of the occupation, but the life of a simple Russian village, the destruction of which resembles a machine -gun tape found during the excavation of the mass grave. Before us is a museum of memory , working with the topic of sorrow and loss, inheriting the world tradition of such institutions.

Even in the Suzdal, popular among tourists, you will find an exposition about the German and Italian prisoners of war, their sufferings and experiences in the Trans-Euphytime Monastery. Перед посетителем открывается целая палитра образов и человеческих связей, и это, заметьте, в музее федерального подчинения.

Старая и новая война

После 24 февраля многое изменилось. Третий год российское государство оправдывает агрессию через образы войны, которая после 22 июня 1941 года стала оборонительной. Если раньше по фасадам школ развешивали доски Героям Советского Союза, то сегодня — несостоявшимся завоевателям. Традиционный парад победы теперь сопровождается выставкой трофеев, а не «бессмертным полком». Многие из тех, кто в 2010-е годы пытались выработать взвешенный взгляд на боевую историю Второй мировой, оказались в Z-повестке: востребована их привычка объяснять логику правителей и ход боевых действий, а не думать о происходящем в целом. Но нет оснований считать, что эта идеологическая конструкция была бы устойчивой без военной цензуры.

Тематика вины и ответственности оказалась в центре антивоенных дискуссий, а россияне продолжают проявлять повышенный интерес к литературе о нацистской Германии. Очевидно, история по-прежнему играет слишком большую роль в публичных выступлениях россиян, вне зависимости от их отношения к текущей войне.

Современная Россия образовалась в 1991–1993 годах, однако путинское государство убедило большинство, что «мифом основания» является Вторая мировая.

Первые бомбы, упавшие в феврале 2024-го на Киев и Харьков, всё это обнулили. И 1990-е, и 1940-е — это уже история, в то время как в горниле текущей войны рождается новая Россия.

Если путинский режим устоит, то миф о Великой Отечественной будет жить вместе с ним на уровне формы, поскольку смысловое ядро сместится к настоящему. Если же оправдаются чаяния антивоенных россиян, то историческая риторика, ассоциирующаяся с Путиным, значительно подешевеет.

На фоне текущих событий Вторая мировая, конечно, теряет значимость. Зато разговор о ее значении — например, для развития России — сможет идти более спокойно. Серьезная же дискуссия о памяти сегодня требует ответа на главный вопрос: почему «наследники Победы» оказались идейно ближе к гитлеровцам?

А положить цветы на могилы солдат 1941–1945 годов вряд ли когда-нибудь станет зазорным. Для того чтобы почтить память предков, нам не нужны ни мифы, ни путинское государство.