War and Identity

The Eurozine article by Lev Gudkov I mentioned in the previous post certainly makes interesting reading. In it the sociologist discusses how the Second World War (or rather the "Great Patriotic War") provides Russia with its identity, and serves to block out the need for national self-analysis and self-reflection:

Victory Day has not become a day of mournful commemoration of the dead, the human suffering, and the material destruction. It is literally a day of victory, of the Soviet army's triumph over Hitler's Germany. Russians address the intentional meaning of victory exclusively to themselves; it only has a meaning within the structures of Russian self-determination. Today there are hardly any people left who feel hatred for the former enemy countries: Germany and, less surprisingly, Italy, Japan, or Romania. Until recently, such feelings had remained intact among the older generations and on the periphery of society. Today anti-American feeling is much more pronounced than anti-German moods, which are characteristic only of 8-10 per cent of the population (mostly old people). Half of all Russians would not even object to putting up a monument to the fallen soldiers on both sides of World War II (although this readiness has also declined during Putin's reign, from 57 per cent to 50 per cent, while resistance to this idea has increased from 26 per cent in 1991 to 35 per cent in 2003).

Russians are not willing to share their triumph with anyone else in the world. Sixty-seven per cent of those surveyed (in 2003) believe that the USSR could have won the war even without the help of the allies. Moreover, as Russian nationalism is intensifying and the war is receding further into the past, it has gradually begun to be integrated into the traditional idea of the Russian "mission" and "rivalry with the West". Parallels between the events of contemporary and medieval history ("By smashing fascism, the USSR protected the peoples of Europe from annihilation", just as "By smashing the Tatar-Mongol hordes, Rus' shielded Europe") have become commonplace both in late Soviet nationalist rhetoric and generally in the post-Soviet period. This view is reinforced by the idea that the Russians defeated an enemy whom none of the most developed, richest, most successful, and "civilized" peoples of Europe were able to withstand.

At the same time, a number of unpleasant facts have been repressed from mass consciousness: the aggressive nature of the Soviet regime, Communist militarism, and expansionism, which were the reason for the USSR's expulsion from the League of Nations after its attack on Finland; the fact that World War II began with a joint attack on Poland by two partners and (then) allies -- Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union; the human, social, economic, and metaphysical cost of war; and the responsibility of the country's leadership for the beginning and course of the war, and the consequences of the war for other countries.

The article's conclusion is not very optimistic:

In the eyes of Russian society, the war and its victims sacralized not only the army as one of the central, fundamental social institutions, the carcass of the entire Soviet and post-Soviet regime, but also the very principle of a "vertical" construction of society, a mobilizational, command-hierarchical model of social order that does not bestow any autonomy or value upon a private existence or group interests that are independent of the "whole". Russian society has left behind a period of critical re-evaluation of its past, including the war. The debates about the "cost" of the war as well as the pre-war and postwar policies are over. Today the memory of the war and victory is "switched on" mainly by mechanisms of the conservation of the social whole that prevent society from becoming more complex and functionally differentiated. Memories of the war are required above all to legitimate a centralized and repressive social order; they are built into a general post-totalitarian traditionalization of culture in a society that has not been able to cope with budding social change. This is why the Russian authorities constantly have to return to those traumatic circumstances of its past that reproduce key moments of national mobilization. The repression of the war keeps spawning state-sponsored aggression -- the Chechen war and the restoration of a repressive regime.

In conclusion, we may say that a "memory" of the war as a whole era, a focal point for a multitude of private or collective events, is preserved in today's Russia only through the activities of state institutions or social groups linked to the authorities and laying claim to a social or political role or acting as ideologists or executors of state orders. Russian society did not take the sumptuous state-sponsored celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of Victory as an occasion for a rational analysis of its past and present. The declared programme of solemn events turned into a sequence of routine demonstrations of allegiance to the symbols of past state power that are rapidly losing their force and significance. To put it more precisely, this was a coercive imitation of collective solidarity with the authorities, based on nothing but police-state patriotism and political cynicism.