Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Falseness is the main thing produced by the actions of the authorities in August 1991 and today. Today’s Russian state is, in essence, as empty and illusory as its hopeless predecessors in the GKChP, who couldn’t even organize a coup d’état . Incapable of carrying out reforms, or even mass repression, all they can do is carry out media shows, like making nuclear threats to the West, simulacra, such as the pirate ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk, and lies, which they throw out onto social networks in the West.

From the point of view of the big picture of history, what is going on today is simply a continuation of August 1991, yet another stage in the long process of the end of empire, which is happening in a nonlinear fashion, through fevers, collapses, amputations and remissions. In the past, it happened by breaking up demonstrations in Alma-Ata in 1986, in Tbilisi in 1989, Vilnius and Riga in 1991 and by a peaceful rally around the White House in August 1991. Today, it is in South Ossetia, a part of Georgia that has been occupied by Russia, and Crimea, which has been annexed by Russia: the empire is dying, painfully and awkwardly. Eventually, a Russian national state should emerge from these transformations, which, like France and Britain, has lived through its post-imperial trauma and is able to live at peace with its neighbours and remember its own roots, including how it was born on the barricades around the White House in August 1991.

One of my earliest childhood memories is linked to 9 May: I’m drawing tiny leaves on a laurel branch. It was a card for my grandfather in honour of Victory Day. These were Brezhnev’s times, when they started to set in bronze the cult of Victory Day, covering it with decorations, orders and laurel wreaths, hence the branch in my picture. I probably also drew the sun, a red star, and maybe a rather clumsy dove of peace – but I never drew a tank.

I remember marking Victory Day during my student life, the time of perestroika . After 1 May, the city was empty and clean, the lilac was in bloom, the trolleybuses seemed to smile and my feet carried me of their own accord to the Bolshoi Theatre, where they hadn’t yet dug up the old square in front of the building and they were playing wartime music. You could wander among the people gathered there in their parade uniforms, some celebrating, some sad, who each year would get together in ever-diminishing groups beside a board bearing the name of their military unit. It was indeed the ‘holiday with tears in their eyes’, as Victory Day was painfully and accurately described in a well-known Soviet song; we all understood that this was nature passing on its way and we tried hard to preserve in our memory this place and this mood, like distant music, like the fading scent of the lilac.

Over the years the holiday grew bigger, yet there were fewer veterans and fewer tears; until there came a moment, some ten years ago, when I realized that 9 May had ceased to exist for me as a national holiday and had become simply a time for private reflection, of a tatty photograph of a young grandpa in his uniform as a Signals Major, and of his grave in the Khimki Cemetery, just outside Moscow; of a few nostalgic wartime songs by Mark Bernes and Klavdiya Shulzhenko [9] Famous Soviet singers of the 1930s–60s. or the film Come and See , directed by Elem Klimov, about the shooting up of a Belarusian village by the fascists. Probably the point that caused my personal split with the holiday was the St George ribbon (the orange and black ribbon handed out to people on the streets on the eve of 9 May, in the colours of the medal ribbon of the Order of the St George Cross, a Russian military award); or, more accurately, it’s not the ribbon itself but the cult surrounding it, poured out in a flood of banality and jingoism. So today I want to ask the question that the film director Michael Moore asked once of George Bush Jr: ‘Dude, where’s my country?’ And I want to know: ‘Where’s my Victory?’

For Russia, 9 May is the fulcrum of the twentieth century. At one edge there was the War of 1914 and the year of revolutions, 1917, and at the other, 1991, the year the USSR collapsed. But the culmination of Russia’s terrifying twentieth century, the huge sacrifice, the peak of the Soviet Union’s might, from where it began its inexorable decline, was 1945. Victory Day is incontestably the single true memorial day in our modern calendar, as opposed to the newly invented Day of National Unity on 4 November, or Russia Day on 12 June. It is a day that was not invented by the propagandists, but came through suffering, and was paid for in blood. That is why the 9 May celebration is the most exact indicator of the age, the mirror that reflects the history of every postwar generation.

Over the course of seventy years, this holiday has changed radically, depending on the times. Stalin was afraid of the Victory, just as he was afraid of those who had served at the front, the victors. He was terrified that they would reveal his criminal cowardliness in June 1941 (after his faint-hearted disappearance for a week at the outbreak of war, when Politburo members Beria and Malenkov turned up at his dacha, Stalin was convinced that they had come to arrest him); his strategic failures; and the unacceptably high cost of victory. It is no coincidence that at the celebratory banquet on 24 May 1945, in a rush of unexpected openness, he turned down the eulogy being paid to him and instead proposed his famous toast, ‘to the health of the Russian people’, and to their patience, which allowed them to forgive the mistakes and mismanagement by the government and not to overthrow Soviet power. Eight million frontline soldiers, five million Ostarbeiter (Soviet people relocated for work in Germany) and almost seventy million people who lived in territory that had been occupied by the Germans were a dangerous and uncontrollable force for Stalin, especially the frontline soldiers, who feared neither the NKVD nor the Gestapo, and on whom the magic of Stalin’s power – the magic of fear – had no effect. From 1947, 9 May was no longer a public holiday (they made the 1 January a holiday instead), and a new fierce wave of terror was rolled out across the country, from repeated arrests and deportations of whole peoples to a cultural reaction known as zhdanovshchina [10] Named after Andrei Zhdanov, who was responsible for that round of purges. and a battle against ‘cosmopolitanism’, which simply covered up a campaign of state-sponsored antisemitism. Many victorious frontline soldiers, partisans and people who had been in German prisoner-of-war camps were simply shipped off to the East without even the chance to catch their breath, sent to camps or deported. Once again, just as after the Polish invasion in 1612 and Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, the Russian people had risen up and saved their pathetic leaders from defeat – and yet again, they submissively returned to the yoke of slavery.

During Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, many of these people returned, and with them a different, more human memory of the war developed. Moreover, Khrushchev himself was not particularly complimentary of the General Staff, starting with Marshal Zhukov. It is in this period that ‘the Lieutenants’ prose’ appeared, by writers who had been at the front, such as Vasil Bykov, Daniil Granin, Grigory Baklanov and Viktor Astafiev; and the most perceptive films were made about the War, like Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (winners, respectively, at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals). A little later, at the start of the 1970s, the classic Soviet films about the war were made: The Belorussian Station and The Dawns Here Are Quiet . Along with Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem, Babiy Yar , and everyone’s favourite song, Do the Russians Want War? , based on the words of the same poet, these books and films created a new canon of understanding of the Great Patriotic War, in which two Soviet generations of the 1960s and the 1980s grew up: full of pride and bitterness, humane and peace-loving. For many decades, the Soviet people were repeating like a spell or a prayer: ‘As long as there’s no war.’