Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

With the coming to power of Brezhnev, the 9 May holiday underwent yet another transformation. From the time of the twentieth anniversary in 1965, when for the first time since 1945 there was a military parade on Red Square and a reception in the Kremlin Palace, 9 May began to take on the trappings of a semi-official state cult. Once again, the day was declared a holiday. Memorials were unveiled (in 1967 Brezhnev opened the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beside the Kremlin Wall); veterans found their place in the Party-Soviet system; multi-tome generals’ memoirs began to be published (including those of Zhukov, having been brought back from disgrace); and epic films were made: the genre of memory moved from the lyrical to the epic. According to the historian, Nikita Sokolov, the idea to turn around the popular memory of the war and show it not so much as a victory for the people as a victory for the Soviet system, to show the effectiveness of socialism, came from the chief Communist Party ideologue, Mikhail Suslov. The living memory of the Victory was carefully painted in rosy hues, pouring on the balm of speeches and the concrete of monumental sculptures, such as the intimidating memorial complex at Malaya Zemlya near the city of Novorossisk on the Black Sea, where Brezhnev himself fought in 1943. The whole cult of Malaya Zemlya, puffed up in the 1970s and crowned by the General Secretary’s book, is a good illustration of the talentless propaganda and the folk cynicism it provoked, such as in the well-known joke of the time: ‘Where were you during the war? Did you fight at Malaya Zemlya, or were you just sitting around in the trenches at Stalingrad?’

This dualism of the people’s memory and concrete officialdom carried on through the years of perestroika and into the 1990s. On the one hand, the time of glasnost revealed new facts about the carelessness and lack of talent of the Soviet military leadership. New evidence came to light about pointless sacrifices, and alternative interpretations appeared about the Second World War (such as by the revisionist writer, Viktor Suvorov), which cast doubts on the glittering image of the USSR as an innocent victim of fascism and a defender of peace. On the other hand, the bronze myth grew and strengthened, definitively formed in 1995 by the megalomaniacal and ridiculous Victory Memorial on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow, for the sake of which the hill itself and the park already there had to be razed, thus destroying a legendary place of memory in the capital.

Then Putin’s time began, in which the Victory has been well and truly taken over by the state. In the era of the redesigning of the vertical of power, the Victory has been employed to legitimize the ruling regime. Putin considers himself to be the direct descendant of Stalin’s USSR circa 1945, which held a thirteen-million-strong army in Europe, redrew the map of the world and decided the fate of countries and peoples. The same myth becomes embedded in the consciousness of the population, which feels the burden of post-Soviet ressentiment and experiences the phantom pains of lost empire. The myth about the Victory gives them the opportunity to feel the illusion of greatness, to give themselves a merit to which today’s Russia bears no relation. This is where the endless ‘T-34’ signs come from in honour of the legendary wartime tank, the order of Victory and the slogan in the windows of cars, ‘On to Berlin!’ These are magical runes, which call up the ghosts of the past and give an illusion of strength.

Despite Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which does not allow for any state ideology, the Victory has in reality become just such an ideology, the thought axis of the Putin regime. It is the universal lens that justifies any actions by the state, from repressive laws about ‘the falsification of history’ and ‘insult to the memory’, which block out any public discussion on the topic of the Second World War, to the granting of budgetary resources under the excuse of the anniversary. The seventieth anniversary of the Victory became a repressive mechanism for the state, a means of fighting anyone who has different opinions, a way of mobilizing and indoctrinating the population. This holiday has become its own logic of sovereignty in its higher, exclusive appearance: it is done not for the people but for the state; or, to be more accurate, for a solitary individual.

An even more surprising transformation of the holiday is that the Russian aggression in Ukraine is justified in the name of the Victory: the annexation of Crimea, the war in the Donbass, and now the Cold War with the West, right up to nuclear threats – in other words, everything against which the Soviet Union fought in 1945. From a symbol of sorrow and memory, the St George ribbon has become the symbol of a fratricidal war, the sign by which the separatists in the East of Ukraine can be recognized. Propaganda has created in peoples’ minds a virtual continuation of the Great Patriotic War in the shape of the war in the Donbass, where the Ukrainians have been given the role of ‘the fascists’; crooks like the field commander nicknamed ‘Motorola’ play the part of the hero-liberators wearing their medals; and the ‘taking’ of the town of Debaltsevo in the Donetsk Region in April 2015 is compared to military operations of the Second World War. Fighters in Donetsk now carry out their own victory parade. The Victory has changed its sign to the opposite side: now it brings not ploughshares but the sword; the incantation, ‘As long as there’s no war’ no longer applies, and the answer to Yevtushenko’s question, ‘do the Russians want war?’ is now affirmative: yes, they do, with Ukraine, America, the West – and to the finish. Thousands of cars are now driving around Russia with a sickening sticker in their rear windows, where the hammer and sickle is assaulting the swastika and with the slogan: ‘1941–1945: Let’s repeat it.’

But behind all these rituals there is emptiness. The principal virtue of Putin’s era is not even the vertical of power, it is not in the repressions or the corruption or the Orthodox renaissance; it is in the imitation of all the institutions, history, memory, power itself. It is in the symbolic order over reality and the individual. And the 9 May holiday has also become a victim of this gigantic falsification. False veterans with fake medals parade the streets – some of them are not war veterans, but veterans of the Communist Party or the NKVD-KGB. The average age of the ‘veterans’ who were invited to Moscow from all over Russia to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Victory was – seventy-three! False posters gaze down from the walls and the billboards, where ignorant designers have illustrated slogans marking Victory Day with pictures from photo collections showing American soldiers, Israeli tanks and even Luftwaffe pilots. On television, they showed coloured-in war films; on the radio, they played songs of the war years being sung under a recording of Russian pop music. The mincing-machine of Putin’s postmodern society has ground down 9 May and produced a sad, half-finished product.

Even the main symbol of victory, the St George ribbon, has become a universal trade mark, which they stick on anything that comes to hand, from sandals to underpants, from bottles of vodka to German beer. The St George ribbon has today become something like New Year tinsel, which decorates everything you can think of in December because the soul simply wants a holiday. Now people also want a holiday, but all they get is an empty gesture, the place for memory becomes a place of contempt. This is probably the harshest accusation one can make against the current regime, which produces only simulations – of democracy, of modernization, of empire, and now a simulation of the Victory. We wanted a historical policy and an imperial myth, but we got banality and pop songs, the slogan ‘On to Berlin’ in the rear window of a Mercedes and ‘veterans of the Donbass’ on the TV screen.