Today’s Victory Day Parade (9 May) was poignant for Russia with Vladimir Putin flying to newly-annexed Crimea to celebrate the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Past Soviet glories provide a useful cultural and political backdrop for the Russian president as he deals with the ongoing Ukrainian Crisis.
Today’s Victory Day Parade marks the sixty-ninth anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945 to the Soviet Union. There is no doubting the immense Soviet contribution in defeating the Axis Powers and this is often overlooked in the West and within popular culture. Increasingly however, it has served to encourage a rose-tinted view of the Red Army and is part of a wider state-controlled agenda to provide a sacrosanct and unifying narrative of the conflict.
Such a discourse can be articulated thus: Crediting the Red Army for the victory; nurture an idealised image of the State as guarantors of the victory; and emphasise the Soviet liberation of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Note for example, the prescient riots in Tallinn in 2007 between ethnic Russians and the Estonian authorities over a Soviet war monument. Underlying these themes is the notion of shared sacrifice, suffering and endurance of the Russian people against Nazism. The objective is to foster a post-Soviet ‘Russian’ national identity. To go against this statist invocation of unity would be perceived as questioning the previous legitimacy of Soviet power, especially as President Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as 'a major geopolitical disaster' of the Twentieth century.
Controlling the Narrative
Depictions of the Red Army and the Soviet Union have been a contentious issue since Glasnost in the 1980s and the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. The Putin era has ushered in a Cold War regression whereby the state seeks to control interpretations and act as custodian of the ‘Great Patriotic War’.
The intention is to keep from public scrutiny or aggressively rebut revelations that err from the Red Army’s role as liberators against Nazism. One such example is the furor over the revelations of Red Army atrocities in Antony Beevor’s ‘Berlin: The Downfall 1945’, published in 2002. To shore up this ‘official truth’ and to add further political control, President Putin earlier this week signed off federal law making it a criminal offence to deny the facts established by the 1945 Nuremberg Trials as well as to ‘publicly spread information on military and memorial commemorative dates that are clearly disrespectful of society, and publicly desecrate symbols of Russia’s military glory’.
The now defunct ‘Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests’ under President Medvedev in 2009 also helped to foster a climate to discourage politicians, academics and activists in Russia and elsewhere who have alleged war crimes by the Red Army, Stalin’s leadership or to discuss contentious issues such as the impact of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Reconciling with the past has been exploited for political gain also, such as the scrutiny given to the Katyn massacre of 1940. President Putin has fallen short of issuing a full apology but pragmatically issued a form of regret (with caveats) at a joint commemoration with Polish officials in April 2010, as part of a diplomatic initiative to foster improved bilateral ties. Renowned Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda’s film, Katyn (2007) was also shown in Russia during this time, contributing further awareness and showing the collusive nature of the Polish puppet state following the post-war settlement as well as Soviet duplicity in the mass executions of some 22,000 Polish POWs.
Alongside a media toeing the Putin-line, Fedor Bondarchuk’s recent box office breaking, bombastic production, Stalingrad, based on the battle that culminated in the encirclement and destruction of the German Sixth Army is a Russian cinematic vehicle that serves to further the regime’s agenda via popular culture.
Stalingrad’s usage of technical innovation, expensive grandiose production and visceral depictions of urban warfare (the ‘Stalingrad Academy of street-fighting’) cannot mask the deficiencies in plot and clichéd characterisation. There is no overt questioning of the Stalinist regime. Rather the screen is filled with uncomplicated doses of patriotism, defence of the Motherland and a self-sacrifice spiel that would appeal to easily pleased young Russians. In comparison, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001), though itself a flawed film,does convey the brutal indifference of the Soviet bureaucracy in feeding troops into the ‘meat grinder’ of Stalingrad, as epitomised by Stalin’s Order No. 227 (‘Not One Step Back’) as well as the political machinations at play, exemplified by the presence of Chief Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, portrayed by the late Bob Hoskins.
Bondarchuk is a member of President Putin’s United Russia Party and so Stalingrad raises interesting points about the way the conflict is imagined in modern Russia, considering the director’s closeness to the political establishment.
Back to the Future
The muscular displays of Russian modern military hardware, manpower and patriotic sentiment at the parade will resonate loudly this year, coinciding with events unfolding in Ukraine and following the annexation of Crimea. Assisted by a pliant media, this is fertile ground toengender domestic support for, and the actions of the Putin regime; it is portrayed as defending Russia’s reputation and cultivating an image of a victorious and morally right nation. A recent Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs report on violations on Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens includes Second World era photographs depicting Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany.
The usage of terms such as ‘fascist’ and ‘Neo-Nazi’ to describe the Ukrainian leadership is also powerful, linking the ‘suffering’ of 1939-1945 to the alleged contemporary mistreatment of ethnic Russians. It also a loaded political barb, tearing at the complexities of Ukrainian involvement in the Second World War, as epitomised by Stepan Bandera, a divisive figure yet also a rallying point for opposing groups with differing interpretations of the war and the present situation.