From 1946 to 1950, every 9 May – Victory Day – the front page of Pravda carried a huge portrait of Stalin, reinstating him in his proper role as the architect of victory. But there was a paradox here too, which the cult of Stalin was unable to resolve after the death of the vozhd in 1953. By assuming the role of victor, Stalin unwillingly exposed himself, post mortem, to blame – and even ridicule – for all the mistakes committed in the course of the war. This was Khrushchev’s ploy from the very beginning of his de-Stalinization campaign when he took over as first secretary in 1953, culminating at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961. It was also a convenient way to absolve himself of actions he had carried out as Stalin’s loyal cupbearer. Already on Victory Day in 1953, two months after Stalin’s death, the tributes to the vozhd were missing from the banner headlines; there was no military parade. It had been shifted to 1 May, a more traditional date. Victory Day was instead preceded by two organized events. One, on 7 May in the Bolshoi Theatre, celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of Moscow University. It was timed to coincide with a mass meeting of Soviet youth on Lenin Hills, greeted by the press with an enthusiasm previously reserved for Victory Day. But both had had nothing to do with the war. A second official celebration was held on the eve of Victory Day, 8 May, also in the Bolshoi Theatre, for the top civil and military leaders. The main speaker was General Ivan Konev, a hero of the war but without the stature of a Zhukov or a Rokossovsky. Konev’s speech dealt only with the military side of the war and mentioned Stalin only once.1 The process of what has been called the ‘expansion of memory’ had begun.2 Before Khrushchev’s removal in 1964, he played the key role in denouncing and eliminating his potential rivals – first Beria, then Malenkov and Molotov – from positions of power, sidelining Zhukov for a second time. If all the wartime leaders were discredited, who then, one could legitimately ask, had led the country to victory?3
In a search for answers one turns to the celebrations of the war. The war was in many ways a formative period for the Soviet population as the revolution of 1917 never was, yet Stalin had to ‘devaluate’ its memory, treating it as a passing moment in the building of socialism. To have done otherwise would have been to celebrate the sense of liberation and self-valuation that came with the themes of mobilization. The arc of the pendulum between russo-centrism and Soviet patriotism had swung dangerously far in each direction; it had to be brought back to a central position. At first, the ritual of Victory Day was exploited by Stalin to reconcile the inherent contradictions between the two positions. The vozhd alone possessed the wisdom and far-sightedness to lead the country from victory to a new stage in the development of socialism. Without his close surveillance, guidance and – when necessary – brutal intervention, the building of socialism would lose its momentum and direction. During the early years of the war, Stalin himself had placed restraints on the cult of leadership, briefly fading into the background before he began to burnish his image again.4 During most of the war, centre stage was occupied by the people, with the Russians in the forefront. The celebrations of Victory Day with Stalin at the centre of his associates on the reviewing platform above Lenin’s mausoleum restored the balance. But the celebration of Victory Day was terminated two years after the war and not revived again until 1964 under Brezhnev.
With the restoration of Victory Day in 1964, Stalin’s reputation, which had reached its nadir under Khrushchev’s withering – often fantastical – recital, gradually recovered. And then, in the Russian Federation, it soared to a 50 per cent approval rating in 2004, where it has hovered ever since. One of the most contested recent battles over Stalin’s reputation as warlord centred on a topographical dispute over the naming of the most famous battle of the Second World War in the east; the city of Stalingrad had been renamed Volgograd, but what about the battle? Surely it too would lose its symbolic meaning if it were also renamed.5
While Vladimir Putin has embraced the idea that the Soviet Union made the greatest sacrifices and contributed the most to winning the war, he has been more restrained in associating himself with Stalin as the architect of victory.6 In his brief remarks at Red Square celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Victory Day in 2020, Putin did not mention Stalin at all. In his long article prepared for a Western audience on the anniversary, he briefly acknowledged Stalin’s ‘crimes’ against his own people and ‘the horrors of mass repression’. He then went on to praise Stalin’s role in foreign policy, first in the course of justifying the Nazi-Soviet Pact as part of a defensive strategy and then at the Tehran and Yalta conferences as a founder of the postwar international system, in other words as a diplomat, not as a warlord. Putin attributed victory in the war to the courage and sacrifices of the people whom he has called variously Soviet and Russian under a collective leadership.7 This fits the anthropologist Serguei Oushakine’s concept of ‘patriotic despair’, which by evoking the traumatic memories of loss and suffering in war feeds into a powerful myth. This – and not the revolution – is the tradition with which Putin identifies himself.8 Meanwhile, similar representations of the war have steadily emerged from below in the Russian provinces, suggesting how closely Putin’s myth-making replicates the mood of the population.9
In the former republics the pattern varied. In Ukraine, Stalin’s general popularity was considerably greater in the eastern than the western regions, where it was virtually non-existent. The celebrations of his achievements in war and peace were often marked by extreme demonstrations. In Zaporozhe, in southeastern Ukraine, the Stalin monument erected by the local communists was blown up in December 2010. It was quickly replaced with a bust that linked him even more closely to the Great Fatherland War. In Western Ukraine the memory of Stepan Bandera, the most celebrated anti-Stalinist in Ukrainian memory wars, underwent similar permutations. As of early 2014 there were forty-six full-sized statues or busts of Bandera in Western Ukraine, plus fourteen plaques, all located in L’viv; in addition more than 100 streets have been renamed after him in the same region, and five museums commemorating him were constructed between 1990 and 2010. But, as was the case with Stalin, memory wars can be fought with real weapons. The first two monuments erected in Bandera’s home town were blown up in the early 1990s and plaques dedicated to him were desecrated with swastikas.10 The fight in Ukraine goes on; truly this was ‘the war that failed to end’.11
Stalin’s conduct of the war will remain mired in controversy; its long-term consequences may never be fully grasped. Such are the fruits of paradox. His wartime policies were on one level a continuation at higher levels of prewar trends towards centralization and control; on another level they deviated from those trends. Just how radically they deviated may be judged from the fate of the major innovations and improvisations introduced in the postwar period. Simply put, most of them were discarded or repressed. Changes were marginal: a modified flexible definition of the professional autonomy of the technical and creative intelligentsia, however still monitored by party and police surveillance. The new postwar campaigns of mobilization – reminiscent of the thirties – restored the more punitive aspects. Various reform schemes failed to prevent a further decline in the viability of the collective farm system in the post-Stalin years. Attempts to shift resources to the material needs of the population were not permitted to diminish traditional investments in heavy industry, which, with the exception of defence needs, became increasingly outmoded in the decades that followed.12 An increase in the level of educational standards was notable in physics and mathematics, but biology and especially genetics took years to recover.13 The social sciences and humanities were heavily burdened by ideological considerations until the end of the Soviet period. Training and performance standards in music, the theatre and ballet remained high, but for a long time the repertoire – with few exceptions – was drawn from pre-revolutionary works.
Stalin’s record as a warlord was paradoxical on a gigantic scale. His leadership – steady, ruthless, tireless and remarkably flexible, given the prewar evidence – was a major factor in winning the war, but then after the war he took measures which suppressed or stifled the most creative elements in the country that he had barely unfettered for four years. His successors failed to break the dead hand of Stalinism on the country. His legacy was to burden the Soviet Union and its successor to our own days.