CHAPTER 7
Artist Aleksandr Kamper works near the Valley of Death in the village of Myskhako. On his studio wall hangs a collage entitled Malaia zemlia, composed from an old, torn canvas depicting a beach, which could well be the beach-head at Malaia zemlia. The frontispiece of Brezhnev’s volume of memoirs is mounted on a hill overlooking the shore, rather as Mount Koldun overlooks the battlefield outside Novorossiisk. According to the artist, this work represents state-sponsored memory of Malaia zemlia, with Brezhnev’s book depicted as a monument overlooking an act of remembrance in which the viewer is taking part. Kamper interprets the holes in the picture as gaps in official memory of the Malaia zemlia campaign, which have inhibited informed remembrance, thanks to Brezhnev’s overpowering intervention of the 1970s. According to Kamper’s explanation, Malaia zemlia is remembered almost exclusively thanks to Brezhnev, but because of Brezhnev’s domination that memory has remained incomplete, over powered by his memoirs to the extent that the full, factual picture has been prevented from emerging.
My research shows that this may well be true on the national, mythical level, despite the emergence of more recent historical perspectives on the war which have influenced the picture since Brezhnev’s death. On the local level, however, the gaps have been filled in two different ways: by hard historical facts derived from material and documentary evidence; and by local legend. Recently unearthed artefacts shed considerable light on the engagement, while schools’ local history courses and an authoritative recent history of the campaign by local academic Tamara Iurina serve to propagate a more detailed narrative.1 Education of the young is covered in Part IV; the rest of this part, in contrast, will examine how a local legend sprang up around Brezhnev’s visit, such that local memory of this event as an addendum in its own right to the wartime campaign has reverberated through the town since 1999.
Brezhnev’s visit to Novorossiisk marked a notable bifurcation of attitude both to Malaia zemlia and to Brezhnev himself on the national and local levels. For the country as a whole, the visit had a single significance: the bestowing of the gold star of the hero city on the town, thereby ratifying the award of 1973. This event was connected to the war alone, such that Brezhnev’s name is integrally linked to that of Malaia zemlia and the war myth he constructed around it. Despite the subsequent deconstruction of both the Brezhnev-era war cult and Brezhnev’s cult of personality, this is the perception of Brezhnev and Malaia zemlia that has remained ingrained in the older generation, with the publication of Brezhnev’s over-inflated memoirs providing evidence for this public interpretation. Gorbachev’s period of perestroika (restructuring and reform) in the late 1980s, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the difficult decade thereafter saw the national demise of the official war myth. Only Izvestiia marked the significant fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war with a sarcastic article about Malaia zemlia, indicative of the scornful attitude to Brezhnev’s memoirs still extant in society years after his death, a view that continues to this day, dormant in the minds of those old enough to remember the Brezhnev era.2
In Novorossiisk, however, the Brezhnev connection was evolving along a different path, as Brezhnev’s visit of 1974 largely superseded the formal award of hero city status the previous year. Brezhnev’s visit was a personal triumph for himself and the town, with the general secretary’s charisma in the present more than eclipsing distant memories of his wartime service on Malaia zemlia. Winning over officials, veterans and the public alike, Brezhnev’s character and overt identification with Novorossiisk endeared him to the population, who claimed him as their own. Here was the real Leonid Il’ich, acting and speaking spontaneously and at close quarters, rather than the official statesman observed from afar on the television. If Brezhnev’s wartime function on Malaia zemlia had played a minor role in shaping the postwar town, this visit of the general secretary would influence the development of the newly nominated hero city for a further 30 years, whilst marking a reconstruction of the persona of Brezhnev with the establishment of a burgeoning local legend in the process.
In 1999, towards the culmination of an era of instability, Novorossiisk looked back to a heyday in the town’s history as the twenty-fifth anniversary of Brezhnev’s visit approached. A key investigative newspaper article in Novorossiiskii rabochii exposed new evidence from witnesses that had been suppressed in 1974 in favour of the TASS reports which had dominated the press.3 It is this first public examination of the significant event which both expressed and continued to formulate local opinion on Brezhnev in the town, as the press still delves into ‘hidden’ aspects of Brezhnev’s now legendary visit.
It is not always possible to believe everything that was recorded in the Soviet press at the time of the actual event. On this occasion, though, many citizens were present at official events, and others actually met the general secretary and heard his speeches. News did – and still does – travel fast in this provincial town: it is important not to underestimate the strong network of interconnections among residents in this relatively parochial place Several of my interviewees had either witnessed Brezhnev’s visit or had heard about it from other family members. Eleven respondents aged from around 50 to well over 80 expressed pride and pleasure that they had seen Brezhnev, and a further five had heard about the occasion at second hand. Memories reinforce one another, tending in this case to support Kudryashov’s view that they had been committed to memory at the time and then permanently fixed and laid down in the mind.4 It is probable that they are genuine, as these accounts confirm the main story while differing in points of detail, as would be expected from a variety of respondents spanning a broad age spectrum who had met Brezhnev under slightly different circumstances. Klavdiya, for example, was in the first class at school, while Stepan was already an elderly veteran at the time. Alena recalls how Brezhnev ‘gave her his hand’ from his car, while he was on foot when Mariya saw him. Lev saw Brezhnev on the road in his open car and then in the stadium, where he waved his flag along with the crowd. Vasilisa met Brezhnev at her workplace, the sovkhoz (communal vineyard) in Myskhako, where ‘he came to our corpus and talked to us’. Her colleague Darya, now in her nineties, was one of the workers lucky enough to meet Brezhnev at the aerodrome, standing alongside two women with babies:
He came up to us with open arms and greeted us [. . .] He gave presents to the children, writing on them ‘a present from Grandfather Brezhnev’. [. . .] The next day we [. . .] gathered in the vineyard where we worked and we were all really happy. He got out of the car and said ‘thank you’.
This story has been passed down through Darya’s family with photographic clarity, mediated by a contemporaneous photograph depicting a bent old woman giving flowers to the general secretary, taken when Brezhnev visited Mar’ina roshcha, another outlying village across the bay from Myskhako. This iconic photograph was widely disseminated in Novorossiisk and included in a book of photographs of Brezhnev’s visit edited by his aide Viktor Golikov and published four years later.5 According to Darya’s granddaughter, she likes to imagine that this woman is indeed her own elderly grandmother, hardly conscious of the fact that the original woman was much older than her grandmother at the time, if nonetheless resembling her now, decades later. This example of what Marianne Hirsch terms ‘post-memory’ demonstrates the appropriation of a real memory by a younger generation who did not experience the event, with the projection of a later image onto an earlier one in a ‘merging of people and times’.6 In this case, the woman in the photograph that has passed into local history has been claimed by another, younger individual in her attempt to reconstruct her own picture of that event.7 This small-scale social construct has produced a sense of familial ownership of public memory, which here is on a purely emotional level and without any rational basis, a product of the cultural environment surrounding Brezhnev’s visit.
Brezhnev was not only the subject of photographs in 1974, but also used the occasion to gift some of his own wartime photographs to the Novorossiisk museum. Evdokiia Prialkina, then director of the museum, remembers Brezhnev’s arrival in September, ‘immediately surrounded by women’, in what was apparently the norm. It seems that Brezhnev was a great hit with the opposite sex, embracing them on his departure: ‘a real man’, as recalled by Larisa Kolbasina, the current director. Both women were struck by Brezhnev’s insistence on simplicity: ‘No need for fine-sounding words, such as “Dear Leonid Il’ich, we are very pleased . . . ”’.8
It is noteworthy that considerably more female than male respondents in my survey spontaneously contributed their memories of Brezhnev’s visit. This may demonstrate a reflection of the demographics of the ordinary citizens who encountered the general secretary, combined with the greater proportion of women in my interview sample. This phenomenon should, however, be compared with published local memoirs of the war, which were largely written and consumed by men who had played an active part. Memory of Brezhnev’s visit in 1974 was claimed by the population as a whole, with the women more vocally endorsing Brezhnev’s masculinity
The outcome of the visit was that the museum was given a new building with extra exhibition space in the town centre – some of which is still used to recall Brezhnev’s visit to Novorossiisk. It is this type of aid which remains firmly in the minds of witnesses and has informed the opinion of many of the residents of Novorossiisk today, including newcomers to the town. Brezhnev’s interest in the town’s industry was emphasised in the local press shortly after his visit, with substantially more coverage of his meetings in the port, the cement factories and the new Pepsi-Cola factory than evident in the national press.
When I first spoke to people in Novorossiisk about the town’s attitude to Brezhnev I was told by the archivist of the Maritime Academy that I would not find anyone in Novorossiisk with a bad word to say about Brezhnev. And this, incredibly, seems to be largely true: Brezhnev certainly seems to enjoy more popularity in Novorossiisk than elsewhere in Russia. Forty per cent of my interviewees, aged from 18 to their late eighties, volunteered this opinion without prompting, including Tamara Iurina, Professor of History at the Novorossiisk branch of the Moscow Institute for Economics and the Humanities. Interestingly, of these 49 subjects, at least seven were relative newcomers to the town, who had assimilated this attitude to Brezhnev since their arrival, providing evidence for the efficiency of propagation of the postwar aspect of the Brezhnev myth. Furthermore, the majority of my subjects who volunteered this information reminded me not of Brezhnev’s role on Malaia zemlia or his communist ideology, but of the postwar support afforded to the almost annihilated town thanks to Brezhnev’s intervention. Although younger respondents voiced more general approval of Brezhnev’s help to Novorossiisk, more mature interviewees specifically credited Brezhnev with improving infrastructure (particularly the new trolley-bus lines), supporting the cement factories, expanding the port and building better accommodation for the townspeople. Three respondents cited this aid as an excuse for Brezhnev’s not having visited the town in 1973 as soon as it was made a hero city, ‘recalling’ that Brezhnev had stated that he would only return to the town once Novorossiisk looked worthy of its new status. Although this is reinforced by Brezhnev’s favourable comments on the excellent appearance of the town in his speech of 7 September 1974, a recent publication refers to Brezhnev’s more disparaging remarks about the town on a visit to the ‘Proletariat’ cement works later the same day, when the ‘head of state observed that the appearance of the town was not commensurate with its status as a hero city and that it would be necessary to solve the overall problems of Novorossiisk (with the building of housing, schools, hospitals and roads) at the national level’.9
Evidence suggests that state aid to Novorossiisk was supplied in one way or another from the late 1960s onwards throughout the first decade of the Brezhnev regime – assistance seen by many in Novorossiisk as proof of Brezhnev’s special relationship with the town. However, it is possible to postulate a rationale and mechanism for preferential development without Brezhnev’s intentional intervention. As early as 1945, Novorossiisk was identified as one of 15 major towns that had suffered most severely from enemy action and were therefore in need of substantial state support for their regeneration.10 Like most hero cities, Novorossiisk was a key industrial centre with its cement works; its strategic position on the Black Sea also made Novorossiisk an ideal location for the export of wood from the interior of the region and oil from the Caucasus or Caspian regions, rendering development of the port and its infrastructure an economic priority for the Soviet Union. This led to a marked increase in population in the postwar years, requiring in turn the construction of new living accommodation and concomitant social amenities, until the town’s appearance was indeed considered to be commensurate with its status as a hero city.11 It is probable that more aid was forthcoming after Novorossiisk became a hero city, due to its significance as a tourist destination for Soviets and its transient population of many visitors to the port from overseas.
The fact that Viktor Golikov had the ear of the general secretary and was himself regularly lobbied by Iurii Semenov, the chair of the town’s strategic developmental committee, the Gorispolkom, resulted in the approval by the state of 35 million roubles for Novorossiisk from 1968 to 1975.12 It seems likely that Novorossiisk would not have received this amount of aid had it not been a hero city of the Soviet Union, which itself was dependent upon the Brezhnev connection. Ivo Mijnssen goes even further in concluding that the link with Brezhnev was ‘absolutely decisive’ for the town’s economic development in the late 1960s and 1970s.13 Other factors were also involved, but the evidence certainly points to an exercise in mutual promotion between Brezhnev and Novorossiisk.
This perceived favouritism by Brezhnev in the first half of the 1970s served to increase the status of the town with respect to other cities in the region, promoting some jealousy on the part of the leaders of Krasnodar, the regional capital.14 However, Novorossiisk continued to receive state aid, despite the fact that its own leadership had been denigrated for economic incompetence by the regional authorities in Krasnodar in the late 1960s.15 Furthermore, it must be concluded that the illogical decision to build the first Soviet Pepsi-Cola factory in Novorossiisk was indeed a sign of Brezhnev’s favouritism, as asserted by three middle-aged male interviewees.16 The town has never been able to rely on a stable source of drinking water, a problem which is not totally resolved to this day,17 rendering it a dubious contender for American investment, despite its strategic position on the Black Sea. Although kilometres of extra piping and a reservoir were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, many in the town were still relying on water from wells and springs, despite a surge in population in the decades after the war. By 1968 a crisis situation had developed following a drought during the spring months such that two tankers were commissioned to work round the clock to bring fresh water by sea from Tuapse and Sochi along the coast. Construction of more wide-calibre pipes and underground reservoirs started later that year, using the ‘voluntary’ unpaid labour of thirsty residents to help dig the new trenches in their days off work, an example of the subbotnik (Saturday) system, whereby workers gave up one Saturday a month for the common good.18 Eight of my respondents credited Brezhnev himself with sending the tankers and providing the financial support necessary for this enormous project.
Once the water was flowing, and despite ongoing supply problems, the Pepsi-Cola factory was constructed in Novorossiisk when trade links with the United States were initiated during a period of détente in Cold War relationships. The contract between Pepsico and the Soviet Union was signed when American representatives of the company met Alexei Kosygin in 1968. Kosygin was premier of the Soviet Union as chair of the Council of Ministers who worked alongside Brezhnev, the chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It was largely Kosygin who was responsible for the introduction of reforms in an effort to modernise the economy and expand industry. This contract was a coup both in economic terms and in the field of foreign relations. Both sides benefited: the Soviet Union was allowed to produce an increasingly popular Western product, while the United States gained the right to import one litre of Stolichnaya vodka in return for every litre of Pepsi concentrate exported. It was probably no coincidence that the factory was completed in 1974, a few months before Brezhnev’s visit, nor surprising that he was given credit locally for the the new plant in Novorossiisk, although it seems that he was probably not the main instigator of the project.19
However, Brezhnev’s connection with drinks and drinking water operates also at the more subtle level of local legend. It is documented that, when he was taken to the Valley of Death outside Myskhako, he was shown the Well of Life, where the defenders of Malaia zemlia had gone at night to fetch precious drinking water in the face of fire from Germans holding the upper ground.20 In an incident reminiscent of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, television cameras following Brezhnev showed how he was re-introduced to a grey-haired woman, who as a young girl during the war had given him water from a bucket at the height of the battle.21 This unexpected meeting apparently reduced Brezhnev to tears, supporting the claim of elderly Lyudmila that Brezhnev had uncharacteristically declined the wine or vodka he was offered on that occasion, preferring to walk off, alone with his memories, to drink water from the well.
The links between Brezhnev and drinking water as a symbol of life and renewal are potent. The arrival of mains water, claimed to be thanks to Brezhnev’s intervention, was celebrated in 1973 by the erection of a statue on the promenade, Dariashchaia vodu (the Water-Giver), the only statue to mains water in Russia.22 The original sculpture was replaced in 2006, on the reconstruction of the promenade, by a more elegant version by sculptor Aleksandr Suvorov, under the direction of the mayor of Novorossiisk and with money donated by businesses, reinforcing the town’s continued gratitude for a stable supply of drinking water.
A female with softly sculpted features, the statue kneels in thanks and supplication with cupped hands holding water outstretched towards the sea, whence the water originally came. Offering the water to the people, she allows it to sprinkle into the pool at her feet, the source of a fountain, the first in Novorossiisk, which would not have been possible before the advent of the mains supply.23 Galina Krympokha, former archivist at the Maritime Academy, attributed the original statue to funds from Brezhnev himself, while Petr, a senior architect, connects the statue with Brezhnev’s instructions to send water to the town by tankers and its ongoing importance as a result of the fragility of the supply even today. Reflecting the primitive emphasis on the gift of life through water, the statue continues to be linked with Brezhnev by some residents in his symbolic role of a beneficent water god, complementing that of benefactor and patron to the town.
Evidence for changes in the attitude of the hero city to its patron may be found in promotional photograph albums of Novorossiisk published over the last three decades. 1978s edition was edited by Viktor Golikov, who seems to have been responsible both for Brezhnev’s visit and the promotion of Novorossiisk in the 1970s. It is therefore not surprising that it contains several pages dedicated both to Brezhnev’s wartime role and his 1974 visit. By 1998, however, there was little interest in the general secretary, such that the equivalent publication had only one wartime photograph including Brezhnev in a total of 14, with no indication of his visit or his connection with the conferment of hero city status, in line with the more derogatory national understanding of Brezhnev’s role. Following renewed interest in his visit, however, the latest luxury edition, published in 2012, indicates a reversal of attitude, with just one small photograph of Brezhnev on Malaia zemlia in 1943 amongst a total of 46, while his visit in 1974 is given much greater coverage alongside images indicating the increased status of the town as an industrial centre.24
In contrast to the national attitude to Novorossiisk, it is clear that not only war memory is at work locally today. Brezhnev’s postwar role in Novorossiisk linked to his visit is indeed considered now to be more meaningful than his time on Malaia zemlia or his once-famous war memoirs. Brezhnev put this provincial town on the map of the Soviet Union to the extent that interviewee Vyacheslav likened him to Lenin; he was deemed a ‘godsend’ by a priest; and described as the town’s ‘godfather’ by the regional manager in charge of maintenance and planning of monuments in Novorossiisk. Over the years, personal and public memories have been incorporated into the larger cultural narrative so that even newcomers are inculcated with a duty of thanks to Brezhnev, who, according to all my respondents, did more than any other statesman for Novorossiisk. The town’s popular sentiment is summed up by former Museum Director Prialkina: If you ask anyone about Brezhnev today, they will talk about ‘the era of stagnation’, linking it with Brezhnev. This may be the political verdict of his rule. But in Novorossiisk we acknowledge the truth that, for us, we want to remember with sincerity Leonid Il’ich, the man who did more than anybody else for the development of our town.25