PART III
В молчании застыли все вокруг:
Куранты бьют мерно в тиши,
И гордо рвется к небу Вечный огонь.
Его зажгли мы в память всех людей,
Отдавших за Родину жизнь.
Этот великий подвиг
В наших живет сердцах.1
Every hour on the hour since 1960, from the first hesitant notes on the celeste to the final triumphant orchestral crescendo, the strains of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Novorossiisk Chimes have rung out across Heroes’ Square, where the tomb of the Heroes of the Soviet Union killed during the Malaia zemlia campaign has stood since 1946.2 Commissioned in the name of the citizens of Novorossiisk by the secretary of the town’s Communist Party, Shostakovich’s requiem for the fallen heroes indicates not only the inevitable passing of time, but also links past and present in its regular remembrance of those who fell on Malaia zemlia.3 Heroes’ Square is widely considered to be the most sacred area of Novorossiisk with regard to the war myth. Groups of schoolchildren and students are often to be found at the memorials, while local dignitaries and important visitors gather there for formal ceremonies and rituals of remembrance.
We have seen in Part I that, despite the accounts of personal heroism in Sokolov’s memoirs and the Ratnyi podvig Novorossiiska series, propagation of the local war myth through literature was highly influenced by the state in the form of Brezhnev’s authoritative Malaia zemlia memoirs. A greater local perspective was added to the myth with the erection of the Brezhnev statue. However, remembrance in Novorossiisk is not simply a case of lionising Brezhnev’s role in the myth or of top-down ideology in action at a local level. Even within the constraints of the Soviet Union, there was much more scope for the proactive agency of the individual and the local dimension of commemoration in the case of rituals of remembrance and the design of monuments. And, surprisingly, individualism in these areas still exists in Novorossiisk – an attribute apparently highly valued in a hero city where respect for the dead of Malaia zemlia is almost as much a part of daily life as the monuments lining its streets.
The maintenance of these monuments and the continuation of the annual ritualistic ceremonies of remembrance taking place around them are evidence of what society deems its duty to remember the past. This continued commitment to honour the war dead is not unique to Novorossiisk or even to Russia. Many aspects of remembrance are universal, as communities still pay homage to those who gave their lives for what is held to be a worthy cause, and to pass on this respect to future generations. In my analysis of the dynamics and mechanism of this strong social reaction in Novorossiisk, I demonstrate that, even in the Soviet Union, the politics of remembrance were not entirely centralised, with some scope for different towns to develop and customise their own memorial practices and sculptures. In contrast to the largely uniform pan-Soviet Victory Day celebrations, the ritual of Beskozyrka, started locally in 1968, serves to emphasise the unique memorial identity of Novorossiisk. Quite surprisingly, this longstanding tradition, now fully incorporated into the myth of Malaia zemlia, was developed not by town authorities, but at the instigation of the inventive members of a small youth club at the height of the Brezhnev-era war cult. An examination of the development of Beskozyrka in Chapter 10 highlights the key role played by the younger generation in the propagation of the local war myth.
A regular repetition of memorial practice may comfort those who grieve, confirm a love of nation and town in many, if also tending to alienate members of the younger generation. Furthermore, any inertia associated with a tradition, even one strongly linked with local identity, risks leading to stagnation, as evidenced by the decline in attendance at ceremonies of remembrance in some countries. This is largely due to the death of veterans and their families, added to the disinterest of the younger generation. In the case of Novorossiisk, however, I show that the population in general displays an increasing empathy with and respect for the courage of the troops. This phenomenon is thanks to national and local conditions under which the war myth is thriving, such that this continuing legacy of the youth of 1968, far from being discarded after Brezhnev’s death like many other aspects of the Soviet war cult, is increasingly relevant to the identity of the contemporary hero city of Novorossiisk.
Monumental commemoration of the dead is central to remembrance across the globe, but the states of the former Soviet Union as a whole have rather more than their fair share of World War II memorials to their war dead. At the end of the Soviet era, deaths of armed forces personnel and civilians were estimated to be around 20 million. And that estimate has risen considerably ever since until it is now closer to 30 million, representing at least 20 per cent of the population as a whole – a figure indicative of the huge scale of casualties inflicted on this occupied country.4
In Chapter 11 I explore through the framework of societal entropy the role of physical space and symbolic spatiality in creating and sustaining memory of the fallen. Modern Novorossiisk represents a mnemonic social construct, with over 200 monuments commemorating those who fell on Malaia zemlia arranged across the town and in surrounding areas to define this special site of memory. Monumental remembrance in Novorossiisk is largely identified by its topography, as Malaia zemlia is a geographically discrete area, where the former battle zone is cradled within the contours of the Caucasian foothills. As in some of the battlefields of We stern Europe, significant decisions have been made either to develop or to retain the ravaged landscape. The topography of the hero city not only dictated some of the military action, but also planning decisions about the erection of monuments. My analysis of the decision-making processes follows on from the examination in Part II of the debate around the Brezhnev statue. In the case of war monuments, the state has played a major role in some instances, whereas in others responsibility is delegated to the Krasnodar Region or even the mayor of Novorossiisk. My research into the urban cultural history of the hero city sheds light on the changing priorities of both state and town over the years since the war, as monuments from different eras make their imprint on the landscape, leaving a visual reminder of the battle lines in the context of the history of Novorossiisk since its foundation in the nineteenth century.
There is a tension between today’s official memory and some degree of forgetting, either unintentional or selective. Monuments seen on a regular basis may fade into the habitual landscape, while there is also evidence of some official and unofficial embarrassment at other aspects of the war which may have been conveniently omitted from the popularly accepted myth of Malaia zemlia. This collective narrative is not able to accommodate every single sub-group in a potentially polyphonic memorial situation. In Chapter 12 I analyse the opposition between mainstream memory, which dictates the official mnemonic identity of Novorossiisk and is located visibly in and around the town centre, and some aspects of popular remembrance on the fringes of organised society, often situated on the geographical periphery. In particular, opinion and practice in the modern centre of Novorossiisk is compared with that in the sel’skii okrug (rural outlying district) of Myskhako, standing on the site of the worst of the Malaia zemlia battle.
Today’s renewed emphasis in President Putin’s Russia on ritual and monumental remembrance implies societal agreement on the interpretation of memory. However, the dead who are remembered remain individuals within the agreed collective narrative, whose personal remembrance is also important to their familial descendants. This dichotomy raises the question of how to locate the individual within a war myth – both individual victims of war and the individuals remembering them today, for whom collective remembrance may not be an adequate or accurate representation of their feelings or attitude to events of the past. I demonstrate that not all the fallen can be accommodated or respected within the simple war myth, revealing different categories of war dead. The town’s relationship with the fallen troops may seem straightforward, but deeper searching exposes the ongoing challenges to respect afforded to innocent civilians and the enemy. Cases on the periphery of the town and of active memory are examined, including a disputed Holocaust event in Novorossiisk, an example of the sensitive issues with which citizens of former occupied Soviet states are grappling today.
The interaction of mythical and historical time is a key aspect of the dynamics of any myth-making process. We have seen in Part I the machinations of the Soviet cultural authorities to establish control over the abstract concept of time in the production of literary memoirs according to the guidelines of socialist realism. Although the intricacies of the psychology and the neuroscience of memory are beyond the scope of this book, it is important to recognise that memory remains a temporal concept, dependent on time in three ways. Firstly, as demonstrated in Part I, the substance and detail of memory is time dependent, changing with the political tide which may potentially imbue the war myth with different meanings; secondly, it is able to recall the past in the present, almost unconsciously relating the former to the latter, with time itself able to expand or contract flexibly on the part of both society and the individual remembering the past; and, thirdly, the passage of time can wipe away traces of the past, scattering personal memories and eroding memorials with a corresponding increase in entropy as time marches inexorably onwards. In establishing the dynamics of the transmission of the war myth, I show that the rich culture of memorial traditions in Novorossiisk merges to produce a unique perception of mythical time, which interacts with and occasionally dominates historical time, thus exposing the true complexity of the process of myth making in the Soviet Union and modern Russia.