CHAPTER 13
Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility.1
In 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, a 200-tonne memory capsule was raised from the sea bed in Novorossiisk. Dreamt up and organised 50 years previously by the ‘Shkhuna rovesnikov’, it contained ‘letters to the future’ written by 118 adults and children to their descendants.2 Among the memorial articles offered by the public and sealed in the capsule were several war medals, evidence that the propagation of war memory to future generations was deemed important by residents as early as 1967. The stainless steel capsule embedded in concrete also contained a recording made by Iurii Levitan, the famous Soviet newsreader associated with wartime broadcasts and the minute’s silence introduced to radio in 1965, stating: ‘Those who open it should be grateful to those who gave their lives so that you could live happily.’
It seems that these descendants concur: journalist Evgenii Lapin wrote in 2013 of the ‘return to a duty of memory’ as ‘the most important task of patriotic education’.3 And that widespread sense of responsibility for the transmission of memory to future generations has resulted in a second phase of this initiative. During the Beskozyrka ceremony in 2017, children from schools across the area deposited their own ‘dispatches to descendants’ into special boxes at the Malaia zemlia memorial, to be, once again, placed into a time capsule for a further 50 years. On this occasion, though, all mention of the 1917 revolution has been omitted from the attendant publicity, with World War II remaining the only historical connection.4
Through these time capsules, generations are mutually linked in two directions in the transmission of the war myth: looking backwards to their antecedents and forwards to their descendants in a chain of memory. Although the Shkhunatiki were only one generation removed from their parents who fought in the war, young people today are temporally more distant from the war experienced by their greatgrandparents. With veterans becoming fewer, artefacts such as war medals, which bridge memorial distance, are increasingly significant in the propagation of the war myth if the past is to become closer in the imagination of the younger generation. While examining the mechanism and effectiveness of the familial transmission of the myth, this chapter analyses whether the family as an integral part of society, where physical proximity is often most marked, values and even needs its ancestors in order to retain its mnemonic identity. Information about the mechanism of familial propagation of the war myth was obtained from two perspectives: from discussions with younger respondents and with older generations. Some of these were war veterans, if with a variety of wartime experiences which together were far more complex than the simplified myth allows. They included military personnel, deportees and child internees. Personal interviews with 26 young adults aged 18 to 29 revealed that a substantial 58 per cent of subjects remembered having discussed the wartime role of their grandparents and greatgrandparents with them, indicative of oral transmission of memory through meaningful conversations.
The close relationship of the present with the past is key to continued societal cohesion. The presentist position, whereby the present reshapes the past as governments and society’s elite employ a preferred version of history for current utility, is the political side of the mnemonic coin. The opposite, anthropological side, sees rather the past forging present identity, whereby society interprets positive current social qualities as due to historical events, which so moulded the characteristics of their ancestors that they were then transmitted across the generations. This essentialist position is what I term the ‘genetic’ approach to desirable social attributes, founded on longstanding traditional familial values, which my research indicates is noticeable in Novorossiisk. There is an evident causal contradiction between the two positions, which are not, however, incompatible in this context, but indicative of the complexity of myth formation in the Soviet Union and modern Russia. This genetic position acknowledges forces already present for centuries within traditional Russian society, which act within the overpowering presentist environment of the state war cult to reinforce a potent local war myth.
Conversations within the family appear to be responsible for a ‘genetic’ construction of memory, a method of propagation typical of traditional pre-Soviet folkloric transmission, whereby older family members act as links in a memory chain which connects today’s citizens genetically with the landing troops. Already in the nineteenth century the poet Mikhail Lermontov had referred to Russian soldiers at the Battle of Borodino as ‘a mighty, spirited tribe’,5 underlining in the language of romanticism the positive military traits possessed by the soldiers which were passed down to their descendants. Two hundred years after Borodino and two days after his inauguration as president in May 2000, Valdimir Putin declared of the whole Russian people: ‘We have become used to victory. This habit is in our blood.’6 Putin held his 2012 election address, perhaps not by chance, on 23 February, Defender of the Fatherland Day, when Russian military courage is celebrated. Putin utilised this occasion to repeat his positive message:
We are a victorious nation. This is in our genes, in our genetic code and it is transmitted from generation to generation.7
In contrast, Serguei Oushakine points to a link with the past through a more negative continuity, whereby generations are united in sadness through rituals of loss, symptomatic of a ‘patriotism of despair’.8 This claim refers largely to victims of more recent wars and is an aspect of genetic inheritance not observed now in the hero city of Novorossiisk, where Beskozyrka and commemorative requiems highlight gratitude today for victorious and justified death during the Great Patriotic War, rather than despair over the ‘devalued military sacrifice’ perceived in the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnia during the unstable final decades of the twentieth century.
In Novorossiisk the genetic belief system stresses continuity with the past – not with the Soviet Union in general, but rather through a local, familial connection which is also evident in the feeling of empathy with the landing troops demonstrated particularly at Beskozyrka.9 Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone see decentred social memory as an inheritable property, transmitted by institutions rather than individuals, which then reinforce the relation between the individual and the social. This genetic mechanism attributes to society a will and a memory of its own which is independent of the individual within it.10 However, my research indicates that the propagation of the war myth is linked to the transmission of a belief and behaviour system as if through cultural DNA, much as eye colour or blood group is transmitted from one generation to another. This is due partly to the strong sense of tradition in the town and partly to the educational memorial environment cultivated by the state, schools and the local authority as well as within the family unit. Many of my interviewees were able to point to their individual ancestors who had fought locally and subsequently settled in Novorossiisk, while respondents at both ends of the age spectrum claimed that they had inherited the hardy and heroic character of their forebears. Moreover, social memory in general is deemed by some to be transmissible through the blood-line in a similar fashion, with one town councillor regarding the war myth as ‘our blood, our duty, future and past together’.
It is this perceived duty of memory which seems to motivate the older generations to educate younger family members in the tradition of commemorative practices, thereby nurturing a familial cultural heritage. Extrapolating from the individual to the community in general, the headmistress of School Number Six observed that the heroism typical of wartime is transmitted through ritual, as if ‘caught’ by the younger generation in the form of improved behaviour: ‘geroicheskoe iavlenie diktuet povedenie’ (‘an heroic event dictates behaviour’). Anatolii, a local historian, commented on this phenomenon, claiming that ‘it is as if they drink it in their mothers’ milk’, while Boris, a former soldier in his forties, believes that the town’s inhabitants ‘were born’ from Malaia zemlia, suggesting that the courageous qualities of the heroes are as desirable in a family as in a tribe or race. Indeed, Alina, a young teacher, sees the war myth as part of the town’s ‘living organism’, whereby knowledge about Malaia zemlia is ‘naturally’ assimilated. Claims of a passive, informal assimilation of both heroic qualities and memory itself, much as first language acquisition, must, however, be questioned, due to the many more formal measures taken to ensure the socialisation of the young with respect to the myth of Malaia zemlia. Whatever the mechanism of transmission, the resulting sense of familial memory and cross-generational identification nurtured in the young is epitomised in the slogan ubiquitously displayed on school walls in Novorossiisk: ‘Pobeda deda moia pobeda’ (‘My grandfather’s victory is my victory’).
One manifestation of the intergenerational transmission of social values is the post-wedding ritual, where myth is effectively propagated as generations come together at local war memorials to lay flowers as a token of respect to the war dead.11 Although in many cases the original meaning of this tradition has been lost, for the first postwar generation such visits in homage to the heroes were extremely important.12 Most of those mainly female respondents who volunteered relevant information interpreted this pan-Russian tradition as a mark of gratitude and indebtedness to ancestors who had given their own lives so that their children and grandchildren would be able to live in freedom and happiness.13 The sites most frequently visited are the main Malaia zemlia memorial complex and the smaller Valley of Death complex in Myskhako, where it is apparently usual for the bridegroom to pose at the base of a map of the Malaia zemlia campaign, while the bride climbs to the top for the photographs, in a pose suggesting the supremacy of the woman in the new family. Evdokiia Prialkina also refers to visits to the Well of Life monument in Myskhako, linking the only water source on Malaia zemlia with the successful future of young married couples. Justifying the local meaning behind the tradition using a further genetic trope, she claims that the characteristic of faithfulness is transmitted from the landing troops to the younger generation: ‘It is as though the Malozemel’tsy, through their heroic lives, bequeath their faithfulness to young people in their life together.’14 It is thus implied that the mutual loyalty of a married couple guarantees the continuity of life through their floral tributes to the war dead. Furthermore the Soviet postwar expression of lament at the death of millions of young soldiers, ‘skol’ko ne rodilos’ detei pogibshikh soldat’ (‘How many soldiers’ children were never born!’), quoted by Anna, a retired nurse, implicitly places a duty on the new family to replace both those who died and their unborn children. The war myth and the celebration of married life are thus linked with the necessity and ability, through water from the Well of Life, to procreate and propagate a new family.
Jay Winter views war memorials as sites of symbolic exchange, where the dead are figuratively brought home and where the living express a debt to the fallen.15 In Russia, the flowers of the newly-weds are offered in thanks for the gift of life, both theirs and those of their yet unborn children, who may also inherit the heroic character of the war dead, in what seems to be almost a fertility ritual. From my discussions, however, the subtleness of interpretation of this tradition by the older generations is lost on the young, who seem to act out of custom alone, with no overt reference to the war except the use of monuments as a backdrop for wedding photographs, providing memory of a different kind for the new family unit.
In modern Novorossiisk there is evidence that the conservative values of the postwar years still exist, as many adults praise the return in the twenty-first century of aspects of vospitanie and patriotic education familiar from their own youth in the Komsomol or Young Pioneer organisations. Any potential generation gap is partly narrowed by this nostalgia for what parents and grandparents deem idealistic aspects of the Soviet past. However, despite the general strength of family bonds and the varied mechanisms by which the young are exposed to war memory in Novorossiisk, my research indicates that there are some families who do not pass on the memory tradition from one generation to another. One elderly man, a child during the war, blamed the family if a child is disaffected, seeing it as their clear duty to transmit memory, although teacher Nadezhda considered that young parents born at the time of change in the late eighties and early 1990s may have different values and little regard for remembrance. Furthermore, the headmaster of a secondary school observed that some children may live in small family units or atomised families who do not spend much time together, such that they are not exposed to an upbringing which includes discussions within the family about the war.
Those not observing memorial traditions were seen as abnormal by some of my respondents active in local affairs: families are accused of being ‘illiterate’ or ‘bad parents’, incapable of joining in the collective social movement for memory transfer, while others are considered ‘nepravil’nye liudi’ (‘not proper people’). This is an indication that an educated, well-brought-up young person is expected by society to think in a socially correct way about the war, due to the ‘proper’ promotion of socially accepted traditional values within the family. Any deviation that may threaten social cohesion invites condemnation.
A recent incident in which a group of six young dancers uploaded a video onto YouTube of themselves performing a twerk dance in front of the Malaia zemlia monument incurred the immediate wrath of the courts. It was not necessarily the suggestive dance that offended public decency, but the place in which such ‘deviant’ behaviour was displayed, which immediately called into question the moral upbringing of the perpetrators. Three of them were given light custodial sentences for ‘mild hooliganism’. However, it was the parents of the youngest girl, still under the age of 18, who came in for most condemnation: they were accused of ‘failing to perform parental duties for raising minors’, and charged with ‘failing to take measures to facilitate children’s physical, intellectual, psychological, spiritual and moral growth’.16
Those parents wishing to imbue a sense of connection with the past in their children may employ family archives, letters, photographs and other artefacts, which render memory more vivid and tangible and engage younger generations more than a dry narration. Although some older respondents narrated their histories to me without any material props, others employed old photographs to mediate their account. In such instances, visual aids may act as aides-mémoire, partly dictating the rote repetition of narratives. I observed this with two older women, Sonia and Lyubov, who twice recounted their own memories of the war to me identically, on both occasions clutching photographs of themselves as young women.
The interaction of private memory with an official war myth is not straightforward. Harald Welzer’s study of intergenerational family narrations finds that they can be gradually re-shaped over time due to re-evaluation and the need for a new meaning as changes in the political environment may affect the perceptions of both the narrator and the listening descendants.17 Similarly, Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson argue that mythical elements in both public and private memory form a continuing historical presence, being continually reshaped for the utility of an individual.18 Retrospective re-positioning of one’s own life story may enable the deployment of some historical perspective, as in the case of memoir literature. Kirschenbaum finds alongside this a common renegotiation of the narrator’s identity in order to maintain the compatibility of individual and official memory 19 Oral narratives become simpler over time, as any problems and ambiguity are removed and plots rearranged to form an idealised linear account, much as in the war myth in general and in local memoir literature.20 To day’ interviewer cannot wind back the clock to hear biographical tales told years ago. However, it is known that, whereas during the war soldiers would declare that they were fighting for Stalin, later memoirs declared that they were fighting for communism, while accounts today hold that the war was fought for the people narod).
Consistency of narrative was demonstrated in one woman’s account of her childhood in the war, related to me in identical terms on three different occasions, providing evidence of the rehearsed version of the past that she wished to propagate. There is no reason to doubt the general authenticity of Lyudmila’s story, which was probably typical of many with such a powerful emotional investment in their personal history. Her father joined the army in the early days of the war, leaving his wife alone with two children. As the enemy advanced towards Novorossiisk, the family became separated; Lyudmila found herself in the care of her older brother living in a small cave in the hills outside the town, with, she chuckles, no proper toilet facilities. Her brother joined the partisans, while Lyudmila eventually went to Ukraine to try to find another member of the family; there, she was taken by the Germans and held in a camp for child internees until her liberation.
While there are clear parallels between accepted social memory and that of individuals, it is important to note the significance of the collective war myth for the individual within the dominant influence of the state war cult, despite the variety of wartime experiences of my interviewees Groups often develop shared stories to define their identity and in orde that members may find a common significance in their own memorial narratives which make use of a shared culture 21 It has also been found that many individuals accommodated their own memories within Soviet ideology, although some managed to retain their individual histories despite an overriding state narrative,22 leading to a difference between the memory of individuals and the state-propagated myth.23
This concurs with my findings of the subjective situation of some personal narratives within the collective myth, evidence of a complex interrelationship of private memory and public ideology, past and present. However, eight of my elderly interviewees’ generally rather diffident and self-deprecating accounts of the war do not conform with We lzer’s claim of a ‘cumulative heroisation’ of the protagonist over time, particularly those events related by two Crimean Ta tars deported to Central Asia. Most of my older interviewees tended to place a positive spin on the end of their war stories, which always ended with the highlight of their career – that is where they were when the war ended on Victory Day 1945, or how they returned to Novorossiisk to build a new life after the war
One respondent, an elderly retired teacher, spoke to me at length about her experience on Malaia zemlia as a worker in the political department alongside Mariia Pedenko, the memoirist. Vasilisa’s detailed account included tales of singing and dancing on the streets after dark during the summer months of the campaign, when she longed once again for the forbidden freedom to wear a dress. More notable was Vasilisa’s claim to have been present during an earlier incident whe Soviet and enemy troops were dug in on opposite sides of a main roa during the harsh April fighting. Apparently the Germans wanted t finish the engagement off quickly that week, driving the Soviets back into the sea, as a birthday present for Hitler. Some older interviewee mentioned that a Soviet artist left a different ‘present’ for Hitler on the enemy’s side of the road during the night – a pencil sketch of the Fu¨hrer characterised as a wild boar. There is no doubt that Vasilisa wa indeed present on Malaia zemlia: this is confirmed in Sokolov’ memoirs.24 However, it is most improbable that she was involved in the birthday incident, if it indeed ever happened, when she was more likely to have been fully occupied in one of the makeshift first aid points further away from the front line. This reformulation of her ow history is indicative of the influence of other accounts, which may have caused her gradually and probably unconsciously to alter her indirect memory over time and assimilate it into what she then transmitted as a direct memory.
This type of personal negotiation in order to make sense of the past is described in the case of Australian veterans by Alistair Thomson, who suggests that individuals strive to construct a personal back-story which helps to make them feel as comfortable as possible with their current identities. In order to do this, they must take into account the accepted cultural norms and language of the time, perhaps unconsciously repressing experiences which may be at odds with the expectations of modern society.25 Individual memories narrated today may not always be totally reliable, but do represent a personal mnemonic construction within the official myth. It is impossible to measure in retrospect the accuracy of an individual’s memory with regard to historical fact, but Michael Schudson, Paul Connerton and Daniel Schacter all emphasise the probability of increasing distortion and (sometimes selective) forgetting with the passing years. If detail is lost over time, it is also possible that the voiced memory of any pain or humiliation in the past is suppressed, whether consciously or unconsciously blocked by the narrator, giving rise to a more positive spin on the past than events actually merit.26
I found that those who took part in the war are largely happy to talk about their memories today, however stereotyped. In contrast, two elderly respondents stated that their parents had never mentioned the war to them. It is hard for children of parents who took part in the war to understand to what extent private family memory of the experience could endure under the oppressive political circumstances of the Soviet Union, when it was often impossible to reconcile public and private memory, especially but not exclusively where minorities were omitted from the official state narrative. Individual memories may not always have coincided with the politically correct state version, leading to a complex process of myth building between sometimes competing images.27
Silence on the part of older family members may also be indicative of the psychological scars that can understandably prevent discussion of some topics within the family.28 It may be tempting to conclude that this silence is on the part of the older family members, but one teenager confided to me that she felt uncomfortable discussing her great-grandmother’s wartime experiences with her, as she had been raped by occupying forces. The greatgranddaughter’s obvious discomfort was matched by that of a further student at the Moscow Institute for Economics and the Humanities in Novorossiisk, whose distress at her family’s experiences during the war prompted her refusal to take part in a class on local history. Apart from these exceptional cases, no intergenerational tension or narratives counter to the accepted war myth were offered, such as found in Canada by Graham Carr.29 My interviews with young and old alike pointed rather to cohesion, consensus and empathy across generations.
In a traditional society, memory often passes from grandparents to children, whose parents are usually busy working. The older generation takes responsibility for memorial practices and informal education, such that propagation of memory tends to skip the middle generation.30 Correspondingly, a majority of 64 per cent of my younger interviewees mentioned the significant role of grandparents rather than parents in the transmission of memory, even if those grandparents were themselves too young to have been war veterans. This indicates that there is possibly more opportunity and desire for grandparents to discuss the war with children than for busy parents, especially in a more modern society with working mothers and sometimes a single parent. The ritual of oral narration may promote historical understanding and empathy in younger family members, binding generations together through memory. In contrast, younger generations may find the narratives of personal memories of the war by their grandparents and great-grandparents repetitive and performances rendered more irritating due to the natural forgetting of old people. However, with the mediation of mnemonic artefacts, family narratives remain subjective and personal, often possessing a sense of intimacy that cannot be reproduced in a more formal, collective environment. Strikingly, the headmistress of School Number Six claimed that some veterans find it more difficult to talk to their own family than to a class of schoolchildren. From the high percentage of veterans claiming to recount war memory to their grandchildren or others of a much younger generation, however, it appears that it may in fact prove easier to talk about the war to a young generation decades after the event than it was to talk to one’s own children soon after the event.
Although they were not specifically asked, some middle-aged interviewees could also recall how they had heard from their own parents and grandparents about the war. Some recounted to me long and personal stories of their relations’ wartime experiences in Novorossiisk gleaned from direct personal transmission and one woman recalled that her aunt had written her own memoirs of the war, which had been treasured in the family. Twenty per cent of subjects between the ages of 30 and 69 volunteered the fact that their father or grandfather had fought in the war, while 14 per cent offered the information that their parents or grandparents had talked to them about Malaia zemlia. In contrast, Zoya was sad that her parents had not talked openly about the war when she was young, and is now particularly eager to transmit family history to her own grandchildren. Thus the sense of a personal connection to the war remains strong for some families, thanks mainly to direct communication of memory transmitted by older generations.
As those with direct memory of the war die, current and future generations will be recipients only of indirect post-memory, when family influence may well diminish in favour of the official war myth. For the moment, though, several of my interviewees, both men and women, related how they personally propagate the story of Malaia zemlia to younger family members, often with their own subjective interpretation. Some parents and grandparents see it as natural to pass on memory about local history in the same way as their own parents. Mariya ‘studies’ the story of Malaia zemlia with her grandson using the same dated children’s book that she used to read to her children.31 Nikolai, like Klavdiya, takes advantage of the Beskozyrka ritual for conversations with his son about the war, while some employ Victory Day for this purpose. Vladimir uses the opportunity of weekends searching on Mount Koldun to discuss war memory with his teenage son. For younger parents, the monuments and street names in the town provide a vehicle for the transmission of memory. Nikolai and Varvara, for example, respond to their children’s requests to read to them the information on monuments to heroes; for incomer Varvara, this activity teaches her about local history at the same time. Kristina is similarly prompted by questions about streets named after heroes, while others more proactively take their children to museums or for a tour of the historical sites. Many questions are prompted by school lessons, and provide the opportunity for family reinforcement. Families also contribute to school lessons by providing personal information for class discussion and websites. Many young parents claimed a sense of responsibility to pass on memory of Malaia zemlia to younger generations. For example Nina felt a duty to answer relevant questions: ‘If the children say “let’s remember”, then parents must do so too.’ However, not all have the time and Vyacheslav admitted that his children were simply not interested in family history.
James Fentress and Chris Wickham suggest that public memory is often in the control of men, with women taking a more private perspective. Most of the dead were male, as were the kinship groups formed after the war, while the mourners were typically female. They argue that older women may have less desire than men to remember the war publicly, as the war myth predominantly recalls male activities. Women are found to speak less about public space and more about domestic and family affairs, especially births, marriages and, most importantly in the context of war, deaths.32 This generalisation may be questioned with respect to female memory of the Soviet Union at war by virtue of women’s substantial participation in the conflict and their experience of life in an occupied country, as well as their wartime responsibility for industrial and agricultural production. However, it is notable that public expressions of female memory through memoir literature are rare in the Soviet Union and the position of potentially marginalised Soviet women in remembrance celebrations remains ambiguous.33
It is impossible to deduce from my interviews whether men or women are dominant in the intergenerational transmission of memory in the family, although women seem to be either more open about having had discussions at home and/or to have taken part in more discussions about the war. This concurs broadly with Artemi Romanov’s findings about the perceived communication satisfaction gained by Russian grandparents in talking with their grandchildren: grandmothers tend to disclose more personal information, while grandfathers are more willing to talk about their opinion on historical events.34 From my research it seems, however, that men may be more proactive in finding opportunities for discussion and interested in talking about the war in general, while women are more responsive to questioning and are more involved with school homework projects. Grandparents of both genders also play an important role.
‘Reverse propagation’, the more unusual but naturally-occurring means of intergenerational transmission of the war myth from younger to older family members, is opposite to the traditional mechanism of transmission from older to younger generations found in a society with little population mobility. This mechanism of intergenerational familial transmission is illustrated by a conversation documented by a journalist during the 2014 Beskozyrka ceremony, when an eight-year old boy was overheard telling his mother what he had been taught about the Malaia zemlia landings at school.35 Six relative newcomers to Novorossiisk confirmed to me that they had learned about local war history from their children, who had in turn been taught about it at school. These examples also provide evidence that the history of Malaia zemlia is not widely known to people outside Novorossiisk, even though many older Russians recollect the name from Brezhnev’s memoirs.
Conversations at home about the war may also be triggered by the amplification of military material in the mass media around Victory Day, reflected notably in the local press, which concentrates particularly on articles about individual veterans and their memories. According to Barbie Zelizer, the press is often an unrecognised agent of the propagation of memory, determining both the form and the content of its transmission.36 In Novorossiisk, however, it is also a site of memory construction in its own right. The local press encourages investigative journalism in the ‘exposure of truth’ about the history of the war, while continuing to carry social interest stories about veterans and their past.37
War documentaries and fictional films old and modern invade the home in the Victory Day period, shown on both state and other television channels. Based on published television schedules, all such films shown in 2013 were of Russian or Soviet provenance.38 This diet of war material is inescapable for three days, with the war classics probably welcomed by older citizens, if considered over-intrusive by Anton, a younger resident. Respondant Vera cited a television documentary about the fear in Russia that American war films such as Saving Private Ryan are too influential on young people who may fail to understand the role of the Soviet Union in the war.39 Indeed, Stephen Norris points to the spate of new nationalistic and patriotic ‘blockbusters’ produced in Russia since the late 1990s, fuelling interest in tsarist Russia, World War II and some nostalgia for the Brezhnev era.40 The film We are from the Future employs a version of socialist realism updated for modern Russia, mixing together past, present and future to re-frame the past in order to make it both relevant and educational for young people of the present. The audience experiences the same learning curve as the films’ young protagonists, leaving all involved ‘cleansed’ by the narrative as they are subjected to the ‘right’, largely optimistic view of history deemed by director Andrei Maliukov to be politically useful.
Based on the resurgence of historical blockbusters in Russia and the West, Olga Kucherenko claims that most young people acquire their knowledge of history informally through films,41 which probably serve to influence and even distort their understanding of the past. Furthermore, within the informal family circle, it is even possible that younger viewers may experience the ‘prosthetic memory’ described by Alison Landsberg, which offers a mechanism ‘at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past’ for the acquisition of powerful memories which were not actually experienced. According to Landsberg, films about history may evoke private feelings from a collective experience in the past such that the distinction between history and memory is blurred, whilst at the same time introducing an ethical dimension that may be absent from personal narrations or collective rituals of remembrance.42 However, despite the huge popularity and accessibility of both home-produced and foreign films about World War II in general, my research in Novorossiisk demonstrates that the influence on young people of formal and informal education about specifically local history predominates.
Discussions about the war are not necessarily uniform across all families in Novorossiisk and children may have different degrees of exposure to direct narratives from an older generation. Furthermore, the family is not the only agent of propagation of the war myth, although two young parents pointed to the primacy of the family by virtue of direct and personal transmission, with emotional triggers guiding interpretation. The familial mechanism, where present, is always supplemented and complemented by experiences from other sources, including formal school lessons and extra-curricular activities. Indeed, many family conversations may not happen without some prompting from the mass media or other external agencies. Despite the pervading influence of the war cult, many interviewees, both men and women, contend that the family plays the largest role in the propagation of memory, arguing for a link between a child’s upbringing and the transmission of the war myth, an indication of the importance of memory from below. Elizaveta, a young woman whose grandfather fought in the war, considered on the other hand that the family’s role should be even more important than it is. In general, however, respondents apparently wish to uphold and transmit the memory and values of previous generations, viewing this as an indication of the patriotism of the family, which values its military ancestors and its own current mnemonic identity.
As direct memory of the war is fading, a family’s own identity is cemented more by artefacts than by oral narration, but this still leaves room for an individuality of response to the state’s war myth. Since 2013 young people of all ages have joined with adults on Victory Day in an overt demonstration of respect for their family ‘heroes’. Following the popular military parade, this new procession unites generations, as marchers hold aloft sepia or black and white portraits of their ancestors who fought and often died in the war. This ‘Immortal Regiment’ (‘Bessmertnyi polk’) movement was started in other regions of Russia in 2012, gradually spreading across the major cities of the country and being adopted in Novorossiisk the following year. Developing from an interactive online archive, its rapid evolution into a newly invented tradition marks an implicit recognition of the dwindling number of war veterans still able to participate in Victory Day.43 Just as the Candle in the Window movement accompanying the Beskozyrka ritual has become an invented tradition in its own right, this addendum to the existing Victory Day tradition has served once again to rejuvenate the original ceremony, rendering it more relevant to children, while capturing the imagination of citizens of all ages through an explicit link to their own family history. The key role of the movement and the significance of the propagation of memory was recognised by the governor of the Krasnodar region on Victory Day 2016:
Every family in the Kuban’ has its own hero, its own member of the ‘Immortal Regiment’. Summoned by their hearts, more and more people are joining the largest procession in the country, because it is a huge honour to march alongside the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Their fearlessness and steadfastness, hardened in battle, saved the world from fascism. And it continues to save it from treacherous paths and false ideologies, from moral emptiness and self-betrayal. Today, our most important task is to transmit memory of the war to the next generations. This memory is our roots, our spiritual and moral support, which we should maintain for the sake of the future.44
This robust declaration aiming to drum up support for the new movement may not resonate with all citizens of Novorossiisk, however. Those with no interest in family history may ignore it, while those whose history has been lost thanks to the premature deaths of key members in or just after the war may feel excluded. From my observations, though, the Immortal Regiment is a popular and growing addition to Victory Day commemorations, validating once-private remembrance and bringing it out into the open to be merged successfully with public ceremonies of commemoration.
In the immediate postwar years, individuals sometimes found it hard to express their own experiences of the war to their children and to situate them within the overpowering influence of the state. Today the Russian state appears actively to encourage the private ownership of family history, which is publicly shared within the community of memory to reinforce the overarching war myth of a victorious nation. This overt convergence of memorial identity appears to be growing in popularity, courted and vaunted by a government seeking to unite the people. The risk of a dependence on a genetic identification with the past, however, is that it is more difficult to challenge in the future, being based on the mnemonic stasis typical of an identity built on past tribal exploits, a cult of ancestors and traditional moral characteristics.