PART I
J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans.
Un gros meuble à tiroirs encombrè de bilans,
De vers, de billets doux,de procès, de romances,
Avec de lourds cheveux roulès dans des quittances,
Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.
C’est une pyramide, un immense caveau,
Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune.
Je suis un cimetière abhorrè de la lune.1
Librarians in Novorossiisk have sometimes surprised me by giving me copies of old war memoirs to help with this book. Why would they part with them so readily? Because these – to me – valuable gifts are simply redundant to them. It seems that they have rather too many for their readers’ needs these days: over the last ten years only elderly men, they say, would very occasionally take them down from the shelves, blow away the dust and take them home for a few days, like old friends. They used them as a portal to a past time, out of nostalgia, perhaps, for their long deceased comrades-in-arms who had written or featured in these slim volumes – the Malozemel’tsy themselves: those who had served on Malaia zemlia. Those local memoirs that I have seen are certainly well-thumbed, though, a testament to the important role they once played in the community. And so we, in turn, must wind the clock back to 1943 and start at the very beginning, when the myth of Malaia zemlia was in its gestation period.
In the construction of a modern war myth all actors in and observers of the event in question have a potential role to play and hence a possible claim to ownership of public memory. In the case of Malaia zemlia, written personal accounts of war correspondents during the campaign and memoirs of veterans after the event were central to the evolution of the war myth. Undoubtedly the most influential of these narratives was the book Malaia zemlia by the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, published in 1978. Although this work won Brezhnev the Lenin Prize for literature, recent evidence reveals that the work was ghost-authored, the subject of political machinations by Brezhnev’s inner circle. However, Brezhnev’s slim volume was only one of a series of written accounts which together were instrumental in the formation of the textually mediated myth of Malaia zemlia.
In the process of construction of a war myth, the gradual homogenisation of different individual accounts over time can produce an unambiguous narrative from a single perspective and with a consistent message of unquestionable heroism. Samuel Hynes’ study of European memoirs of World War I, for example, demonstrates that individual memories undergo a process of selection, gradually converging to determine an agreed version that informs social remembrance, such that, over time, ‘a complete, coherent story emerges’.2 This may be regarded as a process of natural selection, whereby dominant narratives with a strong common element and persuasive rhetorical style prevail. The process of myth making also depends on the weighting and trust attached to different accounts, with eventual common agreement on what material is selected and what is omitted from the myth. This mechanism for the construction of a war myth provides a plausible framework for the development of the myth of Malaia zemlia, albeit largely dependent on forces from below in the form of the individual narratives that are aggregated and homogenised.
However, this war myth was constructed in the Soviet Union, an authoritarian state with a restricted and inward-looking culture. Like all literature, war memoirs were subject to the scrutiny of the official censor charged with the protection of state secrets, Glavlit, and the interest of the KGB (the state security service).3 Furthermore, writers had to be authorised members of the national Writers’ Union,4 while the Communist Party of the Soviet Union kept a watchful eye on the political content of publications. Any deviation from the party line in the strict environment of a one-party state resulted in penalties ranging from the ‘arrest’ of manuscripts or their author, to expulsion from the Writers’ Union or even the country.
Writers were expected to work within the parameters of the prevalent literary system of socialist realism, employed as a tool to educate the masses in communist ideology. The relationship between literature and official ‘truth’ as demanded by the Communist Party was at the crux of thi formulaic literary system imposed by stringent state censorship on writers, if sometimes with their own pre-emptive collaboration. Following a meeting with writers in 1932, Stalin dictated that: ‘The artist ought to show life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully, he cannot fail to show it moving to socialism.’5 After the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Andrei Zhdanov, the chief Communist Party spokesman on cultural affairs, further stated:
Truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic representation must be combined with the task of ideological renewal and education of the workers in the spirit of socialism.6
Using this cultural tool to educate the masses in communist ideology, the writer’s duty was to signpost with optimism the bright ideological future, ‘portraying Soviet life, not as it was in reality, but as it should become’.7
Life was therefore seen as a constant fight, moving towards victory of the workers both politically and in the war, in order to guarantee socialism in the utopian postwar future just beyond the horizon. An integral part of this process was the moral and political education of the younger generation in communist ideology, where literature would provide role models of young people coming to full political consciousness under the guidance of older mentors. The ‘master plot’ of socialist realist works, as analysed by Katerina Clark, emphasises the heroic actions and self-sacrifice of communists, often young men or women, whose death renders them both timeless and immortal. Furthermore, any female companion included in a socialist realist narrative was usually an assistant in furthering the ideological cause, rather than a mere love interest.8
The problem to be overcome in the practical deployment of the theory of socialist realism was that present endeavours did not adequately represent the glorious future to come: the Soviet Union struggled with its economy, industry and collectivised agricultural system and the standard of living of most citizens left much to be desired. It was therefore necessary to indicate the implied reality of the future in the present, based on exploits in the past, leading to a blurring of the time-line in the service of the promised land.9 As the protagonist develops into an ideal communist, ‘past, present and future are crammed together in the process of a person becoming someone better’.10 A canonised literary ‘Great Time’ was invoked, which conferred an exalted status on people who had played a major role in selected past exploits, including the October Revolution, the Civil War and Napoleon’s defeat in 1812.11 To these examples may be added the thirteenth-century character of Aleksandr Nevskii, mythologised in Eizenshtein’s film and Prokof’ev’s music of 1938, which effected an implied comparison between the courageous forces of mediaeval Rus’ and its Soviet counterpart. In a recycling of historical precedents, an heroic age from the past was repeated in the present as a foretaste of the messianic age to come. For war correspondents, as the passage of time was virtually irrelevant, victory became totally predictable as just a staging post in the building of socialism.
The state’s demand to place a positive spin on wartime and postwar literature is at complete odds with the cynical, less censored products of other wars. Many Wo rld War I poets in the West were able to comment o the chaos of war and the futility of mass death, which would not have been permitted in the Soviet sphere. Notably, Siegfried Sassoon invoked the bewildering experience of modern, total warfare, which could never be forgotten, while employing his own concept of time in a very different way from that demanded by socialist realism. Time, it seems, flows differently during a war. To Sassoon, Time (often capitalised in his works) is both personified and polarised, taking part in the battle and capable of acting on the side of either God or the enemy. As with socialist realism, Sassoon’s military time is distorted, seeming to expand or contract as in a war myth. However, although Sassoon sometimes merges past, presen and future into one, as with socialist realism, he also describes a distinct temporal separation between ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’ in a distinctly binary approach. Time, it appears, is devious, capable of acting as either friend or foe. It steals chunks of lives by stopping the clock entirely during a war, then, once in the battlefield, it hastens the start of the actual engagement, only to slow down again during peacetime.12
Socialist realism may not have been as subtle as Sassoon’s poetry, but it was almost universally applied. Re-invoking in the present epic moments in the past, it was ideally suited to the creation of war myths for use in both the present and the future. In this way, the old Russian tradition of myth making and repetitive story-telling merged with the new Soviet requirement for conformity. With its mythological treatment of time, its adulation of (politically conscious) heroes and the formulaic process of its production, socialist realism was a perfect framework for enforcing the uniformity of narration and interpretation demanded by myth.13 As historical time was compressed, myth became fiction and fiction fact, such that there were no barriers to performing mythical feats in the present to be celebrated in the future. The optimistic slant placed on wartime feats would often render them unrecognisable to those who were portrayed in the resulting narrative. Emphasis was also placed on the location of an event,14 so that not only the Motherland (Rodina) became sacred, but also the individual battlefields soaked in the blood of heroes.
Western readers might therefore assume that under the didactic guidelines of socialist realism there would be a monolithic attitude to the process of memory production, even if some Western material permeated the borders of the Soviet Union. In fact, there was some variation within this top-down environment, as the official attitude to war memory oscillated over the years depending on the internal and external political climate. Approval from above for individual and group forays into memory was therefore affected by periods of frost and thaw, often negotiated thanks to some degree of compromise between the state and its would-be memoirists. In a country grappling with Stalin’s wartime legacy, enduring a hot-and-cold attitude to the process of de-Stalinisation under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, there was no guarantee that the war myth would remain constant or coherent indefinitely, or that its tone would remain static.
In democratic societies the agreed form and content of a myth usually provide reinforcement and confirmation to all agents involved, namely the individual, state and society in general. However, such mutual ownership of the war myth by multiple actors in the SovietUnion was compromised within a dynamic memorial environment. Thus the war myth as propagated by the dominating agency of the state sometimes differed from the memory of the individuals formulating the bottom-up accounts, who were often discouraged from publishing their already heavily censored war memoirs. Moreover, once Brezhnev’s connection with Malaia zemlia had become an integral part of the war cult, it was so dominant that it even influenced the official interpretation of history, while dictating the content of other published memoirs. Shaped by the myth according to Brezhnev, individual veterans and the groups to which they belonged lost ownership of their own memories in the culmination of a complex process that is not adequately described within the normative Western model of memory formation.
Distortion of memory was caused not only by the overwhelming influence of the state, particularly with respect to the role of Stalin’s leadership during the war, but also by the natural process of forgetting common to all retrospective demands on memory. Furthermore, whether for ideological or social reasons, the character of memoirs may change depending upon how long after the event they were written; the individual memoirist may find it easier to remember specific events shortly after the war, but, for the statesman, more historical perspective is available at a greater distance from the actual event. Similarly, later memoirs tend to be more reflective, as the benefit of hindsight better enables the location of an individual’s story within the collective as one person’s life intersects with history.15
This part of the book concentrates on war correspondence from the front and memoirs by veterans, all culturally specific literary devices to be interpreted as products of their era within the Soviet literature of the period. The myth was born early in the actual campaign of 1943 and the first tranche of individual memories was then collected together prior to the emergence of a cohesive war myth with the publication of Brezhnev’s memoirs. Later memoirs were more uniform, modelled on the dominant state template, thereby locating individual accounts within the overarching myth by then owned by the state.
If a distinction is made between ‘collected’ and ‘collective’ memory, it is possible to propose a considerably more sophisticated mechanism for the construction of the war myth in Novorossiisk than that proposed by Hynes. The simple collation and aggregation of individual memories toproduce collected memory was followed by a state-sponsored collective representation still residing today in the national consciousness. Rather than just a vague homogenisation of accounts, there were four discrete stages in the construction of the myth of Malaia zemlia, based on the interacting influences of bottom-up popular memory and top-down state ideology:
(1) the birth of the myth through the attribution of a name and its dissemination by war correspondents;
(2) the collection of individual memories into one coherent form by memoirist Georgii Sokolov;
(3) the construction of the official state-owned war myth by Brezhnev; and
(4) the complete convergence and homogenisation of the myth according to Brezhnev.
As mentioned previously, the myth of Malaia zemlia represents just one specific example of a local Soviet war myth, and yet this myth came to be known nationwide above all others during the years of the Brezhnev war cult. Although in many ways typical of myths constructed rapidly during the war, the myth of Malaia zemlia already showed some exaggerated claims to longlasting fame lacking in other cases. A comparison with the development of the myth of the siege of Leningrad, one of the first hero cities of the Soviet Union, shows some considerable variation in tone of the two local war myths. If there is substantial disillusionment in the face of war in literature describing the Western Front in Wo rld War I, and a wish by Leningraders to reveal fully the stories of heroism and human weakness in their war myth,16 what, then, is the tone of the incipient myth of Malaia zemlia and the motives of the memoirists recalling the campaign?
It is this type of evidence which demonstrates the massaging and manipulation of war memory that served the presentist political aims of the Soviet state. Furthermore, I show that the original bottom-up mechanism for the construction of the myth was overtaken by the overarching dominance of the state war cult of the Brezhnev era, within which memories were mutated and relocated. The influence of the state on war memory was eventually more powerful in the construction of the war myth than that of groups of veterans, even locally in Novorossiisk with its own unique claim to the myth. Finally, I show that the production of memory is not necessarily the same as its reception, proving that the myth of Malaia zemlia disseminated nationwide was dominated so much by the persona of the general secretary himself, that, with Brezhnev’s death in 1982, the memorial climate changed entirely.