CHAPTER 4
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.1
Individual memories continued to become collective property during the 1970s, when popular memory of the war was very much influenced by the television programme Ot vsei dushi (From the Bottom of my Heart). Travelling around the country to highlight previously unknown ordinary heroes of the recent past, the programme emotionally evoked memory of the war and immediate postwar years, serving to reunite veterans separated for decades. This family show was presented from 1972 to 1978 by the well-known actress Valentina Leont’eva, a survivor of the siege of Leningrad, reaching not only individual families in their homes, but also provincial audiences assembled in local palaces of culture.2
Denis Kozlov has suggested that the nationwide manifestation of an interest in history was due to the fact that it was a more ‘culturally acceptable’ subject of discussion in Soviet society than internal or external politics, which invariably strayed into the realm of uncertainty.3 This may have been true for the politically conscious intelligentsia, but From the Bottom of my Heart was riveting viewing for the masses, as everybody in the country could identify with the courage and death toll of the war. The preoccupation with history did not only concern the recent war, however, but still encompassed a general concentration on and even idealisation of the past.4 Although socialist realism was by then less stringently applied, the identification of historical continuities remained a developed literary form, recalling both the wartime article by Svetov and Miliavskii and Sokolov’s convoluted comparison of the Korean War and both world wars of the twentieth century.5
The propagation of war memory through a burgeoning war cult during the late 1960s and early 1970s reinforced Brezhnev’s own political position as a high-ranking veteran. By the end of the 1970s, according to Hedrick Smith, a Western journalist based in Moscow, Soviet cultural life had become ‘saturated with the war theme’.6 While Catherine Merridale condemns the whole Brezhnev era as ‘a golden age of concrete and hot air, an era of state-sponsored multivolume histories of the war, of solemn speeches of commemoration, handouts, new medals, and the mass design and construction of memorials’, there was substantial popular support in the early years for a policy which aimed to unify the country. Merridale refers to the gratitude of successive generations for a ‘hero-myth’ giving them a sense of purpose in the face of foreign antagonism, whilst at home Lisa Kirschenbaum has argued that the cult may have diverted the intelligentsia’s attention from state clamp-downs on freedom of speech following the arrest and trial of dissident writers Iulii Daniel’ and Andrei Siniavskii in 1965–66 and the persecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from 1969 to 1974. Nina Tumarkin similarly attributes the growing war cult to the state’s wish to ‘mobilize loyalty [and] maintain order’, in what could have become an explosive situation amongst people questioning the whole ideology of communism. The cult helped also in the identification of an unambiguous Western enemy. In view of Brezhnev’s appropriation of the ‘great victory’ for the Soviet people alone, with the denigration of the other wartime allies, it is probable that any conscious political target of the cult was the capitalist West as a whole, particularly at the height of the Cold War, with distraction from internal politics a useful by-product.7
It is difficult to establish the main instigating agent for the growth of the war cult: Brezhnev himself, the ruling elite or the ordinary people. If the cult had been established, as suggested by Tumarkin, early in the Brezhnev regime, many aspects of it resonated with the average citizen in the late 1960s.8 Indeed, we shall see in Chapter 10 that the year 1968 was pivotal in the development of remembrance in Novorossiisk. The war cult was widely disseminated not only through literature, but also via the Communist Party’s Komsomol organisation for young people and the programme of monumental commemoration which expanded during the 1970s. Certainly the overall dogmatic environment regulated the production of culture, encouraging on the one hand while restricting content on the other. Television programmes about the war were genuinely popular in the country, although it is indisputable that the general secretary took advantage of the memory environment to establish further his own military and leadership credentials, evidence for which is examined in Part II. It may be deduced that Brezhnev encouraged the originally largely popular development of the war cult for his own personal ends, while also aiming to unify the country politically through the intergenerational propagation of war memory. With Brezhnev’s physical and mental decline towards the end of the 1970s, however, it seems that the cult was employed as a tool for self-protection amongst the ruling elite. Playing to Brezhnev’s vanity and cult of personality within the war cult, his political comrades awarded him a series of medals in what appears to have been a concerted campaign to keep him in power whilst protecting the governmental status quo. Thus Brezhnev was awarded a Hero of the Soviet Union star on his birthday on four different occasions: in December 1966, 1976, 1978 and 1981.9 However, for our purposes, it is the recently uncovered plotting around the production and dissemination of Brezhnev’s war memoirs which sheds light on the most relevant machinations of Brezhnev’s inner-circle in the late 1970s.
With memory of an heroic victory cementing the population and the leadership together, more and more veterans were encouraged to produce their war memoirs in the 1970s, in marked contrast to the general restrictive literary environment. Memoirists’ freedom to publish in principle did not, however, imply a total freedom of content. Authors were supposed to support the party line on the war, adhering to the material in the official history books and situating their works within the state’s master-narrative, which by then attributed victory to the party and the people working together against fascism, rather than to Stalin or even the military commanders.10 However, official history was, in turn, mutually reliant on memoir literature, such that a dubious edifice of incontestable mythology of the war was generated, with a vicious circle linking history and political ideology.
The postwar memoirs of Sergei Borzenko provide a useful example in the case of Malaia zemlia; they also emphasise the growing position of Brezhnev within the myth, whilst serving to promote Borzenko’s own reputation through his (indirect) association with Brezhnev thanks to his work on Malaia zemlia as a war correspondent. As early as 1958, Borzenko lionised Brezhnev as colonel in charge of the political section of the 18th Army, a senior representative of the party, in a chapter dated 1943:
Brezhnev was the soldiers’ favourite. He knew their moods and thoughts, knew how to make a joke at the right time and inflamed their thirst for heroic deeds. The landing troops knew him by sight, and in the noise and din of battle they were able to distinguish his authoritative, calm voice.11
Borzenko also reveals that Brezhnev had his own validating encounter with danger at the front when knocked unconscious as the boat he was taking from Gelendzhik to Malaia zemlia hit a mine, the tone of the section suggesting that Brezhnev was never far from the sound of battle.12 The same information is recycled word for word in later works by Borzenko, although local newspaper articles before 1966 make no mention at all of Brezhnev’s role on Malaia zemlia.
In a case of what Roger Markwick terms ‘institutionalized mendacity’, Borzenko’s at best exaggerated and at worst inaccurate ‘memory’ is cited as historical fact in the official history of the war, published in 1961, even before Brezhnev had ousted Khrushchev and started the war cult.13 This is perhaps an indication of Brezhnev’s growing influence or simply the desire of an ambitious writer to flatter the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Nonetheless, Malaia zemlia and Novorossiisk featured only briefly in Soviet histories of the war: the official six-volume publication (1960–5) contained only four pages about Malaia zemlia, a mere 0.1 per cent of the whole. Reading in places more like a myth than an historical record in the fact-dominated Western sense, more space is allocated to the young hero Viktor Chalenko than to Brezhnev. Whether benign mythology or indeed institutionalised mendacity, Soviet historiography since the October Revolution certainly played a political function that must be acknowledged when situating Soviet-era works on Malaia zemlia in their historical context. This degree of mythology in the official history paved the way for further aggrandisement, as a vicious circle developed whereby only ‘facts’ already in print were allowed to be deployed or cited in future history texts.14
With memoirs officially sanctioned, the censor remained busy, ‘neutralising’, for example, any potentially embarrassing comments on the defeats of the early weeks of the war.15 Authors, forewarned, therefore avoided sensitive topics, producing sometimes less than honest, formulaic works, full of sentimental clichés about the ‘sacred’ battle with no comments of an anti-war nature. Few, if any, of these memoirs went as far as Sokolov in synthesis, being content with description rather than analysis.16 In contrast, the anti-war character of literature in the West was prevalent towards the end of the Vietnam War. Commenting on the noticeable difference, Hedrick Smith observed:
Official propaganda treatment of war [. . .] is vastly greater than in the West. Because of Vietnam, war is an extremely divisive issue in America, but in the Soviet Union, it is an unchallenged unifying element that serves to justify many of today’s policies.17
During the decade from 1967 to 1977 Voenizdat published memoirs by the nationally famous Marshals Rokossovskii, Konev and Zhukov, although Khrushchev had to step in to overrule a KGB move to prevent publication of Zhukov’s memoirs.18 Zhukov, highly respected during the war and the veritable symbol of military victory, paid tribute to Brezhnev by inserting a few lines in his memoirs about seeking Brezhnev’s military advice in April 1943:
We wanted to ask the advice of the head of the political section of the 18th Army, L.I. Brezhnev [. . .]; Brezhnev had been here numerous times and was familiar with the situation, but at that moment he was on the Little Land where extremely fierce fighting was going on.19
An historical debate has ensued about this paragraph. According to Zhukov’s daughter, Mariia, her father had never heard of Brezhnev during the war, a claim supported by Roi Medvedev, an unflinching Brezhnev critic, who held this passage to have been fabricated when Zhukov’s editor was ‘advised from above’ (‘po sovetu svyshe’) to insert a paragraph about seeking Brezhnev’s advice.20 In contrast, however, Aleksandr Khinshtein unconvincingly pushes all possibilities to their limits in order to give Brezhnev the benefit of the doubt, whilst accepting that Brezhnev probably asked Zhukov not to forget his role in his memoirs.21 This is the likely scenario, as, in a similar vein, Orlando Figes cites the case of the documentary war film A Soldier Went (Shel soldat), 1975, based on Konstantin Simonov’s interviews with veterans, which was not passed by the censors until a sequence paying homage to Brezhnev as a war leader had been inserted.22
It seems probable that Brezhnev facilitated the publication of memoirs by those who had fought in his sphere of the war in the Krasnodar and eastern Black Sea region, particularly A.A. Grechko, the commander of the North Caucasian 18th Army and Vice Admiral Kholostiakov.23 The main memoirs of Malaia zemlia in this period were by Lt Gen I.S. Shiian, who wrote in detail about the partisans. Following the national trend and in contrast to Sokolov’s work, Shiian’s works were published centrally by Voenizdat and were introduced by the now famous Sergei Borzenko.24
Brezhnev’s own war service on Malaia zemlia became increasingly highlighted and exaggerated in representations of the war. Borzenko had written in Pravda as early as 1968 that Brezhnev was on a par with the main hero of the Malaia zemlia landings, Major Tsezar’ Kunikov. It is probable that Borzenko, always closely linked with reporting and commentary about Malaia zemlia, was able to promote his own career by his association with and flattery of Brezhnev.25 Further excessive claims at this time about Brezhnev’s military prowess are found in two documentary films crediting Brezhnev as ‘one of the people who planned and executed the landings in Novorossiisk’ prior to its liberation.26 By 1976, Brezhnev’s volume of speeches and articles was being referred to in a history book as ‘an item of documentary material’.27
Anatolii Sofronov, another former war correspondent familiar with the Novorossiisk front, also promulgated Brezhnev’s role fictionally.28 While his play, Deviatyi val (Storm Force ), 1968–73, includes some real historical characters, the chief protagonist is not a military leader, but a certain Colonel Berezhnov, a party official on Malaia zemlia clearly intended as a fictional representation of Brezhnev, whose main function is to check that all the troops carry their party cards, at the same time boosting their morale. Reminding his audience of the importance of the transmission of war memory, Berezhnov concludes the play with the words: ‘Memory [. . .] is propagated from generation to generation. We shall never forget the heroes. Eternal glory to them.’ Reinforcing the by then mythical qualities of Brezhnev as a wartime political leader, the name ‘Berezhnov’, barely changed from that of Brezhnev, signifies by implication the attributes expected of a great statesman: caring and solicitous of others, careful and thrifty economically. A photograph in a review of the play’s premiere in Uzbekistan in 1975, on the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war, further underlines the identification of Berezhnov with Brezhnev, as the actor playing Berezhnov looks remarkably similar to Brezhnev himself. Emphasising not only the importance attached to the brotherhood of different nationalities in the war, particularly relevant outside Russia, the review also reiterates the nationally required theme of the importance of the party during the campaign through the role of the political commissar. Once again the historical importance of Malaia zemlia is inflated, with Novorossiisk dubbed ‘the Stalingrad of the Caucasus’ by virtue of its deemed strategic significance for the outcome of the war.29
Brezhnev’s connection with Malaia zemlia was disseminated even further than Uzbekistan: Brezhnev gave a gift to Fidel Castro on his visit to Cuba in January 1974 of a book of pictures of Malaia zemlia produced by former 18th Army war artist, P.Ia. Kirpichev.30 Thus, during the 1970s, the status and significance of Malaia zemlia in the national and even international consciousness increased considerably, thanks to Brezhnev’s association with the campaign. Whereas Stalin had opposed any propagation of the myth of the siege of Leningrad in order to retain his own reputation, Brezhnev actively promoted his connection with Novorossiisk and Malaia zemlia, finally resulting in the publication of his own war memoirs.
By 1977, with his physical and mental health deteriorating, Brezhnev’s growing cult of personality depended increasingly upon his popularity with veterans and his reputation as a modest, wise and organised wartime leader, the desirable qualities typical of a mature mentor in the socialist realist mould. Although some consider that Brezhnev’s dominant cult of personality was reminiscent of Stalin’s, in that he gave the impression that he was controlling every aspect of government,31 Brezhnev’s leadership style was in fact much more democratic. Collective decision making allowed for a substantial delegation of responsibility, which won him more supporters than enemies amongst the ruling elite, the Politbiuro. Brezhnev had, however, been astute enough early in his leadership to defuse any potential threats to his leadership. Iurii Andropov (who would eventually succeed him), for example, was demoted early in Brezhnev’s leadership from the secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to become chairman of the KGB. Known increasingly for his legendary vanity and love of military awards, Brezhnev was honoured on his seventieth birthday in December 1976 with yet another war medal and more flattering films.32 It was the following month, January 1977, on the journey to Tula, the latest in the growing list of hero cities of the Soviet Union, that the plot to write Brezhnev’s war memoirs was hatched by his closest allies.
Popular debate about the authorship of Brezhnev’s memoirs has flourished over the last few years, with Russians anxious to elucidate the ‘truth’ about their provenance.33 The man apparently behind their inception was Konstantin Chernenko,34 leader of the Soviet Union after Andropov, then a member of the inner-circle of the Politbiuro and Brezhnev’s ‘political shadow’.35 Anxious to please the general secretary, who, it seems, had the habit of boring colleagues with his wartime stories while freely admitting that he had no writing skills, Chernenko enlisted the support of Leonid Zamiatin, head of the state news agency, TASS. A team of ghost-writers was signed up, notably Anatolii Agranovskii of Izvestiia, Arkadii Sakhnin of Novyi mir, Aleksandr Murzin of Pravda and Vladimir Gubarev, science correspondent for Pravda. Each had responsibility for a part of the memoirs; for example, Gubarev wrote about Brezhnev and Soviet space developments in Kosmicheskii oktiabr’ (Cosmic October). Russian scholars now agree that Sakhnin started and Agranovskii completed Malaia zemlia.36
With Brezhnev refusing to take part in the project, according to Brezhnev detractor Leonid Mlechin, the writers had to use archival material and trace his former comrades-in-arms, such as Sergei Pakhomov, Brezhnev’s wartime deputy. Once the text was approved by Zamiatin and Chernenko, only four or five copies were typed up in what amounted to a top-secret military strategy, being kept deliberately from Andropov at the KGB. No explanation for this is given, but no doubt the commissioners of the work remembered the relatively recent controversy leading up to the publication in the West of Khrushchev’s war memoirs in 1970, in which Andropov was also implicated.37
As soon as the work was finished, Brezhnev asked for it to be published immediately in the literary journal Novyi mir, entailing a last-minute cut-and-paste exercise in 500,000 copies to replace the intended middle section of the next edition with Malaia zemlia.38 Brezhnev’s work finally appeared in February 1978, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Malaia zemlia landings. It was reproduced in Literaturnaia gazeta and locally in Novorossiiskii rabochii a week later.39 Malaia zemlia was followed later the same year by the two other sections of the original trilogy, Vozrozhdenie (Regeneration) and Tselina (The Virgin Lands). After the appearance of Brezhnev’s Malaia zemlia in the press, several books followed.40 The main publication of two sections of Brezhnev’s memoirs, Malaia zemlia. Vozrozhdenie, was a paperback clearly produced for mass consumption, priced cheaply at 24 kopecks and measuring 22 by 14 centimetres.41 With a wartime picture of the troops on the cover and a current image of Brezhnev as the frontispiece, the scene was set by a photograph of Brezhnev in uniform with the troops during the war. Just less than half of the book’s 94 pages (39 in all) relate to Malaia zemlia, with the second half, Vozrozhdenie, covering immediate postwar events.
The popularity of Brezhnev’s work was guaranteed, extending to several editions. With an overall print run of 15 million over 20 editions, it appeared in over 100 countries in 65 languages.42 An article about it even appeared in The Times of London a couple of weeks after its publication, recording the fact that Brezhnev had received the Order of Victory for his ‘great contribution’ to the Soviet victory in World War II. This was apparently presented by Mikhail Suslov of the Politbiuro, citing Brezhnev’s participation in the ‘bloody battles of the legendary Malaya Zemlya’.43
In contrast to Sokolov’s substantial memoirs published 11 years previously, Brezhnev’s work was concise – short enough to fill only four pages of the broadsheet Novorossiiskii rabochii. The print run for the first book published locally was similarly modest, at 3,000 rather than the 50,000 copies of Sokolov’s 1967 edition. This edition of Malaia zemlia was a correspondingly small hard-back volume measuring only 15 by 10 centimetres, with 136 pages, produced in time for the thirty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Novorossiisk in September 1978.44 Its quality was proclaimed by the glossy, maroon cover, boasting a photograph of landing troops, with a picture of Brezhnev opposite his signature in maroon as the frontispiece, and further photographs of the campaign inside the front and back covers. At 35 kopecks, it was cheaper than Sokolov’s 85-kopeck edition.
Despite the indirect source of much of the information they contain, Brezhnev’s work agrees with Sokolov’s to reinforce the myth of Malaia zemlia through several key tropes. Brezhnev emphasises the name of the beach-head, quoting from a letter claimed to have been written by himself to the troops and copied to Stalin: ‘The small piece of land outside Novorossiisk retaken by us from the enemy [. . .] we named “Malaia zemlia”’.45 The small area of the re-conquered territory is stressed by both authors. Sokolov writes without elaboration of the troops ‘on a small area of land’.46 Brezhnev, in contrast, highlights the significance of the name in an elevated literary style indicative of the authorship of his memoirs:
It is certainly small – less than 30 square kilometres. And it is great, as only a scrap of land can become great when it is soaked with the blood of selfless heroes.47
Continuing to evoke the empathy of his readers, he explains the meaning of defending this small piece of Soviet land, portrayed as a small section of the Motherland and thus a smaller representation of the Soviet Union:
It may be small, but it is ours, Soviet land, soaked with our sweat and our blood, and we shall never under any circumstances return it to the enemy.48
Sokolov goes even further, stressing the troops’ positive wish to rejoin Malaia zemlia with the mainland: ‘The Malozemel’tsy cherished a dream to unite the Small with the Large.’49
While both authors agree on the significance of the coastal strip, there is a distinct difference in the tone of two respective memoirs. Sokolov remains optimistic throughout, while Brezhnev emphasises negatively the sense of isolation and separation from the mainland, writing rather of the constant hardship and mortal danger. As his memoirs are written in the first person, in contrast to Sokolov’s third-person account, this may be interpreted as a testament to Brezhnev’s own implied courage. Indeed,the whole tone of the work is set in the introductory passage, when, promoting his own bravery, Brezhnev repeats the story published by Borzenko of the mine explosion which left him unconscious on the night of his arrival by boat on the beach-head.50 Sokolov’s more positive approach is demonstrated by the inclusion in his memoirs of several song sung by the troops, some of which look forward to victory. 51 Brezhnev however, despite the literary provenance of his memoirs, only resorts to verse when speaking of the death of a comrade in the political section, when the man standing next to him in a dug-out was blown up, again serving to promote Brezhnev’s reputation as a brave soldier.52 Where Sokolov concentrates on several individual acts of heroism, Brezhnev focuses largely on his own interaction with the troops and his role in boosting their morale, which largely took place in relatively safe bunkers.
Although Brezhnev’s memoirs were produced by committee, they do not demonstrate the variety of perspectives inherent in a collaborative venture such as Sokolov’s. Both memoirs have a performative style, with substantial amounts of fictionalised dialogue between characters. However, with only one main protagonist in Brezhnev’s work, it has even more cohesion than Sokolov’s collected work.
With Brezhnev’s influential position as leader of the Soviet Union, his memoirs were far more significant than Sokolov’s collected work in shaping the national myth of Malaia zemlia, which thus attained a higher status than its brief mention in the history books warranted. Reactions to Brezhnev’s memoirs were mixed. Andropov’s response to a political fait accompli was to telephone the ‘author’ in hospital to express his rapture.53 The national press immediately provided extensive coverage, praising Brezhnev as a military and literary hero.54 and commenting on the high level of interest within the Soviet Union.55 As early as 29 March 1978 a conference with over a thousand delegates, mainly party officials, was held in Rostov-on-Don in order to scrutinise and approve Brezhnev’s conclusions.56 In the introduction to the published proceedings, the work’s political importance is highlighted:
Workers of the Don region rate highly the memoirs of Comrade L.I. Brezhnev, ‘Malaia zemlia’.[. . . .] They agreed unanimously and wholeheartedly that the publication of the book ‘Malaia zemlia’was the most important socio-political event in the life of our country.57
The work was not only acclaimed for its political content, however. Subsequent conferences held across the Soviet Union from Tashkent to Tbilisi proclaimed its literary merit. Praise was also attributed to Brezhnev by Ukrainian scholars for both the literary style and historical veracity of his memoirs, despite the fact that he had used the services of a team of ghost-writers for the project. Furthermore, scholars at a conference held at the Institute for World Literature in the Moscow Academy of Sciences favourably compared Brezhnev’s work with the oeuvre of Aleksandr Pushkin.58 Brezhnev’s memoirs were also awarded the Lenin Prize for Literature in 1979, for ‘their popularity and their educative influence on the mass of readers’.59 The myth of Malaia zemlia once again caught the attention of The Times.
The engagement received little mention in Soviet war histories until the late 1960s, when President Brezhnev’s image began to predominate. Now it is treated as a major turning point in the war, alongside the battle of Stalingrad and the siege of Leningrad, with Mr Brezhnev’s role receiving special attention in official accounts and memoirs.
Mr Brezhnev’s own description of the battle, in which he is officially said to have come close to death, was given the country’s top literary prize. A song about it is now frequently played on Moscow radio.60
Some subdued criticism was also evident at home. Brezhnev’s wife, Viktoriia Petrovna, is alleged by Zamiatin to have said that he should not have accepted the prize.61 More generally, following the controversy over Khrushchev’s memoirs and the fact that Stalin, the leader of the country during the war, had not published memoirs himself, it may have been viewed an extreme move for Brezhnev, albeit already leader of the country for over 13 years, to promote himself so boldly in what was clearly a bid for political one-upmanship. Moreover, although ghost-writing and group-authorship was widely practised amongst the country’s highest-ranking politicians, in this case newspaper editors disapproved of the rumoured non-payment of the anonymous writers who had earned him ‘hundreds of thousands of roubles’, while allegedly embellishing Brezhnev’s military career.62 Popular opinion judged the issue with yet another Brezhnev anekdot, one of a wealth of relatively good-natured popular jokes told at the expense of the general secretary and his war cult:
Brezhnev found an extremely positive review of his Malaia zemlia in the national press. He hurriedly summoned an aide and asked if he had read the book. ‘Yes’, replied the aide. ‘And what did you think about it?’, asked Brezhnev. ‘Amazing!’ replied the aide. Seeking confirmation, Brezhnev went through the same daunting interrogation with two further, increasingly frightened officials. In the face of unanimous positive response, Brezhnev declared: ‘Well, in that case, I really must read it myself!’63
As Brezhnev’s personal memoirs depended on a team of ghost-writers, their credibility as an historical document or even a witness account may rightly be questioned. It is likely that Sokolov’s memoirs are more accurate than Brezhnev’s, as a first edition was recorded in 1949, relatively soon after the war, although Sokolov admits that he lost his notes during the liberation of Novorossiisk.64 Although arguably historically more useful,65 Sokolov does make occasional mistakes, notably the exact date of the February landings, whilst claiming that Malozemel’tsy never forget.66 If Brezhnev’s work was inaccurate, it may possibly be attributed to the fact that it, like Sokolov’s, was a collaborative venture, although not in the same sense. Brezhnev had already suffered a stroke by the time it was written, so that the drafts were read to him while he was ill and probably not mentally alert in hospital.67 Being written by a third party, it was reliant on other memoirs and contemporaneous news reports, which were often themselves inaccurate. The frequency of his visits has also been questioned: Roi Medvedev claims that Brezhnev only crossed twice to Malaia zemlia, while Novorossiisk historian Tamara Iurina cites records showing up to 11 visits.68 Other sections of the memoirs were obviously politically motivated, for example the continued propagation of the myth that Brezhnev’s military advice was sought by Marshal Zhukov.69
However, despite criticism of factual errors and claims of exaggeration of the role of Brezhnev, his memoirs went on to influence the nation as a whole. By 1978, the story of Malaia zemlia was firmly established in the national consciousness, showing more characteristics of a drama than of an historical account. Under the domination of Brezhnev’s memoirs, one authoritative voice prevailed, rather than the coherent collection authored by Sokolov or the multiplicity of perspectives normally encountered in historical publications in the West. Encouraged by the pervading war cult, one ideological meaning was attached by Brezhnev to the campaign, with motivation for its success attributed solely and subjectively to the heroism of communist troops. No doubt, disillusionment or cynicism features, and there is no objectivity or room for differences in its interpretation.
Malaia zemlia is remembered nationally mainly thanks to Brezhnev’s overpowering top-down intervention, rather than Sokolov’s bottom-up project, which remained largely local. Especially in the Krasnodar region around Novorossiisk, Brezhnev’s memoirs were praised as a literary monument not only to the defenders of Malaia zemlia, but to the whole Soviet people:
a monument, created by a man who has lived through all that the heroes of his work lived through, comprehending entirely the greatness of the feat not only of his comrades-in-arms, but of the whole Soviet people.70
However, if Brezhnev’s volume is considered to be a monument, it is, like Pushkin’s poem, a literary monument to himself, the central character in the work created in his dotage, rather than to his fallen comrades, as in the case of Sokolov. If Brezhnev propagated the myth of Malaia zemlia through his memoirs, he also used them to construct a mythological version of himself for posterity. Just before his death, quotations from Brezhnev’s work were engraved on the giant Malaia zemlia memorial erected in Novorossiisk by the state in 1982, guaranteeing Brezhnev and his memoirs a certain degree of physical, if geographically limited, immortality.