PART II
People, their deeds and works, are remembered by history only if they succeed as story. Their lives may be told and retold as legend, altered to fit the needs of succeeding generations.1
A bronze statue of Leonid Brezhnev appeared in the centre of Novorossiisk in 2004, decades after other statues to the general secretary had been removed from public spaces across the country. The new statue was erected for the thirtieth anniversary of Brezhnev’s visit to Novorossiisk in 1974, when he presented the Gold Star to the new Hero City of the Soviet Union. This statue reveals the human characteristics of the general secretary in an artistic representation of a local legend which has developed around the event. It encapsulates the personal rather than the political side of this historic relationship, serving to define the current identity of Novorossiisk with respect to Brezhnev. The Brezhnev statue is grounded in local society and is thus more specific than national memory, which barely recognises the event to which it refers. National and local views of Brezhnev’s place in history are not necessarily in opposition however, but offer complementary perspectives of the general secretary, seen from a distance or in close detail as if through opposite ends of a telescope.
This type of relationship has been explored with regard to Germany by Alon Confino, in search of common ground between local and national myths. Through the idealistic concept of Heimat (home) in German society, he successfully links the local with the national, demonstrating an overlapping of symbolism such that local memory may sometimes appropriate the national, while the national may acquire and revive different local meanings. In this way, Confino inverts traditional, presentist scholarship which sees national interests always moulding local ones, to examine how local issues may shape nationhood in a convergence of interests.2
The Heimat approach in Germany embraces both local and national connotations. Although it is particularly useful in the case of Germany, to date scholarship has barely addressed this degree of complexity in the construction of local identity within the often overpowering Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War.3 On the local level the concept of Heimat is similar to that of Malaia zemlia: a small place that one can call home. However, the troops on Malaia zemlia saw the rest of the country as different, Bol’shaia zemlia, accepting that their beach-head was only one small part of a larger whole and hoping for a reunification of the two as the enemy was expelled.4 There is no opposition between these two concepts, though, which dovetail together perfectly. The early myth of Malaia zemlia was simply an expression of a strong local identity which would later be subsumed within the national war myth, as we have seen earlier with memoir literature.
In this part we return to Novorossiisk to examine growing scrutiny of the local war myth and Brezhnev’s role within it in the town where he saw war service. Brezhnev’s visit in 1974 so affected the hero city’s perception of its own status within history that an eventual divergence in interpretation of Brezhnev’s association with Malaia zemlia arose between national and local audiences. The visit shows characteristics of what Aleksandr Etkind terms a ‘memory event’.5 This type of secondary phenomenon occurs some time after the original, historic event, but is dependent upon memory of the original for its impact and (re-)interpretation. A more familiar example of a memory event is the fall of the Berlin Wall, which invites comparison with the original event of its construction and also led to its own sequence of anniversaries. Brezhnev’s visit to Novorossiisk in 1974 was both secondary to and a product of his presence in the original Malaia zemlia campaign, in turn giving rise to its own memorial consequences in a series of reverberations through time. Chapters in this part examine the Brezhnev visit, the agency and mechanism of subsequent reverberations and the extent of any consequent re-interpretation and divergence from national collective memory.
The public persona of Brezhnev, which had been carefully constructed during the war cult only to be deconstructed nationally shortly after Brezhnev’s death, was re-constructed in Novorossiisk alone after the fall of communism, overriding the connection still ingrained in national collective memory between Brezhnev and his state-sponsored myth of Malaia zemlia. With a national re-assessment of Brezhnev around his centenary in 2006, however, a more empathetic and nostalgic sentiment has arisen nationally, which is closer in some aspects to the view consistently held in Novorossiisk.
Recent publications reveal a certain nostalgia for the Brezhnev era of stability and international power amongst some commentators, with criticism of a period of political and economic stagnation by others.6 It is not only some members of the older generation who would welcome a return to the conditions of ‘developed socialism’ under Brezhnev, but also President Putin, who has publicly lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union and reintroduced the Soviet national anthem with new words. War memory in contemporary Russia is also an integral part of the wave of nostalgia for the past that is gripping the country. Indeed, Putin’s policy of expansionism in Ukraine may be interpreted as a neo-imperialistic attempt to turn back the clock. It appears that the war cult is not merely used to validate the present, but also marks a campaign to return to some of the social and political values of the past by the promotion of collective remembrance.
The onset of a new war cult in the twenty-first century has led to a rapprochement of perceptions of Malaia zemlia nationally and locally, albeit allowing for a revised role for the general secretary in the public consciousness. The protracted debate around the adoption of the Brezhnev statue suggests that this artistic representation of Brezhnev’s place in the war myth is one significant indicator of the current mnemonic identity of Novorossiisk with respect to its relationship with Leonid Brezhnev.