Originally published in the print version of “First of the Month” in the 60th Anniversary year of V-E Day.
The Mamayev Kurgan, the highest ground in the city now called Volgograd, is the site of the memorial to the battle still called Stalingrad. Thirty-five thousand soldiers of the country once called the Soviet Union lie buried there—a very small fraction of the millions killed or crippled in and around the city—beneath the largest statue in the world, the Rodina Mat, literally, ‘the motherland mother’. Near the base of the memorial—the Mameyev Kurgan has 200 steps, one for each day of the battle—the torso of a figure looking more than a little like the Incredible Hulk emerges from what appears to be concrete. Its rough, hyper-masculine features were not in fact dreamt up by someone who in the West would have been a comic book artist: the features are pretty scrupulously modeled on those of Marshal Vasily Chuikov, whose 62nd Army clung to the last scraps of Stalingrad until the great double envelopment across the Volga encircled Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army, sealing the fate of Nazi Germany. The portion of the Sixth Army trapped in the pocket exceeded a quarter of a million men. Enforcing extraordinarily brutal Stalinist military discipline, Chuikov also executed around 13,500 of his own men.
Chuikov’s victory averted the worst disaster we can imagine and, simultaneously, preserved and expanded a monstrous tyranny; dwelling on the latter achievement, neither the Lithuanians nor the Estonians showed up for the celebrations on May 9th. If you were invited to a tour of Soviet-era war memorials on the eve of a decennial event—I was—you probably departed with an eye primed for spotting moral paradox (I did). The paradox of May 9th was real and troubling, and before I walked the ground where the Soviets (and now the Russians) commemorate their great victory, I expected to be uneasy, and at best mistrustful: sixty years after the events they memorialize, it is hard to determine much about a recently totalitarian culture from a whirlwind visit to the institutions and people charged with creating and preserving its official memory.
So before I saw it, I was fairly confident that the Mamayev Kurgan memorial would be not only coarse Soviet-era gigantism, but kitsch. It is instead vastly impressive. Like the Soviet war memorials at Belgorod, commemorating the titanic Battle of Kursk, or the dioramas in the huge new Moscow Museum of the Great Patriotic War, you are not sure quite what to make of it, or what Russians make of it, but you are inclined to remember the Prologue’s advice in Henry V, and ‘sit and see/Minding true things by what their mockeries be.’ It is an odd fact that while the most magnificent war poetry in our language commemorates a squalid and failed imperial venture in fifteenth century France, most of us know no poetry of any kind about the Second World War, and certainly none about Russia’s war, where the most vicious imperial venture in history came within an ace of success. So our old poetry has to do.
Our current estimate is that twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the Second World War. Many died because of the murderous ineptitude of the regime they defended, and whose rule they extended, but they died doing what Churchill described as “tearing the guts out of the German Army”. Without their fantastic tenacity, courage and skill, we’d have lost the war. Their names are almost unknown in the West, but visiting Russian memorials, one learns a few of them. The Russians are fond of panoramas and dioramas—another art form that ought to be kitschy, but in situ, isn’t. The biggest panorama painting in the world is in a Volgograd museum.
Represented there are people a lot of Russians still seem to know about—the ‘names/Familiar in his mouth as household words’. Zaitsev, the master sniper who stalked and killed hundreds of German soldiers in the ruins of Stalingrad, appears in the panorama, as does another tiny, flaming figure, hurling himself at a tank: that is Panikakha, who approached a German armored column holding two Molotov cocktails. A German bullet ignited one, setting Panikakha afire; he then ran forward, destroying a German tank with the firebomb that remained. A highly stylized statue of Panikakha on a Volgograd back street has him parallel to the ground, flying to his fate, in no way joyous, but infinitely determined. In advance of seeing the statue, one suspects that recent images of suicide bombers will infiltrate one’s response. They do not. Sometimes, memory is preserved in a ruin and a name, as is the case with ‘Pavlov’s House’: Jakob Pavlov was the sergeant who defended that house with a platoon, encircled, for fifty-nine days. Russians know that the German army lost more men attacking Pavlov’s house than they did taking Paris.
In the city’s main military museum, and in a smaller museum in the basement of what is still the Central Department Store, where Paulus surrendered, a couple of objects—Paulus’ busy design for the Stalingrad victory medal, what seems to be a Vichy propaganda poster announcing the city’s fall—may make one remember another snatch of Henry V: “The man that once did sell the lion’s skin/While the beast lived, was killed with hunting him.”
But most of the Russian memorial apparatus shuns even that much dark levity. There is pride, but the overwhelming tone is sorrow. The victory may have legitimized the regime for almost another half century, but to my eye the memorials do their work without too much callow triumphalism. Russian war memorials seem suffused with a sense of the victory’s cost, and official memories seem in this respect to track private ones: of five veterans asked for their most vivid memories of the battle of Stalingrad, three mentioned the first week of bombing, when the Luftwaffe killed perhaps 100,000 civilians.
The memorials obviously do not work identically on all Russians who see them—one translator-guide in the Volgograd museum seemed rather bored by the museum’s contents—and the memorials occasionally fail to convey wholly unambiguous messages. On the Mamayev Kurgan, between the statues of Chuikov and the Rodina Mat, two rows of statues show men dragging wounded comrades. Our guide asked if we knew what, under Soviet military law, justified a soldier leaving a position on the battlefield. There was, she explained, only one justification: to advance. To abandon a position to save a wounded comrade carried the death sentence. Why then did two rows of statues show men doing just that? Perhaps, our guide suggested impassively, those men were advancing with the wounded on their backs. It seems unlikely that a Soviet memorial was intended to be self-deconstructing, but it also seems unlikely that my guide was wholly unaware that she was developing a paradox of May 9.
So, on May 9th, I’d hoped President Bush would keep easily belligerent meditations about the paradoxes of May 9th to a minimum. There are an abundance of such paradoxes—for example, a glittering Orthodox cathedral has just been erected overlooking the battlefield of Prohorovka, where what was once called the Red Army won the largest tank battle ever fought—but most of them seem pretty well known to the Russians, whose per capita GDP has just fallen below that of Brazil’s, whose death rate vastly exceeds their birth rate, and who seem painfully aware that what were until recently the two superpowers may now be divided into the one that remembers almost nothing, and the one that, for now, may sometimes fear that it has only its memories.
The 60th anniversary of VE Day, suffused with the agony of a victory whose spoils have in any case now vanished, and which is nowadays probably under-appreciated in the West, was an unlikely source of truly dangerous and radically dishonest militarist sentimentality. It was perhaps not the best occasion to dwell only on admittedly horrific Soviet crimes, while leaving that country’s massive sacrifice and magnificent achievement almost entirely off the agenda, but this is what we did. There was almost no mention of the occasion in our press, and President Bush, who went to Latvia on the eve of the anniversary, bravely disdained the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, instead choosing to denounce dangerous and dishonest militarist sentimentality about VE Day, before heading off to Russia, where he sat more or less silently while President Putin commemorated the feats and sacrifices of the vanished country in which he’d been born. Last year’s best book on the end of the Second World War in Europe, A Woman In Berlin, was an astonishing achievement, not least astonishing in its refusal of the pleasures of morally-privileged victimhood, even when describing the Red Army men who had repeatedly raped its author. Many people who have suffered rather less at Russian hands seem more intoxicated by the pleasures of indignation. The last Western bestseller on the Battle of Stalingrad confidently pronounced the Mamayev Kurgan a monstrous monument to the Soviet Union, rather than to the people who fought there—which is not so obviously and indisputably the case.