Without idea of Nazis, Putin’s Russia cannot cohere

Vladimir Putin told soldiers at Monday’s Victory Day parade in Moscow they were “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did”. In speaking of “denazifing” Ukraine, Putin is updating the Soviet mythologisation of the Great Patriotic War. That Ukraine is a democratic state with a Jewish president is irrelevant; Nazism, in the Russian myth, has little to do with anti-Semitism or the Holocaust.

Bizarrely, under the Soviet Union, the Holocaust was a taboo subject. Vasily Grossman, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jew, was one of the first writers to attest that the Jews of his homeland had been exterminated by the Nazis. Embedded with the Red Army as a correspondent from the battle of Stalingrad until victory in Berlin, Grossman visited Treblinka shortly after it was liberated and wrote the earliest account of the workings of a Nazi extermination camp. After the war, he was among a group of writers tasked with documenting the Holocaust on Soviet soil. The completed Black Book of Soviet Jewry was refused publication in 1948; Stalin had no wish to complicate the tale of Soviet valour with real information concerning the reason the victims were killed, or that risked touching on the matter of collaboration by Soviet citizens with the Nazis.

In 1952, Stalin provoked his own wave of anti-Semitic frenzy in Russia. Prominent Soviet Jews were arrested and murdered. A million copies of a pamphlet explaining “Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country” were printed and readied for distribution. Presumably, Stalin would have acted on this plan had he lived a little longer. He had already deported whole populations – Chechens, Crimean Tatars and others – as collective punishment for presumed collaboration with the Germans.

Slaying the beast

Putin draws directly on the Soviet tale of united Russia slaying the Nazi beast. The reality was rather different. Jozef Czapski, one of a handful of Polish officers to survive imprisonment by the Soviets, was released in 1941, when Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin. In Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia 1941-1942, Czapski told of peasants who complained of hunger due to state requisitioning, and their hopes for liberation by the Germans: “In the fall of 1941, those of us who had the opportunity to come into contact with the ordinary people, if only on trains or in stations, were struck by the wave of bitterness, hatred for the regime, and objection to the war that surfaced everywhere in the few short months when the NKVD [interior ministry] had relaxed its iron grip amid the chaos prompted by the pressure of the German offensive.” Conscripts had no appetite for the coming fight, and the regime looked ready to collapse from within. “Only when the Russians came to believe the initially incredible news of the inhuman, mindless cruelties committed by the Nazis on a mass scale did the mood change.”

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Stalin decided it was time to revive Russian nationalism and to depict the war as a struggle for Russia’s survival. Russia’s national heroes and symbols were invoked. Tolstoy’s War and Peace was broadcast over the radio, to suggest parallels with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

Stalin decided it was time to revive Russian nationalism and to depict the war as a struggle for Russia's survival

The demands of socialist realism required that the Russian soldier of films, books and murals be a self-sacrificing hero. The role of being the Tolstoy of the Great Patriotic War was awarded to the same Vasily Grossman of the cancelled Black Book. The edition of his epic novel, Stalingrad (1952), available to us now in translation, draws on three versions published in Grossman’s lifetime and 11 typed drafts made in response to political demands, and is of great importance for what it tells us about Stalinist censorship. The censors insisted that Grossman add chapters on proletarian valour at the front and cut references to labour camps and discontent with collective agriculture. Also struck out were mentions of pilfering, bad food, vermin and – in one instance – unwashed hands. (That Grossman pushed boundaries is no trivial matter; of the 2,000 writers arrested in Stalin’s prewar purges, only 500 survived.)

Arrests and executions

Grossman’s wartime diaries tell another story; of traitors and desertions, soldiers turning their weapons on commanders and comrades, of arbitrary arrests and executions. Those assigned to punishment units were known as “smertniki” – the dead. Over 400,000 men perished in such units. At Stalingrad, the NKVD Rifle Division took up position behind frontline troops, to shoot anybody who retreated.

Nor did the sufferings of the Soviet soldier end with victory. Survivors of German prison camps were dispatched to the tundra to serve as slave labour; having surrendered was a crime. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, a frontline soldier, was sent to the Gulag for criticising Stalin in a private letter.

Grossman's diaries tell of traitors and desertions, soldiers turning their weapons on commanders and comrades, of arbitrary arrests and executions

Within months of its 1952 publication, Grossman’s censored Stalingrad was denounced as ideologically unreliable; Grossman would likely not have survived Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge had the dictator lived a little longer. Repenting of his compromises with socialist realism, under the Khrushchev thaw Grossman wrote Life and Fate, one of the great works of 20th-century Soviet literature, in which he portrayed the Nazi and Soviet regimes as mirror images of each other. He could not publish it.

The thaw did not extend to acknowledgment of the millions who had died in the Gulag or in state-provoked famines or who had been shot in prisons. It did not admit to memory the infantry forced into making suicidal attacks, or the deportations of entire nations. To do so would have meant questioning the revolution itself.

Russia held fast to its fictional version of the second World War to avoid confronting the truth of Stalinism and the perpetual violence that the Soviet Union was founded upon.

The sole period in the last hundred years when Russia’s historiography has not been the domain of the state was the brief period Putin identifies as a national disaster – the late 1980s under Gorbachev until the rise of Putin in 2000.

The Soviet myth is the Russian myth and the Red Army is central to it. The “capitalist world” is now a spectral presence called “the West”. If there are no Nazis, they must be resurrected. Without Nazis, the Russian state as it exists today cannot cohere.

Russia’s war with Ukraine is a struggle by the Kremlin to maintain the facade of lies that it has never stopped telling its people about the past; a narrative which its present leader identifies with deeply, pathologically.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is an Irish short story writer and translator who lives in Bucharest