Source: Washington Post
MOSCOW -- The 60th anniversary of Victory Day, to be celebrated here tomorrow, is much more than a great historical date. Gradually in recent years the Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Russia, has become the substitute for a national sense of mission in a country that has gone astray on the way to modernization. The meaning of victory in that brutal war goes beyond commemoration of a glorious past; it has evolved into an important element in current politics and even into a vision for the future. And increasingly it has meant the return to public discourse of the man who led Russia through that brutal conflict: Joseph Stalin.
In the years immediately after the war Stalin played down the victory. Until his death, the day was not nationally celebrated. Russian soldiers returning from a victorious struggle had gained too much pride and independence -- an unacceptable development for a tyrant who sought to keep his country in fear and humiliation. Only Stalin himself could be extolled as the savior and victor. He disparaged the people's feat and downgraded the number of Soviet casualties to 7 million killed -- about one-fourth of the actual number.
But after Stalin, the importance of the victory began to grow in the public mind. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and disclosed the executions of the best Soviet generals, ordered by Stalin before the war, a purge that left Soviet defenses in a weakened condition and contributed to the huge wartime losses. On Khrushchev's orders countless Stalin statues all over the Soviet Union were removed. Khrushchev paid tribute to the people's sacrifice and revealed a much higher -- though still not genuine -- number of lost Soviet lives: 20 million.
For Leonid Brezhnev, the victory was the key to his foreign policy doctrine. While Khrushchev still believed that communism was an attractive idea that could mobilize masses and provide a solid basis for his power, the cynical Brezhnev regime relied almost entirely on imperial expansion to achieve these ends. During the Cold War, the territories that had been liberated by the Soviet army from Nazi occupation were claimed by the Soviet Union as its rightful realm. The figure of Stalin -- largely obliterated from the landscape by Khrushchev -- reappeared in movies in the role of wartime commander in chief. His name began to show up again in novels and poems.
Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika overturned the Communist Party's monopoly on history, and it revealed and condemned Stalin's crimes. Disclosures of the late 1980s included the fate of Soviet POWs who made it back home, only to be locked in Stalin's camps. Others involved the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and prewar occupations of neighboring countries, the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, and scores of other dark Soviet war secrets. An accurate accounting of Soviet losses was finally provided: 27 million killed.
The collapse of the communist system gave Russia a chance to reshape itself as a democratic nation and build its national identity on something other than Stalin and military might. The people's victory over autocracy in 1991 had the potential to create a new vision for Russia as an open society, a country joining the world after decades of isolation.
But the 1991 victory failed to fulfill this great role. The disillusionment and hardship of the early post-communist period, the maladjustment to the hazards of fledgling capitalism, the sense of humiliation over lost superpower status -- all these things fed the yearning for Russia's habitual paternalism, for a strong state (as an idea if not a reality) and for a ruler who could serve as a father figure.
Vladimir Putin as president has catered to this desire. He and his aides and loyalists have cultivated an anti-modernization mind-set. They have given people a steady diet of Soviet-style political rhetoric and have revived communist symbols, along with the imagery of Russia as an isolated country targeted by unnamed -- but most likely Western -- enemies seeking to destroy it.
The victory in World War II has played an indispensable role in this discourse. By now, however, the disclosures of the nation's dark past made during the perestroika years seem mostly to have been forgotten or put aside -- much like the transformational drive of perestroika itself. In the Russian mind, the war has been once again reduced to a symbol of sacrificial struggle followed by victory. Russia's triumph of 1945 is seen as the embodiment of the state: strong, victorious, mobilized -- everything today's Russia is not.
As the failure to define a modernization project for Russia becomes obvious, its leaders increasingly cling to the symbols of past Soviet glory. In these circumstances it's only natural that the image of Stalin should be reinvigorated. In recent years nostalgic yearning for paternalism has repeatedly placed Stalin among the top three or four Russian heroes in opinion polls. Now the 60th-anniversary celebrations further encourage such views. An increasing number of cities have reported plans to erect new Stalin statues. And while intellectuals and human rights activists have written to Putin urging him to speak out against rehabilitation of the Kremlin butcher, the president refuses to act against the re-Stalinization drive.
In the 1960s Alexander Galich, a Russian poet with a superb grasp of the Soviet mind-set, described a phantasmagorical nightly procession of discarded Stalin statues, whole figures or just limbs and fragments -- a boot, a mustache, a button -- marching together in procession, headed by a "bronze generalissimo." They disappear with the light of dawn but lie in hiding ready to make a glorious return when their time comes. That time may not be here, but Stalin will continue to haunt Russia until it finds its way onto the path to modernization.
Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra journal, writes a monthly column for The Post.