#11 - RW 263
Moscow Times
June 25, 2003
The Great Patriotic War Today and Yesterday
By Zaira Abdullaeva

To those of my children's generation, World War II is as buried in the annals of history as the Hundred Years' War, and the Battle of Stalingrad means about as much to them as the ancient Battle of Pharsalus.

It is hard to imagine a teenager today who can rattle off the stages of the Soviet victory over Fascist Germany without making a mistake: The perfidious invasion on the clear morning of June 22, 1941; the Leningrad blockade; the defense of Moscow; the battle of Kursk; the Tehran conference of 1943; the Yalta conference in 1944; the mining of Krakow by the Germans; and the fall of Berlin in May 1945.

In the Soviet Union, even school dropouts knew the whole thing by heart. Because the four-year Great Patriotic War was the patriotic foundation on which postwar generations were brought up. Nothing else was quite so powerful or evocative.

Thirty years after the war, the Soviet Union had entered a period of relative stability. The country had been rebuilt, outer space had been conquered and the assimilation of the Virgin Lands had already become a legend. New generations knew neither hunger nor the triumphs of Soviet power first-hand. The country needed something that could consolidate society, and which could be used to ensure future generations would be devoted -- or at least loyal -- citizens.

For a totalitarian society, still coming to terms with the official condemnation of Stalin's personality cult, the war -- still fresh in people's minds -- was the only thing that could fill such a role. The Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov neatly summed up the formula for any such successful enterprise, when he wrote: "The thing is eternal if it is built on blood."

The Great Patriotic War -- the greatest shock in the young Soviet Union's history -- was, more importantly, the most profound ordeal in the history of each and every Soviet family.

Growing up in Grozny in the peaceful and uneventful 1970s, my peers and I -- as I recall -- were a very militarized generation.

Our textbooks taught us that "no one, apart from cowards and despicable outcasts, refuses to serve in the Soviet Army." So twice a week, we had classes in basic military training. We learned to take apart Kalashnikovs and fire Makarov pistols at the school shooting-range. Fifteen years on, I still remember exactly how to assemble a rifle.

In addition to our basic military training, we were required to take part in a patriotic military game called Zarnitsa three times during our school careers. This involved crowds of 15-year-olds being bused to a forest several kilometers outside of Grozny, where we would run around shouting "Hurrah," while scouring the area for the military flags of the imaginary enemy. Dzhalka, where they took us to, was about half an hour's drive from Grozny. Maybe yesterday's teenagers are running around there to this day, only now wielding real guns.

In May 1985, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the victory over Germany on the central square of Grozny, wearing tank helmets and camouflage. The creme de la creme were rewarded with a week's duty keeping guard by the eternal flame in front of Grozny's Council of Ministers building. Just a few years later, unshaven young men -- who had clearly done their military training -- could be found there, cooking shashlik on the flame.

Of course, all the dates and figures repeated over and over on television, radio, in newspapers and schools bored us to death. Agent Shtirlitz, the well-loved screen hero, was also the butt of numerous jokes. And getting us to strap on gas masks over bows and braids in three seconds at the start of every military training class was all a big lark for our dashing military instructor.

After the military games were over and budding patriots had had their fill of running around, we would sit by a fire eating baked potatoes and singing: "Ah, wretched war, what have you done!"

Much later, it transpired that the heroics that had fed our nascent patriotism were not quite as crystal pure as had been portrayed in the films and books. We learned that many more than 20 million people had been killed; and that people had been unceremoniously pushed into the line of fire with only one rifle between three.

We learned that the pioneer heroes who had perished during the war were nothing more than children who had often been unscrupulously and ruthlessly used by adults -- and that children being killed in a war is nothing to be proud of.

We learned that Red Army soldiers had turned to looting and violence on enemy territory; that Stalin's camps did not stop for a moment and that often entire ethnic groups were punished -- a fate that befell the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars and Volga Germans in 1944.

I learned that my mother's father, who normally never spoke a word about the two wars he fought in -- Finnish and Great Patriotic -- would sometimes let slip that twice he had escaped from prisoner of war camps in Poland. Until his death in 1973, he was terrified that he would be found out.

I learned that my other grandfather had been less lucky. After spending four years in a German camp, he spent another two years in labor camps in eastern Siberia. He probably got away with such a light sentence only because he was illiterate and would hardly have made an effective spy.

Nowadays, whole books are devoted to the crimes of the Soviet regime and films tell a very different story. The war is no longer a sacred cow about which one should say only good things or nothing at all.

The war has ceased to be a unifying national idea that could be used to teach children to love their motherland. And no other national idea has emerged to take its place, although from time to time, the authorities announce competitions to come up with a new one.

As for June 22, it always used to be a quiet day, not a time for celebration. People did not associate it with victory; it was a day for counting one's personal losses. On that day, my father and grandfather would sit down and drink 100 grams of vodka. And sit in silence. My normally talkative grandmother would wipe the corners of her eyes with the edge of her kerchief as she remembered her only brother, who had disappeared in May 1945, and her little daughter, who had died of fever in 1944.

In February 1944, a group of Soviet soldiers came and roughly shoved my grandmother and her children into a truck, and if it hadn't been for the local postwoman, a Ukrainian woman named Valya, who screamed: "They aren't Chechens, they're Dagestanis!" and pulled them from the back of the truck, my grandmother (aged 28), who hardly spoke a word of Russian, would have shared the fate of her Chechen neighbors who were deported to the freezing steppes of Kazakhstan. She was lucky, but her 3-year-old daughter was not. The soldiers hadn't let my grandmother wrap her up in something warm, and she died of pneumonia three days later.

I tell these things to my children and they listen attentively, but only because the stories have to do with relatives of theirs. As far as they're concerned, the war is not part of their heritage, it belongs to the distant past. I can teach them songs from the war, but I'll never get them to feel the sense of personal involvement in the great victory that I felt as a child.

They'll finish singing the songs and run off to listen to Eminem. And if you believe what they say on music channels and radio stations, Eminem is what unites our children today. Perhaps not the only thing, but certainly a powerful force.

Zaira Abdullaeva, a freelance journalist based in Moscow, contributed this essay to The Moscow Times.

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