There was below the surface something of a conflict at that time between “Holy Russia” and the “Soviet Union.” Sometimes compromises were reached between the two.
Our masters the Bolsheviks set up the Third International, and our masters the Bolsheviks developed the theory of so-called Socialism in One Country. That theory’s a contradiction in terms – like fried ice.
In late November 1941, as the Battle for Moscow raged, Soviet newspapers heralded a remarkable act of bravery at a place west of the capital called Dubosekovo. According to reports, twenty-eight members of the 316th Rifle Division (later redesignated the 8th Guards “Panfilov” Division) stood their ground against a column of fifty-four German tanks, destroying as many as eighteen in the process. Although all twenty-eight men perished in the fighting, their gallantry had forced the withdrawal of the much larger and better equipped German force. This story, repeated in various iterations throughout the war, proved extremely popular. As the Germans advanced on the city of Stalingrad in the late summer of 1942, for example, one political officer noted in his diary that he was suddenly compelled “to call out to the soldiers of the south: ‘Fight like the twenty-eight! Crush tanks as they were crushed by the Panfilov-Guardsmen outside Moscow. Stand to the death, and the enemy will flee as it fled from Moscow.’”Footnote 3 Only later did it emerge that a few of the twenty-eight Panfilovtsy had not died in the fighting at Dubosekovo. While the story was easily modified to accommodate the new details, the matter was further complicated when one of the survivors later admitted to military prosecutors that the Dubosekovo encounter was largely a fabrication, the invention of frontline newspaper reporters and editors. The Prosecutor’s Office passed this information to the Politburo, which continued to promote the invented and sensationalized account as a highly effective source of agitation. The legend of the twenty-eight Panfilovtsy survived the war’s end and Stalin’s death; it would thrive for decades as an important component of the Soviet myth of World War II.Footnote 4
The appeal of the story of the twenty-eight heroes derived in large part from the unit’s multiethnic composition. Assembled in Soviet Central Asia, the Panfilov division had recruited heavily from the local population, with Russians constituting a small percentage of the overall formation.Footnote 5 Although the first newspaper articles devoted to the engagement at Dubosekovo made no mention of the participants’ ethnicities, by 1942 the central press was specifying that among the twenty-eight “were Russians, Ukrainians, and Kazakhs,” as well as troops of other nationalities. “Their martial comradeship, sealed in blood, became the epitome of the great fighting friendship of the peoples of our country,” wrote Aleksandr Krivitskii, the literary secretary of the Red Army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda and the man most responsible for the myth’s creation and perpetuation.Footnote 6 Such an emphasis on multiethnic friendship dovetailed with a broader mobilizational campaign highlighting the heroic pedigree of “non-Russian” men-at-arms.Footnote 7 In fact, it was the head of the Red Army’s Political Directorate and Soviet Information Bureau, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, rather than Krivitskii, who first publicly emphasized the unit’s diverse ethnic makeup.Footnote 8
At the same time, the myth of the twenty-eight reinforced the more Russocentric themes of Soviet wartime culture. Most significant in this regard was the Russian political commissar supposedly in charge of the unit, Vasilii Klochkov. According to an expanded version of the story published in 1942, a few days before leading his men into battle, Klochkov took part in the famed November military parade on Red Square, during which Stalin delivered one of his most famous wartime addresses. “Let the heroic image of our great ancestors inspire you in this war,” Stalin urged, “Aleksandr Nevskii, Dmitrii Donskoi, Kuz’ma Minin, Dmitrii Pozharskii, Aleksandr Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov.”Footnote 9 The author then recounts how, standing in formation, Klochkov felt as though he was following in the footsteps of Russian warriors through the ages, such as the forces of Dmitrii Donskoi before defeating the Mongol–Tatar horde at the Battle of Kulikovo Field, or the militiamen of Kuz’ma Minin and Dmitrii Pozharskii, who ousted Polish–Lithuanian forces in 1612. Alongside these young Red Army volunteers “are the mustachioed fellow-fighters of Suvorov,” and with them “Mikhail Kutuzov will soon pursue Napoleon’s vaunted grenadiers.” The story’s narrator then ponders whether it was this moment, admiring the ancient Kremlin walls, that inspired Klochkov’s legendary battle cry nine days later as German tanks bore down on the twenty-eight: “Russia is vast, but there is nowhere to retreat – Moscow is at our backs!”Footnote 10
The figure of Klochkov is instructive. While the 1942 account described the political commissar deriving inspiration from prerevolutionary Russian sources, by 1952 authoritative treatments were attributing the man’s bravery and sacrifice to a decidedly Soviet pedigree: “At the head of the platoon stood political instructor [Vasilii Klochkov]. The son of a poor Russian peasant, Klochkov passed through the difficult school of life. The Soviet Motherland opened before him a path to a happy future. But war broke out, and Klochkov left for the front to defend the Motherland.” It was in the name of a homeland that symbolized emancipation from the prerevolutionary epoch, as much as continuity with it, that Klochkov and his men sacrificed their lives. “I will fight to the last breath,” Klochkov’s 1952 iteration declared shortly before the fateful engagement, “for the Motherland, for Stalin.”Footnote 11
As the war experience receded further into the past, the multiethnic, even universal, aspects of the Panfilovtsy story often took precedence over its Russocentric and historical features.Footnote 12 By the 1960s, delegations of young communists from around the world were identifying with this “socialist Thermopylae” (Figure 0.1).Footnote 13 Cuban youths visiting Moscow in 1965, for instance, took an oath at the site of the battle, declaring: “As the twenty-eight Panfilov-Guardsmen defended Moscow, so too shall we protect Cuba from American imperialism.”Footnote 14 All the while the legend of the twenty-eight resonated among the USSR’s multiethnic population. It should come as no surprise that one of the most revered Soviet war memorials still standing outside the borders of present-day Russia, one that has avoided the waves of post-Soviet iconoclasm that saw the toppling of other such monuments, is Kazakhstan’s Memorial of Glory, dedicated to the feat of the twenty-eight. Unveiled in 1975, at the peak of the late-socialist commemorative cult of the war, the monument consists of a massive sculptural depiction of representatives of each of the country’s fifteen republics wrought into the shape of the USSR (Figure 0.2). A popular venue for afternoon strolls and wedding processions, the memorial is situated in a leafy park in the center of Almaty that also bears the name of the Panfilovtsy.
Communist youth commemorate the last stand of the Panfilovtsy at Dubosekovo, early 1980s
Monument of Glory, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Like the legend of the twenty-eight Panfilov-Guardsmen in particular, the larger Soviet myth of victory embodied the fundamental tensions of wartime mobilization, which incorporated seemingly contradictory “Russian” and “Soviet,” ethnocentric and “internationalist,” transhistorical and postrevolutionary tendencies. The tensions and contradictions between these countervailing patriotic currents did not dissipate after 1945. Rather, they underpinned later Soviet debates about the meaning of victory; about the nature of patriotism and patriotic identity in a socialist society; about the place of the Russian people, their history and culture, within a supranational entity that presented itself as a renunciation of the old imperial order. How the war’s “official” memory refracted these tensions of patriotism between the 1940s and 1980s is the subject of this book.
* * *
This is a history of the Soviet myth of victory in World War II from its Stalinist origins to its emergence as arguably the supreme symbol of state authority during the late-socialist period. The book argues that the war’s memory encapsulated a range of competing ideological tendencies that gradually coalesced to form a “pan-Soviet” counterpoint to broader notions of Russian leadership and Russian-led ethnic hierarchy. While Russocentric historical narratives of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet eras continued to stress Russian benevolence and assistance on the path to modernity, the story of the war evolved as a parallel but countervailing ideological current, which flattened hierarchical configurations among Russians and non-Russians alike. At the same time, many contested the notion of a horizontally integrated “Soviet” political community. The book shows how a “Russophile” faction of party elites, nationalist-oriented intellectuals, and even some non-Russian party organizations in the republics, perpetuated a Russocentric understanding of the war “from below.” The competition between Russocentric and pan-Soviet conceptions of victory, which burst into the open during the late 1980s, reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space.
The book challenges a commonly held view that official war memory embodied and reinforced the fundamentally Russocentric basis of Soviet multiethnic governance.Footnote 15 Particularly in the years after Stalin’s death, the Soviet leadership looked to the war’s memory to bolster lateral “friendship” bonds and a supra-ethnic sense of belonging, one that did not succumb to, but remained in constant tension with, state-sponsored Russocentrism and a centuries-long narrative of Russian exceptionalism. In highlighting the fluid and ambiguous nature of the state’s informal ethnic hierarchy, the present study sheds new light on long-standing questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the patriotic revival of the war’s memory in twenty-first-century Russia.Footnote 16
The Myth of the War Victory
As in other countries that experienced the devastation of war and occupation, the Soviet leadership fashioned a self-serving “myth of the war experience,” which recast the conflict as an event with profound meaning and sanctity.Footnote 17 Although national myths are always selective and grounded in forgetting as much as remembering, this book is less interested in ferreting out “myth” from “reality” than in looking at how myths structure reality.Footnote 18 As the cultural historian Michael Kammen proposes, even where there is a willful distortion of the past, “description and explanation serve us in more satisfactory ways than cynicism about bad faith or evil intent on the part of dominant elites.” War myths reflect “a normative desire for … national unity, stability, and state-building.” They are, moreover, hardly confined to authoritarian regimes.Footnote 19 This is to say that the Soviet myth of the war victory, like all officially sanctioned mythologies of war, reflected the universal drive for social cohesion in the wake of national upheaval.Footnote 20
And yet, in the Soviet Union, the collective remembrance of World War II attained a significance arguably without parallel.Footnote 21 This was due in no small part to the sheer scale of Soviet losses. By most estimates, close to twenty-seven million Soviet citizens lost their lives as a direct result of the conflict. The Germans and their allies destroyed as many as seventy thousand Soviet villages and nearly two thousand towns and cities, leaving some twenty-five million people homeless by war’s end.Footnote 22 Beginning in the 1960s, the public celebration of victory acquired the characteristics of a state-sanctioned cult, which included ubiquitous monuments, commemorative rituals, and mass media productions devised, in part, to legitimate the aging political elite (Figure 0.3).Footnote 23 Official portraits of Leonid Brezhnev increasingly tied his personal authority to supposed wartime service and heroics, a connection reflected in the almost comical number of military and other decorations adorning the general secretary’s uniform.Footnote 24 By 1984, according to official figures, the CPSU had helped to establish as many as one-hundred thousand monuments and memorial sites dedicated to the war, with more than forty thousand of these falling within the territory of a single republic – the Ukrainian SSR.Footnote 25 Even amid the USSR’s collapse, the war remained, in the words of one Western chronicler at the time, the only “unquestionable victory of the regime.”Footnote 26
Artist at work on an official portrait of Leonid Brezhnev
The “Great Patriotic War,” as Soviet media dubbed the conflict, emerged as the central defining event of the Soviet epoch.Footnote 27 It was the lens through which Soviet citizens made sense of everything that had come before. From the vantage point of 1945, the brutality of collectivization, headlong industrialization, the Gulag, show trials, and purges became necessary measures to prepare the country for the long-anticipated showdown with the forces of imperialism, among which Nazi Germany embodied a particularly monstrous strain. Although the war’s mythology fluctuated with the evolving political landscape, several key ingredients to victory remained constant: the Soviet political and economic system, the unity and unwavering patriotism of the Soviet people, socialist ideology, cooperation among Soviet nations, and the leadership of the Communist Party.Footnote 28
Long dismissed for its blatantly propagandistic function and its association with both Stalin’s cult and late-socialist gerontocracy, the war’s public memory has become the object of sustained scholarly investigation over the past two decades.Footnote 29 Grounded largely in the theoretical and methodological approaches of the “memory boom” of the 1980s and 90s,Footnote 30 studies focusing on the Soviet Union have shed light on the often-dynamic role the war’s commemoration played in shaping individual and group recollections and identities.Footnote 31 In recent years, pathbreaking monographs have explored both the production and reception of Soviet war memory from a variety of perspectives.Footnote 32
But whereas the scholarly literature has tended away from high politics and the Party’s central mythmaking apparatus to shed light on regional and societal variation and lived experience, the present study focuses on the production of what Amir Weiner called the “dominant myth” and its relationship to the most numerous Soviet nationality – the Russian people. That is to say, The Soviet Myth is primarily concerned with the mechanisms of rule, the outlook and intentions of political elites, and the methods whereby those elites sought to forge a sense of common identity through remembrance of war.Footnote 33 As Krishan Kumar observes, far from ignoring popular attitudes and perceptions, a focus on “rulers” and “ruling peoples” can elucidate the process of negotiation between state and citizenry, “to see it not simply in oppositional terms but as a matter of a shared enterprise that could unite rulers and ruled as much as it divided them.”Footnote 34 Even one-party political systems depend on their capacity to connect with their subjects, to – as Frederick Corney puts it – implicate “the listeners in the telling of the story.”Footnote 35 The myth of victory in the Great Patriotic War, and its relationship to the Soviet Union’s “first among equals,” played a central role in this official endeavor. But before examining the book’s argument in greater detail, it is necessary to first consider the party-state’s evolving posture toward its most prominent (one might even say “awkward”) national community, ethnic Russians, in the years leading up to and during the war.Footnote 36
The Russian Question
Having emerged victorious from the bloody civil war that came in the wake of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, Russia’s Communist government faced the daunting challenge of transforming a vast former empire into a structure that claimed not to be one. The Bolsheviks unveiled their novel approach to this problem in 1923, following the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics the previous year.Footnote 37 Based on the Marxist assumption that national identity was a transitory, bourgeois phenomenon that needed to be traversed and transcended before advancing to the purely class-based consciousness of socialism the regime granted forms of nationhood to the inherited ethnic minorities of the former Russian Empire in hopes of defusing their politically charged aspirations and antagonisms. This “anti-imperial state” was conceived not only to assist in the revolutionary drive toward socialism, but also to facilitate trust between the state’s various ethnic groups and the former oppressor nation of Great Russians. To this end, the regime introduced measures that positively discriminated against the state’s ethnic Russian core. In the cultural sphere, this meant the denigration of tsarist military heroes and Russian literary icons. At an institutional level, the Bolsheviks denied the Russian people their own communist party, academy of sciences, state security service, and ethnically delineated territory. They were granted a federative (SFSR) rather than national (SSR) republic. And while this encouraged Russians to more closely identify with central, all-union institutions – and thus territorially with the USSR as a whole – the objective was to hamstring Russian cultural and political nationalism, which both Lenin and Stalin initially identified as the greater threat than the “local” nationalisms of non-Russian peoples.Footnote 38
During the 1930s, Stalin reversed the official line on Russians in what has been cited as an important facet of a more general conservative “retreat” from the internationalist and class-based precepts of the prior decade.Footnote 39 The very creation of the Soviet Union in 1922 and Stalin’s subsequent thesis of “socialism in one country” reflected the gnawing sense that revolution in the industrially advanced West was unlikely anytime soon; hence, the fledgling Union would need to fend for itself.Footnote 40 The War Scare of 1927 and especially Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 appear to have convinced Stalin that Marxism-Leninism alone lacked the mobilizational potential necessary to successfully defend the Soviet state.Footnote 41 Just as troubling were indications that indigenization policies, far from accelerating the obsolescence of ethnonational identities, were fueling anti-Soviet “bourgeois” nationalism within the USSR’s borders. Thus, throughout the decade, the regime took a hard line against perceived instances of non-Russian nationalist activity, resulting in the “unmasking” of several dozen real or imagined nationalist conspiracies across the country.Footnote 42
At the same time, Soviet cultural production shifted attention away from abstract social forces as the drivers of history toward individual agency and everyday heroism. Following Stalin’s decimation of the Old Bolshevik ranks in the latter part of the decade, the focus shifted more thoroughly toward Russian cultural and historical themes. The press celebrated Russians as “first among equals” while touting Russian cultural, scientific, and, especially, military achievements of the prerevolutionary era. Films, histories, and monuments depicting Russian and proto-Russian heroes such as Aleksandr Nevskii, Dmitrii Donskoi, and Mikhail Kutuzov complemented official appeals to patriotism and patriotic devotion to motherland.Footnote 43 Russian language instruction became mandatory in schools in 1938 while the introduction of the internal passport (1932) had fixed one’s sub-state national identity, which was based on the nationality of one’s biological parents. Such “cultural technologies of rule” helped imbue both Soviet officialdom and the broader citizenry with an increasingly ethnonational outlook and self-perception. By the end of the decade, the concept of nationality had displaced the former preoccupation with class identity, a phenomenon Terry Martin goes so far as to describe as a turn toward ethnic primordialism.Footnote 44 During the war, as we will see, these processes helped render whole ethnic groups vulnerable to accusations of collective treason.
But the turn to Russocentrism and prerevolutionary patriotic imagery signified neither an abandonment of socialism nor an embrace of Russian nationalism.Footnote 45 The Stalinist leadership, like all revolutionary elites, continued to legitimate itself through a revolutionary metanarrative that emphasized the cleavage between the old and the new orders and that often explained away negative social phenomena as “remnants of the old regime.”Footnote 46 Not unlike the nineteenth-century American magazine editor John O’Sullivan, who pointed to his country’s revolutionary break as justification for its unfettered westward expansion, Stalinist authorities regularly signaled their antipathy toward “monarchies and aristocracies of antiquity” and nostalgic “reminiscences of battle fields [sic].”Footnote 47 As Marxists, however, the Bolsheviks did not reject the past wholesale. Instead, they viewed their movement as the culmination of a process centuries in the making. History even offered a blueprint that, if properly deciphered, could illuminate the inexorable march toward communism.Footnote 48 Although Russian history was rife with “reactionary” elements, Stalin believed it was entirely appropriate to celebrate its “popular” features, including pre-Soviet proletarian struggles and wars fought in defense of the homeland.Footnote 49 Far from irrelevant to the revolutionary project, the Communists saw “progressive” historical subject matter as vital to comprehending the prehistory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, even if there was not always a consensus over whether tsarist commanders and proto-Russian warriors constituted acceptable models of revolutionary patriotism.Footnote 50
Stalinist Russocentrism might best be appreciated as a pragmatic and populist shift in the method of ideological indoctrination. As David Brandenberger has argued, at a time of rapid industrialization and mobilization for war, the new line “cloaked a Marxist-Leninist worldview within russocentric, etatist rhetoric” in order to more effectively “propagandize state-building and promote popular loyalty to the regime.”Footnote 51 Such an interpretation is especially apt given the official declaration, following collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan, that socialism had been “built in its foundations.”Footnote 52 In light of the purported elimination of capitalist exploitation within the Soviet Union, the shift in policy of the mid 1930s – observed in the promotion of traditional familial roles, in the move from avant-gardism to neoclassical monumental forms, and in the seemingly un-Marxist notion of a Soviet homeland – could now be justified as legitimating and consolidating the revolutionary order.Footnote 53 The Russian national revival was selective and largely adhered to Stalin’s doctrine of national cultures, which mandated that they be “national in form” but “socialist in content.”Footnote 54 Pushkin’s rehabilitation, to take one example, recast the poet-aristocrat as a true “people’s poet,” largely alienated from the ruling class to which he belonged.Footnote 55 Similarly, authorities rehabilitated certain tsars – Ivan IV and Peter the Great, but not Catherine – for having enabled a strong central state in which to build socialism.Footnote 56 Put simply, the turn to Russian prerevolutionary cultural and patriotic motifs was, from its inception, highly pragmatic and instrumental; it was a provisional means of ideological indoctrination and mobilization at a time when the country was about to face an existential threat.
War and Ethnic Hierarchy
It was during the war that the Soviet state most effusively co-opted tsarist symbolism and Russian historical motifs.Footnote 57 The Soviet leadership cast the war as a struggle for national liberation, as a “Great Patriotic War” evocative of the 1812 Patriotic War against Napoleon. State media touted traditional Russian soldierly virtues as a model for new recruits. These included “physical stamina,” “sense of duty,” “self-sacrifice,” “hatred of oppression,” and, most of all, “steadfastness [stoikost’]” and “love for the motherland [rodina].”Footnote 58 Iconography depicting prerevolutionary Russian commanders urging on Red Army troops became a mainstay of wartime propaganda. In early 1944, the state adopted a new patriotic national anthem to replace the old “Internationale,” one that made explicit reference to the role of Russia, which “united forever” [splotila naveki] the country’s various peoples.Footnote 59 Meanwhile, chauvinistic and anti-Semitic attitudes among party functionaries, such as the head of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation (Agitprop), Georgii Aleksandrov, only added momentum to the Russocentric surge unleashed by the war.Footnote 60
But the Russocentric propaganda of the war years did not target Russians exclusively. As late as 1945, the Soviet leadership remained committed to mobilizing non-Russians through the deployment of local national-patriotic imagery, albeit within a Russocentric historical framework.Footnote 61 This campaign stemmed primarily from complications presented by the recruitment and arrival at the front of soldiers from Central Asia and the Caucasus who often lacked knowledge of the Russian language and among whom political indoctrination before the war had met with limited success. The program sought to localize and contextualize the war for non-Russian recruits in several ways. The military created a number of national formations within its ranks while central authorities deployed bilingual political instructors to articulate Soviet objectives in recruits’ native languages. In addition, training in the Russian language intensified during the war to improve communication between the predominantly Russian and Slavic officer corps and the new arrivals.Footnote 62
Along with these measures, mobilization involved the selective resurrection of non-Russian national pasts. Georgian writers produced histories on state-building monarchs like eleventh-century King Davit Agmashenebeli. Uzbeks were reminded of the hero Tarabi, who “struggled for freedom against the Mongol invaders.”Footnote 63 Ukrainian newspapers traced the fighting traditions of the Ukrainian people to the seventeenth-century Cossack leaders Petro Konashevich-Sahaidachnyi and Bogdan Khmel’nitskii, who, in 1654, pledged Cossack allegiance to the Muscovite tsar. In 1943, the state went so far as to establish the Order of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii for outstanding combat service leading to the liberation of Soviet territory. Patterned on military orders named for Nevskii, Suvorov, and Kutuzov established in 1942, this order remained the only military decoration recalling a historical figure of non-Russian lineage.Footnote 64 The advancement of non-Russian national pasts supplemented the central media’s emphasis on the present-day heroism of non-Russian Soviet citizens in defense of the motherland – the myth of the twenty-eight Panfilovtsy being the most famous example.Footnote 65 However, authorities intended such measures to reinforce rather than replace a sense of ethnic hierarchy. Indeed, Stalin approved the introduction of the Order of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii mainly because of the latter’s role in promoting the “sacred union” between Ukrainians and Russians.Footnote 66
Such efforts to mobilize non-Russian groups through targeted propaganda accelerated the essentialization of ethnic categories that began before the war.Footnote 67 If the leadership considered certain nationalities useful in the fight against Germany, it looked upon others with suspicion and came to regard whole ethnic groups as irredeemable “enemy nations.”Footnote 68 For example, in 1944, authorities deported nearly half a million Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia. Given their “enemy” status, wartime and postwar commemorations downplayed the contributions of these groups. Soviet media gave strikingly little recognition to the numerous fighters of Chechen origin who participated in the defense of Brest Fortress in June 1941.Footnote 69 Amir Weiner describes such a ranking or outright “excision” of peoples based on their perceived wartime contribution as “hierarchical heroism,” one of two major cornerstones of the emerging war myth.Footnote 70
The other cornerstone Weiner identifies is the principle of “universal suffering,” which applied most directly to the uniqueness of the Jewish wartime experience. Jews were well represented throughout the Red Army and industry and Soviet media acknowledged the Jewish contribution to the fight until very late in the war.Footnote 71 Readers of Soviet newspapers, moreover, could find in the journalism of Ehrenberg and other published reports direct references to the Nazi extermination program.Footnote 72 While not a full-throated appeal to the Soviet Union’s Jews, the sporadic release of such information probably contributed to a general sense of outrage, a reaction that occasionally provoked calls for the creation of Jewish military formations within the Red Army.Footnote 73 Nevertheless, public representations typically cast the Nazis’ campaign against Soviet Jewry as being waged against “citizens of the USSR.”Footnote 74 This was in part an effort to counter German characterizations of the Soviet Union as a bastion of “Judeo-Bolshevism.”Footnote 75 It also stemmed from anti-Semitic attitudes among the party rank and file, further complicating representations of Jewish heroism. It was quite common, for instance, to encounter rumors that Jews were evading military service. As a sign of things to come, public accounts increasingly glossed over the Jewish identity of soldiers as the war drew to a close.Footnote 76
Hence, Weiner and others contend, the war not only furthered the essentialization of ethnic identities, it also reified their hierarchical configuration. Russians, through their wartime service, remained the paramount Soviet collective, while groups suspected of disloyalty were consigned to political oblivion.Footnote 77 Between these two poles stood everyone else, grouped into Soviet nations arranged vertically in the order of their supposed contribution in wartime.Footnote 78
Interpreting Victory
The relationship between the hierarchical mode of heroism detailed in the preceding section and the fledgling myth of victory has divided historians. A number of scholars have argued that the war victory fostered a transcendent, pan-Soviet identity, one that superseded hierarchical ethnic particularism.Footnote 79 As Barbara Epstein asserts in her study of the Minsk Ghetto, “The Great Patriotic War became the basis of a new or at least refashioned and revived Soviet identity, transcending the various ethnic groups, or nationalities, composing the Soviet Union.”Footnote 80 Amir Weiner, too, contends that the emerging myth of the war nurtured a “supraclass, cross-ethnic” sense of belonging that provided “the polity with a previously absent integrating theme.” Yet precisely how this wider sense of Sovietness impacted the war myth’s hierarchy of heroism – and in particular the notion of Russian wartime primacy – is less clear. Weiner notes, for example, that toward the end of the war the inclusive all-Soviet mode of heroism was reinstated in Ukraine so as to “curtail the mistaken assumption … that Ukraine was liberated from the Nazis ‘under the banner of [Taras] Shevchenko and [Panteleimon] Kulish.’” Here, Weiner frames mobilization as a “balancing act” between ethnonational-oriented appeals and what he calls the “Soviet component.” Should it grow too strong, the national factor threatened to destabilize the Soviet component; at the same time, the Soviet component offered a means of tempering ethnonational assertiveness linked to wartime mobilization.Footnote 81 But how this intriguing framework, taken from Ukraine, applied to Russians and to Soviet multiethnicity more generally remains unexplored.
An investigation into the relationship between the “Soviet component” and the concept of Russian hierarchical primacy seems especially appropriate given that scholarship on postwar ideology, mass culture, and nationalities policy has largely interpreted the war’s official memory to be an extension of the Russocentric hierarchy of the war years.Footnote 82 It is in its attention to the war myth’s bearing on the so-called Russian Question – defined here as “the role and status of the Russian people, language, and culture within the Soviet Union” – that the present study builds on the important groundwork laid by Weiner and others.Footnote 83
The most important scholarly examination of this issue to date is David Brandenberger’s National Bolshevism, which explains the trajectory of the Stalinist turn toward Russocentric etatism from 1931 to 1956. Brandenberger affirms the link between the war’s memory and the Russian people’s enduring status as the paramount Soviet nation.Footnote 84 As he observes, ideologists’ main preoccupation in the immediate postwar period involved reconciling “the previous decade’s emphasis on prerevolutionary Russian history with the war’s undeniably modern, ‘Soviet’ character.” For Brandenberger, this ideological reconciliation hinged on the emerging war myth, which presented the 1941–5 conflict “as a fundamentally Russian experience.” In this view, nuanced distinctions between the Soviet war effort and Russia’s much longer history of patriotic struggles against foreign aggressors mattered little, as a broader Russocentric ideological framework quickly subsumed the victory narrative.Footnote 85 The war victory thus enabled the Stalinist leadership to craft an ideological amalgam of sorts, which paired Russian-led victory in 1945 and a millennium of Russian exceptionalism in a patriotic double axis, offering ideologists an “evocative vocabulary of myths, imagery, and iconography with which to rally the population.”Footnote 86
A similar emphasis on the Russocentric basis of Soviet patriotic identity has dominated the historiography of the late-socialist period.Footnote 87 Groundbreaking studies by Yitzhak Brudny, Nikolai Mitrokhin, and others, have exposed the sometimes-intimate relationship between Russian nationalist-oriented intellectuals and the late-socialist party leadership, as well as the state’s continued reliance on Russian national-patriotic motifs for popular mobilization. As Brudny argues, faced with a decline in revolutionary fervency, the Brezhnev-led Politburo of the 1960s and 1970s made an ideological compromise, co-opting elements of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia in order to bolster the state’s mobilizational capacity. The official support for a limited, pro-Soviet Russian nationalism was, Brudny contends, most apparent in the increased print runs of nationalist “thick” journals and in the protection and elevation of so-called village prose writers. Likewise, Mitrokhin has charted the permeation of Russian nationalist attitudes among the middle echelons of the Party and state. The development of an informal network of Russophiles in positions of authority, and the likeminded artists, writers, historians, and veterans they cultivated, constituted nothing less than an informal “Russian Party” embedded within party-state structures. Although Mitrokhin notes in passing that Russian nationalist cultural figures were instrumental in shaping the war’s memory, the connection between state-supported Russian nationalism and the late-socialist victory myth has remained almost wholly unexplored. This omission is particularly glaring given that the war’s memory was the subject of perhaps the largest propaganda campaign of the late-socialist era – the cult of World War II. The few authors who do touch on the war’s remembrance in this context tend to view it as an outgrowth of broader Russian national-patriotic tendencies.Footnote 88
This book makes three significant contributions to this literature, which will be explicated in detail in the following sections. Together, these interventions – which I categorize as “wartime threads,” “discursive tension,” and “the doctrine of the Soviet people” – form the core of the book’s argument.
Wartime Threads
The book’s first major contention is that Stalinist Russocentrism was merely one of several competing patriotic strands unleashed during wartime mobilization that vied to define the war’s memory in the postwar era. By the war’s end, as Agitprop terminated certain wartime appeals, such as those pertaining to non-Russian heroic pasts and Orthodox Church-inspired proclamations, the various remaining mobilizational threads coalesced to form two prevailing ideological paradigms. The first, which this book terms the “Russocentric paradigm,” was a direct extension of the wartime Russocentric line. Epitomized in Stalin’s “great ancestors” speech of 1941, its essence involved positioning the Great Patriotic War along a thousand-year continuum of Russian martial struggles. This tendency was multiethnic in the sense that it highlighted the state’s ethnic diversity and Russians’ leading place within a highly variegated population. It was “Soviet” in that it cited the Soviet system, party leadership, and socialism as important wartime factors. But the Russocentric paradigm presented Russian leadership and historical pedigree as fundamental, even overriding, ingredients to victory.Footnote 89
The other dominant postwar tendency this book identifies, one that is often glossed over in the scholarly literature by the more evocative nationalistic imagery, was an ideological line firmly rooted in the Soviet era, its unique achievements, and the motif of a “socialist motherland” inhabited by a supra-ethnic community of “Soviet people.”Footnote 90 This “pan-Soviet/internationalist paradigm” was highly statist and patriotic in the sense that it advocated the “patriotism of socialism in one country.”Footnote 91 It was Russified in its emphasis on Russian as the language of interethnic communication and in its veneration of the Russian cultural canon. Its internationalism was domestic – that is, reflecting “friendship” bonds among Soviet peoples.Footnote 92 But unlike the Russocentric paradigm, the pan-Soviet/internationalist tendency maintained an uneasy if not antagonistic relationship to both Russian-led hierarchy and pre-Soviet patriotic motifs. The concept nearly always served to underscore the depth of the revolutionary divide, the novelty (as opposed to antiquity) of the Soviet people, and the primacy of a supranational and postrevolutionary sense of political identity.Footnote 93
The pan-Soviet line portrayed the state’s various ethnonational constituencies as bound not by Russian leadership but by lateral loyalties: “Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tajiks and other peoples of the multinational Soviet Union” defending their motherland “arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder,” as one wartime article in Pravda phrased it.Footnote 94 Such appeals minimized ethnonational particularities as the multiethnic “friendship” and “family” of nations became a monolithic “fortress” and “ferocious wall.”Footnote 95 The pan-Soviet paradigm was distinct from the closely related doctrine of the “friendship of the peoples.” As initially conceived, the friendship of the peoples formula functioned to perpetuate notions of ethnic hierarchy and primordialism.Footnote 96 It was the Russians, according to the friendship narrative, who first cast off the yoke of old regime oppression and whose guidance and cultural achievements led non-Russians along the path to modernity. As Pravda explained in February 1942, “The Great Russian people – elder brother and first among equals in a single Soviet family – lent tremendous assistance to other peoples. With its help, formerly oppressed peoples achieved their liberation, [and] economic and cultural golden age.”Footnote 97 The opening stanza of the new national anthem, adopted in January 1944, reflected this aspect of the friendship of the peoples doctrine: “An unbreakable union of free republics, / Great Rus’ has united forever to stand.”Footnote 98
However, by mid-1944, press accounts were commonly attributing the impending victory to a homogeneous “Soviet people” [sovetskii narod] rather than to metaphors underscoring ethnonational diversity and variegated hierarchy. Allusions to the war as the “trial” [ispytanie] or “crucible” [surovoe ispytanie] of the Soviet people appeared frequently, while rote formulations such as “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people” and “great feat of the Soviet people” routinized the link between victory and the overarching Soviet community.Footnote 99 One Pravda editorial reacted to a speech in which Stalin honored the “great Soviet people”Footnote 100 by exclaiming that “[t]hese simple words … speak of a fervent Soviet patriotism,” characterized by “boundless love of the Soviet person for the Soviet Motherland and Soviet state,” a “superior worldview,” and a “deeply civic identity.” In contrast to the virulent ethnonationalism of the Nazis, “[o]ur patriotism,” the author specified, “is Soviet, socialist patriotism.” The article concluded by looking to the Soviet people’s venerable past:
Twenty-seven years ago, the workers and peasants of our country, heeding the appeal of the Party of Lenin and Stalin, began to build a new, Soviet society … They defeated their domestic enemies – the imperialists. They defended their state from fierce attacks by foreign invaders. They overcame all deprivations and tribulations, and gave the world the most striking demonstration of their ability to govern, organize domestic life, [and] advance the cause of their country and world civilization. Today the Soviet people have shown they are able to defend the Soviet cause and the cause of all humanity on the battlefield against fascism.Footnote 101
While Russian military exploits in 1242, 1380, 1612, and 1812 continued to provide ideologists with convenient images of heroism in wartime, with the pan-Soviet paradigm such distant connections were no longer requisite.Footnote 102 It was not inspiration from prerevolutionary models that facilitated victory in the present but rather the radical transformations that had begun a mere “twenty-seven years ago” (Figure 0.4).
“Glory to the valiant Soviet fighters who are smashing the fascist beast in his lair!”: 1945 poster pairing the impending victory with Soviet-era precedents
By the time the historian M. V. Nechkina proposed what she saw as the emergence of a “fundamentally new” community of Soviet people in the summer of 1944, she drew on what had become a commonplace pan-Soviet/internationalist model of patriotic identity, one that, though difficult to define, was certainly “higher” than any one nation, Russians included:
The formation of the “Soviet people” has passed through significant stages during the [Great] Patriotic War. The Soviet people is not a nation [natsiia], but something higher …, fundamentally new and novel in the history of mankind, a stable community of people. It combines a unity of territory, a fundamentally new, shared economic system, the Soviet system, [and] a type of single new culture despite a multiplicity of languages. However, this is not a nation, but something new and higher. This is quite a new phenomenon in human history.Footnote 103
Nikita Khrushchev’s 1961 declaration that the Soviet people constituted a wholly “new historical community,” sharing a “common socialist motherland,” “a common economic base,” and a “common worldview” was not, as is often suggested, an invention of the post-Stalin era.Footnote 104 Rather, it embodied one of two contrasting mobilizational strategies that would go on to shape official conceptions of victory for decades.
Discursive Tension
How authorities attempted to reconcile the Russocentric and pan-Soviet/internationalist tendencies after 1945 is the book’s second major theme. While many scholars have pointed to the wartime and postwar emergence of a Russified ideological amalgam, this book argues that the two mobilizational paradigms did not so much fuse as constitute a set of divergent patriotic discourses.Footnote 105 Starting late in the war, the ideological establishment worked to harmonize the competing Russocentric and pan-Soviet threads through what might be called discursive tension. A set of norms rather than an explicit policy prescription, discursive tension involved positioning what were two distinct patriotic paradigms at the opposite poles of an ideological spectrum.Footnote 106 In the postwar era, the war narrative itself embodied this tension. Late Stalinism tolerated the coexistence of rival Russocentric and “internationalist” victory narratives, enabling a surprisingly fluid mobilizational repertoire that the leadership could use to promote either Russian leadership and ethnic diversity or the idea of a homogeneous “Soviet” people as the changing domestic and international landscape required. Despite the victory myth’s continued multivalence under Stalin, the Cold War saw many Soviet ideologists confine Russocentric dynamics to prerevolutionary and early Soviet historical narratives, while advancing the emerging victory myth as an overwhelmingly pan-Soviet/internationalist ideal. It would take over a decade after the war for the pan-Soviet victory myth to prevail over its Russocentric counterpart. Nevertheless, this more compartmentalized form of discursive tension, in which the war became the exclusive domain of the pan-Soviet end of the ideological spectrum, was already observable in some of the mobilizational strategies of the latter half of the war. To illustrate the concept, it is useful to examine its initial, wartime manifestation.
For instance, both the new state hymn and the “friendship of the peoples” narrative limited the scope of Russian exceptionalism to the period leading up to and during the establishment of Soviet power. In the case of the national anthem, following the single mention of the Russians’ part in uniting the peoples of the USSR, the chorus and subsequent verses stressed ostensibly supra-ethnic, Soviet ideals: the revolution, Stalin’s cult, and war against a foreign enemy.Footnote 107 Likewise, the course of the war reconfigured the friendship metaphor in subtle but not insignificant ways. Representations of the friendship of the peoples increasingly concentrated the theme of Russian leadership around the events of the revolution and the spheres of cultural and technological advancement. As an article in Pravda asserted in November 1944,
The Russian people rallied the other peoples of Russia on to the Great October Socialist Revolution, liberating working people from bondage to industrialists and imperialists … [Revolution] put into practice the humane ideas of Lenin and Stalin on the self-determination of peoples, on the equality, brotherhood, and friendship of the peoples.Footnote 108
The war, according to the same article, embodied not Russian leadership but “the common cause of all working people regardless of national distinction.” The author continues,
The [Great] Patriotic War has expanded and strengthened ties between our peoples, between the republics belonging to the Soviet Union … Today the RSFSR, the Kazakh SSR, and the Georgian SSR help to rebuild Ukraine. People in Tashkent and Ashgabat think about the revival of Kiev. The residents of Baku, Yerevan, Kazan, Novosibirsk, [and] Vladivostok are avidly interested in the fates of Minsk, Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Kishinev and Petrozavodsk.
The article pointed to the legendary twenty-eight Panfilovtsy as the exemplification of this newfound wartime unity between peoples. In a telling omission, the author cited the battle cry of the commander of the twenty-eight, Vasilii Klochkov (“There is nowhere to retreat – Moscow is at our backs!”), shorn of its original reference to “Russia.”Footnote 109
By 1945, many ideologists were asserting that victory represented the fulfillment of 1917 and the rejection of the tsarist inheritance, even those aspects that were celebrated as emblematic of a heroic pedigree.Footnote 110 This variation of the war myth stressed the political, socioeconomic, and ideological sources of victory over notions of Russian leadership, ethnic hierarchy, or the association with prerevolutionary Russian military exploits. Indeed, as victory became more certain, elite conceptions of the war’s significance often portrayed it as a uniquely Soviet feat, as the basis for an imagined political community disengaged from any prerevolutionary inheritance.
None of this is to suggest the elimination of the Russocentric paradigm either during or after the war. Historical narratives continued to underscore prerevolutionary Russian benevolence and Russian-led industrial and agricultural modernization in the Soviet era. Moreover, Stalin reiterated the Russocentric understanding of victory on multiple occasions between 1945 and 1946. These statements, together with memories of wartime propaganda highlighting Russian historical precedents, assured that the victory myth would itself contain Russocentric and pan-Soviet vectors.
However, within the deeply Russocentric ideological ecosystem of the late 1940s, Soviet patriotism’s discursive tension facilitated a variant of the war’s memory that diminished the primacy of Russians in favor of an aspirational and undifferentiated Soviet people.Footnote 111 The Soviet state remained committed to fostering multinationalism within its borders. Yet victory in the war offered the party leadership an alternative wellspring of heroic imagery with which to bridle ethnonational identities and emphasize their transitory rather than primordial nature. In this way, late-Stalinist war memory would work to collapse the heroism hierarchy in certain contexts while reinforcing it in others.Footnote 112
The Doctrine of the Soviet People
The book’s third major assertion is that a doctrine of the Soviet people reconceptualized how discursive tension operated throughout the post-Stalin era. During the late 1950s and early 60s, destalinization conflated much of the wartime Russocentric imagery and messaging with the excesses of Stalin’s personality cult, discrediting the Russocentric victory narrative in the process. Thus, rather than tolerate contrasting Russocentric and pan-Soviet/internationalist variations on the war’s memory as Stalin had done, Khrushchev and his successors put forth the pan-Soviet myth as the sole official expression of victory. They did so by way of the Soviet people doctrine.
First enunciated by Khrushchev in 1961, the doctrine of the Soviet people reified the practice, described previously, whereby the Russocentric and pan-Soviet/internationalist paradigms were tethered to specific narrative spheres along an ideological spectrum. The doctrine therefore contained both homogenizing and variegating discourses. The reformulated victory myth became the exclusive purview of the doctrine’s pan-Soviet/internationalist pole, advancing a picture of the Soviet people as a unified, nation-like entity. At the same time, narratives of the Soviet Union’s formation and consolidation, which rested at the opposite pole, emphasized Russian-led ethnocultural diversity and hierarchy.
Such a framework helps explain the prominence of the war’s commemoration beginning in the late 1960s. While state policies deliberately stoked pro-Soviet Russian nationalistic expression during this period, the theme of the war and its cultic commemorative edifice provided a countervailing pressure that authorities could draw upon as needed to curtail both Russian and non-Russian national assertiveness. As the book argues, neo-Stalinists in the Party, Russophile intellectuals, and cultural preservationist movements were hesitant to openly engage the subject of the war from a Russocentric, much less nationalistic, perspective. Instead, authorities encouraged these groups to silo their nationalism within the designated spheres of prerevolutionary patriotic culture and early Soviet development.
At the same time, the expansion of the war cult was partly geared toward bringing Russian nationalist sympathizers into the fold, not to cater to nationalist concerns but rather to steer Russian cultural nationalism in a pan-Soviet direction. The war’s commemoration emphasized key areas of overlap with nationalist priorities, such as devotion to motherland, patriotism, and, most importantly, the dissemination of these values among Soviet youth. Over time, this attention to overlapping areas of interest with nationalistic-oriented intellectuals created ambiguities that eroded the foundations of the Soviet people doctrine. It was precisely those areas of ambiguity that some nationalist writers focused on to cultivate a vaguely Russocentric, even national-patriotic, version of the war narrative. Although this remained a marginal tendency, it nevertheless perpetuated a Russocentric memory of the war that was increasingly irreconcilable with the dominant myth of state, a fact made all too apparent when Mikhail Gorbachev lifted many censorship restrictions in the mid to late 1980s, hastening the USSR’s demise.
* * *
In short, the book argues that the state employed two distinct mythologies of integration in the decades after 1945, which represented contrasting expressions of collective belonging and loyalty. The first, which the book describes as a Russocentric tendency, promoted Russian leadership of an ethnically diverse and hierarchically configured collection of nations; the second – a pan-Soviet/internationalist tendency – limited displays of the singular role of the Russian people and heterogeneous hierarchy more generally in favor of a laterally united and Russian-speaking “Soviet people.” In the initial years after 1945, the war narrative itself reflected these divergent paradigms. Soviet leaders and ideologists could craft accounts of victory that hewed to either end of the ideological spectrum. Following Stalin’s death and denunciation, authorities reformulated the discursive tension contained within the war narrative. The new doctrine channeled Russocentrism toward the themes of prerevolutionary and early Soviet ethnic relations while the pan-Soviet paradigm centered on the myth of the war victory.Footnote 113
Although these twin mythologies each served the ends of social integration, they represent contradictory approaches to Soviet multiethnic governance.Footnote 114 This is not to suggest that ethnic and Soviet identities were incompatible. Studies of empire have shown that citizens often effectively negotiated local, national, and supranational identities.Footnote 115 Recent scholarship on the USSR has likewise demonstrated that non-Russian communities routinely balanced local and all-union loyalties in a way that stabilized relations between the center and the ethnically defined periphery.Footnote 116 Rather, the present study locates this contradiction in the practices and outlook of the regime itself, as it simultaneously elevated and subjugated the status and identity of its Russian national core.
The argument unfolds chronologically and thematically. Chapters 1 and 2 explore ideological production and commemoration in the late Stalinist era through the lens of the fledgling victory myth. Specifically, Chapter 1 pursues the afterlife of Stalin’s oft-cited toast to the Russian people in both Russian and non-Russian contexts to tease out its rather inconsistent and ambiguous connection to the official war narrative. Chapter 2 analyzes late-Stalinist commemorations and the victory myth’s coexistence with the wider celebration of Russian prerevolutionary themes. It argues that in spite of the highly Russocentric atmosphere, the late-Stalinist leadership tolerated a certain dynamism and multivalence in the war’s memory, which preserved the pan-Soviet line as an “internationalist” counterpoise to the otherwise Russian-dominated mobilizational agenda. Chapter 3 focuses on efforts to de-Stalinize the war’s memory and recalibrate Soviet identity in the wake of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult. As destalinization linked the Russocentrism of the war to the figure of Stalin, the leadership elevated the pan-Soviet/internationalist version of the war’s memory via the doctrine of the Soviet people. Defenders of Stalin’s war record meanwhile contested this process, recasting Stalin as a protector of Russian national-patriotic values. Chapter 4 centers on the production of the commemorative war cult of the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Together, Chapters 3–4 show that the political establishment saw the large-scale veneration of 1945 as a means of diffusing neo-Stalinist and nationalist-oriented resistance to the ideological formula elaborated in the Soviet people doctrine. Finally, Chapter 5 examines Russian nationalist engagement with the state war cult and the limited way nationalist intellectuals sought to Russify the content of the war’s memory, while nonetheless adhering to its officially endorsed, pan-Soviet configuration.
This book does not claim to be a comprehensive study of the war’s representation in the Soviet Union. It centers squarely on the interrelationship between the Russian Question and the politics of the war’s memorialization. The Soviet Myth is necessarily selective, therefore, in its sources and lines of inquiry. While the analysis does not ignore films, television, novels, theater, memoir literature, and paintings – all mediums that helped shape the Soviet victory myth – it gives far greater attention to debates among ideologists, historians, anniversary committees, and party leaders. It was these deliberations that most directly engaged the Russian Question and that generated the official framework within which Soviet cultural production operated. Likewise, the book’s emphasis on the tension between national and supranational identities precluded an in-depth treatment of many other important aspects of the war’s memory, including the gendered nature of the war’s representation, the memories of deported peoples, local and family commemorations, veterans’ gatherings, among other themes. The chapters that follow pursue those voices that, I believe, best shed light on the Russian people’s evolving place within official war memory.
The book’s analysis aligns broadly with an interpretation of the Soviet Union as a unique type of modern polity, one that exhibited characteristics of both empire and a multiethnic national state.Footnote 117 In many ways, patriotic mobilization in its pan-Soviet guise resembled the “imperial patriotism” practiced by certain dynastic empires. Just as the Habsburg and Romanov monarchies sometimes promoted a form of patriotic identity that obscured the dominance of their respective Germanic and Slavic cores, the Communist Party leadership often utilized the war’s memory for a similarly dissociative function, to project a supra-ethnic, socialist version of what Clifford Geertz called “the inherent sacredness of sovereign power.”Footnote 118 But the subordination of a dominant people for the sake of the political community as a whole is also a feature of multiethnic nationalizing states, where, as Anthony Smith observes, myths that advance lateral bonds serve to “weld an ethnically disparate nation together” and “draw in other ethnies who have no connection with the communal past of the dominant ethnie.”Footnote 119 Such rhetorical similarities with nationalizing states have convinced a few scholars that the term “Soviet people” is perhaps better rendered in English as “Soviet nation.”Footnote 120
Whether patriotic mobilization in the Soviet Union constituted an imperial or nationalizing outlook, its persistent tensions lent a remarkable fluidity to the state’s “repertoire of rule,” which alternated between the “production of difference” and the promotion of social homogeneity.Footnote 121 On the one hand, these tensions proved irreconcilable in the long term and fueled competing rather than symbiotic notions of what it meant to be at once Soviet and Russian. On the other hand, this dynamic enabled Communist authority to assert, reconfigure, or ignore outright ethnic particularism and hierarchy as circumstance dictated.Footnote 122 This book argues that the adaptability of Soviet identity hinged on the Russian Question. The pan-Soviet model of patriotism encouraged Russians to subsume their unique sense of identity in the name of a higher “Soviet” sense of belonging. While not the only approach to mobilization and state-building that the regime employed – Russian-led hierarchy and ethnic diversity remained constant themes – the present study contends that such a logic was most fully on display in the myth and remembrance of the Soviet victory in World War II.
