Never Again in Russia

Summary

In the Soviet Union and later in Russia, reference to World War II played a central role in the decades after 1945. The reference has never lost any of its intensity and is currently reaching a new climax. The “never again” narrative in Russia takes a very specific form: It has never been focused on drawing lessons for either domestic constitutional reform or the reform of international law. The focus is not on the Holocaust but on the Victory in the “Great Patriotic War” against fascism, the increase of power and status in the international system that this has brought, and the perpetuation of the present and timeless actuality of war in a mostly imperial and post-imperial context. Instrumentalized by the state in many ways, the discourse on Victory against fascism undergoes a paradoxical development, from a way of commemorating collective trauma to the justification and glorification of new wars.

From 1945 until the beginning of 60s

In terms of its position of power the Soviet Union (SU) found itself enormously strengthened in the world as a result of the Victory. The incorporation of the Baltic states, Western Ukraine and a number of other territories into the SU, as well as the establishment of socialist, essentially Stalinist regimes in the countries of Central and South-eastern Europe, brought lasting changes to the European balance of power. Furthermore, as a co-founder of the UN and a Permanent Member of the Security Council, the SU emerged as one of the leading world powers in the new universal system of international security established to prevent future wars.

The SU succeeded in appropriating the leading role in the European and then worldwide Peace Movement, which was originally initiated by the Western European communist parties. The claim of a victorious peace power was vigorously propagated, including by the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace, for example, through its campaigns for millions of signatures against nuclear war and for disarmament. The fact that the SU, as the victor and main victim of the last war with tens of millions of casualties, took a leading role in the fight against the danger of a new (nuclear) war was initially perceived as natural. The SU’s “peace offensive” would later be closely linked to the anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America and used to establish and support socialist regimes in these continents, with the SU holding itself out as a power supporting the struggles of the oppressed against imperialism and colonialism.

Such positioning originally resonated among countries subjected to colonialization or domination by Western powers. However, the SU’s political practice over time severely undermined its credibility. It was the SU practice of casting a veto in the UN Security Council during the Cold War that effectively prevented the system of peacekeeping and peace enforcement in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter from functioning. Between 1946 and 1960 alone, the SU exercised 71 vetoes (and was the only UN Security Council member to do so until 1955). Until 1955, it not only systematically opposed the admission of new UN members but also consistently prevented debates about current aggressions or the regulation and reduction of armaments and armed forces. From January to August 1950, the SU boycotted UN Security Council meetings altogether, protesting the fact that the representative from Taiwan rather than mainland China represented China in the UN Security Council. That ended only when the UN Security Council decided it could authorize military action in Korea even without the affirmative vote of a Permanent Member, thus requiring Permanent Members to be present and to cast a veto to prevent UN Security Council action.

The domestic political view shows that, in contrast to Germany, the end of World War II did not lead to far-reaching state or constitutional changes. The “Stalinist” Constitution of the Soviet Union of 1936 existed until 1977. Nevertheless, in the state rhetoric, the Victory was an enormously relevant topic in the first years after the war. Remarkable is that although the colossal war losses were emphasized, at the center of the official rhetoric was the triumphant Soviet army led by Stalin and its military successes. The Victory itself was primarily categorized and celebrated as a socialist achievement and integrated into mythologized accounts of heroic deeds of the past as part of a renewed Russian nationalist discourse. However, the victors of the past, the veterans, and war invalids received hardly any state support and recognition. Victory Day, introduced in 1945 on 9 May, existed as a public holiday for only two years between 1945 and 1947. After 1945, there would not be another May 9 Victory Parade celebrated in Moscow until 1965. At the same time, the emphasis on the aggressive plans of US Cold War rivals in the Soviet state propaganda was suitable for creating fear of the new (nuclear) war among the population and mobilizing them to persevere in the deficient supply system of socialism. The famous saying “The main thing is that there is no war” arose in this domestic political situation.

On an individual and family level, the trauma of war and the relief of its end naturally dominated the country with the greatest war casualties and the most brutal warfare. It was a natural consensus over the decades that there should not be another war. However, the private emotion of Victory in the first decades after the war was ambiguous. After the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the exceptional circumstances of the war led to a partial slackening of the repressive apparatus and opened personal “windows of freedom” for the combatants. After the Victory, they were quickly closed by the renewed repression of the post-war period, which affected Soviet prisoners of war, among others, who were often sent from the German concentration camps to the GULAG. Post-war repression was also perfidiously directed against the Jews in the course of the so-called anti-cosmopolitan campaign, with the simultaneous suppression of information about Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In the territories occupied since 1940, the population went through several occupations, the Holocaust, possibly the armed struggle against the Soviets and then Stalinist repression in the post-war period within a few years. Overall, the trauma of the war and the trauma of the continuing state terror were closely intertwined. The particular emotionality and tension in the memory of the first, well felt in the later Soviet books and films about the war, has partly to do with the repressed and unspoken second trauma.

From the beginning of the 60s until the late 80s

The Cuba crisis in 1962 clearly showed that the principles on which the UN was founded were jeopardized by the dispute over the deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons. The propaganda efforts of the Soviet Committee for Peace were not only called into question by the Soviet role in the deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba, which brought the world to the brink of World War III, but were also criticised by the international left for the Soviet Union’s violent suppression of the democratic movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. After these years, the peace narrative gradually turned into bureaucratically routinised compulsory events aimed at domestic audiences, with its demonstration marches and cynically indifferent speeches “For Peace”, a characteristic feature of late socialism. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the last of the SU’s numerous (proxy) wars, dealt a death blow to its peace-loving image.

This period saw a quite lengthy constitutional process that culminated in the so-called “Brezhnev constitution” of 1977. In its preamble, the victorious outcome of the war is added to the long list of socialist achievements and reference is made to the dividends of Victory in foreign policy:

“A vivid manifestation of the power of socialism was the immortal feat of the Soviet people and its Armed Forces, who won a historic Victory in the Great Patriotic War. This Victory strengthened authority and international positions of the USSR, opened new favourable opportunities for the growth of the forces of socialism, national liberation, democracy and world peace”.

Remarkable is that the trigger for a new constitutional process was not the war nor the war lessons but the further development of the ideological construct that replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat (the cornerstone of the 1936 constitution) with the class-transcending “people” as the basis of the socialist state under “developed socialism”.

In the domestic policy, the official war and Victory narrative gradually solidified. This included the central role of Victory reached through the heroic Soviet people, who were led by the Communist Party against the Nazi empire, strengthened by Western capital. The reasons for the country’s lack of defence capability on its western borders at the beginning of the war, a result of both Stalin’s misplaced trust in Hitler and his ideological cleansing of the higher ranks of military officers, were not up for debate. The role of the Soviet Army in Eastern Europe was defined exclusively as the liberation army. The canonical Soviet narrative of war and Victory was finally formulated and cemented through state rituals of remembrance and glorification, educational policy, art and the media.

In the field of private and collective memory, instead of the ambivalent and multifaceted memory phenomenon of the post-war period, the official, more uniform and predominantly state-driven war narrative has been appropriated by the population. There was, however, a significant individual component. In 1965, Victory Day on 9 May was once again declared a public holiday, and the military parade was held on Red Square for the first time in 20 years to mark the 20th anniversary of Victory Day. Millions of war veterans, now getting on in years, received significant material support and social recognition, which they had previously lacked. These measures, together with others, were intended to counteract social dissatisfaction with the current unfortunate economic conditions. However, in the veterans’ councils, originally set up for propagandistic foreign policy purposes, war veterans began to become involved as contemporary witnesses in the educational institutions, media etc. The official state war narrative has been partly humanized through the mostly honest testimony of veterans and through the intergenerational dialogue that existed in almost every family. The tragedy and horror of the war and the value of peace were not doubted in this discourse. It is also particularly characteristic of this period that the former enemy, the Germans, were not demonized.

From the 90s until around 2005

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet system experienced fundamental upheavals that ultimately led to the end of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new independent states (including the Russian Federation). The new 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation did not originally even mention the last war but referred generally to “honouring the memory of our ancestors who passed on to us love and respect for the Fatherland.”

Nevertheless, exactly at this time a real historical and societal reappraisal of the price of Victory, i.e. the causes, course and consequences of the war, the brutal nature of the warfare and the role of the Stalinist regime in it, came in the course of a broad scientific and public discourse in Russia and other former Soviet republics. This discourse included, for example, the recognition of the Katyn crimes committed by the Soviets against Polish officers, the publication of the secret protocol of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, research of the actual number of victims and the brutal warfare of the Soviet commanders, etc. According to that, it was recognized that the Victory was not achieved thanks to the Soviet rulers and their party, but in spite of them. There were initiatives to make Victory Day a day of remembrance. The former official narrative of war and Victory seemed to be severely shattered, if not destroyed.

Ca. 2005-2024 – we can do it again

However, the Victory narrative experienced an astonishing revival in the following 20 years. The findings of the 1990s were suppressed unusually quickly, and in their place came an anchoring and expansion of the old Soviet Victory narrative on an unprecedented scale. Around the same time as the last contemporary witnesses were passing away, the debate about the real price of Victory largely disappeared from state and social discourse. With every anniversary of Victory, the festive, almost “carnivalistic”, and at the same time the increasing militaristic, character became more and more evident. At the same time, the Victory narrative mutated into the central point of Russian history in general. Ritualized and declared as a kind of state religion, it became a Victory Myth – and the cornerstone of national and later extreme nationalist ideology. Any contradiction to the Victory Myth is therefore fiercely denounced. For example, Russia reacted vehemently against the resolutions of the Council of Europe of 2006 and 2019, condemning Europe’s communist past and assessing the causes of World War II. Internal criminal law prohibitions on the “rehabilitation of Nazism” followed, including the “dissemination of obviously false information about the activities of the USSR in the years of the Great Patriotic War” (2014), as well as administrative offences law prohibition on equating the USSR with Nazi Germany and denying the “decisive role of the Soviet people in the destruction of Nazi Germany and the humanitarian mission of the USSR in the liberation of the countries of Europe” (2022).

The latest major constitutional reform of 2020 must be seen in light of these developments. The constitutional amendments proclaim the protection of the “historical truth” and prohibit “to diminish the significance of the people’s heroic deeds in defence of the Fatherland.”

The state-ruled media apparatus uses the latest manipulative techniques to propagate the “historical truth” defined by the state. It also fuels resentment about the alleged underestimation of Russia’s role as a liberator of the world and the ingratitude of the liberal West. The “moral rightness” of the 1945 Victory is transferred to today’s Russia. The exclamation “We can do it again”, coming from the dregs of society but now quite widespread, took over from the “The main thing is that there is no war.”

Overall, an unprecedented intensity of the instrumentalization of Victory can be observed over the years. Victory has been used more and more to cement the power of state leadership, distract attention from continuing structural economic and social maldevelopments and justify the conservative-archaic domestic and neo-imperial foreign policy.

The right to “de-Nazify” Ukraine is directly derived from the fact that Russia was affected by the war. “We can do it again” is happening now, and immediately in Ukraine, whose government and the entire people have been declared Nazis even long time before the beginning of the war. Now the Russian population largely support this narrative: in May 2022, shortly after the start of this war, 36% of respondents felt pride for their nation (17% the year before), and 13% felt resentment for their nation (23% the year before), according to the liberal sociological institute Levada Centre.

As a final climax and perversion, the Myth of Victory has been successfully used to justify a war of aggression.¹⁾