From films, books, school lessons and family stories, the image of the Great Patriotic War is formed. What does this war mean for us decades after it began? We invited sociologist Lev Gudkov, director Mikhail Kaluzhsky and psychoanalyst Maria Timofeeva to see the past in the present together.
Psychologies What do we really talk about when we remember the war?
Lev Gudkov: We are not talking about the war itself, but about victory. The vast majority of Russians consider the victory in the war the main event of our history. Today we are not dealing with a living memory – there are almost no witnesses left – but with a myth, an ideological construction: the triumph in the war is presented as the triumph of the Soviet regime, and it justifies repressions, famine, collectivization. This view is reproduced by all state institutions: propaganda, rituals, schools, art. As a result of propaganda, the Great Patriotic War completely overshadowed the world war in the minds of Russians. Two-thirds of those we interview say that we would have won without the help of the allies: we do not want to share our triumph with anyone. But there is another, dark, everyday side of existence in war – this is the experience of a soldier, the experience of living in extreme conditions of fear, dirt, pain, hard work, inhuman relationships. It is relegated to the collective unconscious.
Maria Timofeeva: Under Stalin, they tried to forget about the war, to cross it out altogether. The front-line soldiers were silent: they were afraid, they did not want to remember … When, after 20-30 years, they began to speak, it was already within the framework of a myth, and not personal experience.
L. G.: The state cult of victory and, accordingly, the myth of the war arose only in 1965, when, after coming to power, Brezhnev made Victory Day a holiday. In parallel, the language of private existence began to take shape, in which one could talk about existential experience, about the fear of death. A very important role in the emergence of this language was played by cinema and literature – Grigory Baklanov, Konstantin Vorobyov, early Yuri Bondarev, Vasil Bykov … Then individual experience began to find expression with all passions, complexes, with inexpressible feelings and ethical conflicts. But this part of the experience has never been included in the state military canon.
Why exactly that victory has become the core of national self-consciousness in recent decades?
L. G.: The more we feel our inferiority, the more we feel pride in the victory – and today there are no special achievements, we have nothing to be proud of. Against this background, victory is the main support symbol for the country. It blocks the awareness of both the historical experience and the moral experience of people in the war. This is a means to rethink the price of war, the price of victory and, of course, the responsibility of state leaders for starting a war.
Why are we unable to believe that we could win with less blood? Because the number of dead is one of the components of the sacralization of victory. And when it turns out that the Germans have four times less human losses, there is a reaction of displacement. The fact that the USSR and Hitler’s Germany were allies and started this war together is completely ousted from the minds of Russians. But the understanding that we were attacked, the myth that we are a victim, justifies us as a people, and victory exalts us in our own eyes, gives us significance and value.
Mikhail, judging by your performance “The Load of Silence”, today in society there is a huge interest in the private experience of experiencing the war …
Mikhail Kaluga: This is true. We see a huge gap between the mass ideologized perception of history and the acute private interest in the individual experience of that war. We live in a situation of total lack of information about what actually happened in 1941-1945. The archives have not been opened, we do not know the exact number of those who fought and died. A private person, experiencing his family history as a story of drama, tragedy, parting, really wants to talk about it. At the discussions that take place after each performance, the audience immediately begins to tell personal stories.
Everyone has their own story about the war, about how it really happened and what is not written in textbooks
Because, in general, there is no such place where you can talk about the fate of your family or discuss and comprehend the past. There are almost no attempts to make oneself the subject of historical narrative. And the need for this is huge. Each of us has our own story about the war, about the evacuation, about German and our camps, about detachments, about how it really happened and what is not written in history books.
Why is it so important to talk about it?
M. T .: I had a patient, a front-line soldier. We made so many circles in conversation before he finally told his story. At the beginning of the war, he hit the caterpillar of his tank with his foot, ended up in the hospital, and that’s all – he didn’t fight anymore. And he doubted all his life – did he do it on purpose or was the injury accidental? He was glad that he was alive, and for almost fifty years he lived with a sense of guilt destroying him for this joy. Before meeting me, he never talked about it.
To start living a full life, you need to talk, analyze your own past
For a psychoanalyst, the past almost completely determines the mental makeup of a person: in order to start living a full life, you need to speak out, analyze your own past. A person who has survived a trauma feels the fragility of being, lives with the feeling that there is nothing reliable, nothing settled, nothing can be sure. Time passes, and suddenly something happens in his life for which he cannot find an explanation. He may have painful symptoms, conditions, and he does not understand where they come from. This applies not only to those who survived the war, but also to their descendants – there is a transgenerational transmission of trauma (Read more about this in the text Understand the Laws of Your Destiny – approx. Psychologies).
L. G.: The consequences of military experience, if it has not been worked out and comprehended, are manifested, for example, in coarsening, inability to interact with other people in complex forms, in the displacement of any complex ideas. A very primitive division into friends and foes, almost a tribal consciousness, is becoming the norm: friends are always right, strangers are always enemies. This inability to understand or even take into account the point of view of another is an extremely important consequence of the canonization of the language of war, the language of violence.
Why, in the 80s and 90s, when many witnesses were still alive, when the archives were being opened, did the truth of a man in war not become part of public notions?
L. G.: For this to happen, you need individuals with authority, who would be listened to; we need means of analyzing the past, public institutions that would sanction analysis, set its framework – this is a trauma, this is a crime, this is a mistake. But in our society this was not and is not the case.
M.K .: We have a narrowed, irrational perception of history… Such a perverted logic operates in the state, according to which if we debunk myths or recognize Stalin’s crimes, then today we will feel our infringement, inferiority.
L. G.: The collective reaction to the history of the war is “we know very little about this, and we must forget about it, because it is impossible to figure out who is right and who is wrong …” The mass consciousness today is characterized by the absence of mechanisms that could fix the past: not mythical, but real. As a result, most of our fellow citizens have a very short time horizon: many do not remember what happened five years ago and do not plan their lives more than six months ahead.
But, you see, when they write “Thank you grandfather for the victory!” and tie St. George ribbons to cars, there is something positive in this. What do those who do this really need?
M. T .: We all have a need for good identification, for belonging to something to be proud of. But in our country, identification is impossible, because a false, unacceptable construction turns out to be a “good object”. After all, both the ethnos and the state are unconsciously perceived by us as a clan and a family. And what is this family?
Is this the kind of family that devours their children, is this the kind of mother that sends her children to their deaths? Or are they wonderful parents: strong, wonderful, victorious in the most terrible war? There is such an image of an ethnic group as a tent with a pole in the middle, on which everything rests: it can be faith, a leader, an idea. But we don’t have six. What can we actually grasp? Only for Gagarin and for the Patriotic War.
M.K .: Tying St. George ribbons is a ritual, sort of like rooting for the national football team. But along with this passion for the external attributes of national unity, in recent years, the fashion for everything documentary is clearly visible. One of the main hits of the past winter – the first published blockade notes Lydia Ginzburg. This shows a great need for evidence, for personal history.
L. G.: Patriotic feelings are completely natural. It is bad that no other symbols arise around the war, except for the triumph over Germany and the West in general.
Perhaps it was easier for Germany: she was the bearer of evil, she had something to repent for. And what about us, who were both aggressors and victims in this war, and winners who live worse than the vanquished?
M. T .: The generation of participants in the events is not able to work with trauma. Their children (the second generation) feel the trauma through their parents, and for them ordinary human goods become much more valuable than they could be. That is, just to survive, just to live a normal life.
The third generation is already separated from the traumatic events for a longer period of time – they may have enough mental strength to deal with those terrible experiences that the second generation wanted to forget about. And so the “grandchildren” of the war ask the “children”: “How did you live? Where were you during the evacuation? Did you have food? What was there? And in response they hear: “Why do you need this? We forgot about it, we don’t remember it.”
L. G.: We have only one way – to talk about the past. Recognize that the crime of others is no excuse for our people. The rationalization of victory based on untruth leads to the fact that we begin to see the world in black and white and are unable to take into account the experience of other people who are different from us. We must try to understand the other, accept his point of view. But for this, there must still be an interest in the other, and not the perception of him as alien and hostile.
But the word “crime” is not associated with the Great Patriotic War at all …
L. G.: Because we are dealing with a cult of victory. The higher the rank of this symbol and celebration, the stronger all traumatic consequences are repressed and the higher the aggressiveness in society. Our level of aggressiveness in relations is very high. And this is a direct consequence of the lack of elaboration of a difficult experience.
What can you say to a person who is worried about this, who thinks about it, who wants to find out somehow their relationship with the past?
M. T .: From the point of view of a psychologist, the rejection of a part of one’s own soul is never in vain. We always pay something for it. For example, insufficient self-realization or “flattening” of one’s existence. In any case, life will be less complete, less real, will take place on a different level of functioning. Although it is easier for someone to live in ignorance, it can be too painful to understand the past.
L. G.: You know, changes in society occur when they are assimilated by women, enter the female consciousness. I’m talking about value changes that they will pass on to their children, about changes in people’s attitudes. Therefore, it is so important that women understand this: if we do not work with the past, it will haunt us.