Russia's Hero Cities

From Postwar Ruins to the Soviet Heroarchy

Ivo Mijnssen

• Éditeur: Indiana University Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253056238
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Russian History

World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War to Russians, ravaged the Soviet Union and traumatized those who survived. After the war, memory of this anguish was often publicly repressed under Stalin. But that all changed by the 1960s. Under Brezhnev, the idea of the Great Patriotic War was transformed into one of victory and celebration.

In Russia's Hero Cities, Ivo Mijnssen reveals how contradictory national recollections were revised into an idealized past that both served official needs and offered a narrative of heroism. This triumphant narrative was most evident in the creation of 13 Hero Cities, now located across Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. These cities, which were host to some of the fiercest and most famous battles, were named champions. Brezhnev's government officially recognized these cities with awards, financial contributions, and ritualized festivities. Their citizens also encountered the altered history at every corner—on manicured battlefields, in war memorials, and through stories at the kitchen table. Using a rich tapestry of archival material, oral history interviews, and newspaper articles, Mijnssen provides a thorough exploration of two cities in particular, Tula and Novorossiysk.

By exploring the significance of Hero Cities in Soviet identity and the enduring but conflicted importance they hold for Russians today, Russia's Hero Cities exposes how the Great Patriotic War no longer has the power to mask the deep rifts still present in Russian society.

ONE

Heroism across Generations

AT DAWN ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1966, twenty-five hundred Soviet youngsters board buses to play at war. Twenty-five years have passed since the Red Army defended Moscow against the onslaught of the German Wehrmacht during the Great Patriotic War. Now, the members of the youth organization Komsomol gather for the finals of the All-Union Tours to the Sites of Revolutionary, Military, and Labor Glory (Vsesoyuznyy Pokhod po Mestam Revolyutsyonnoy, Boevoy i Trudovoy Slavy)—to show themselves as worthy successors of the wartime heroes and to pay tribute.

The young men and women, all of whom have won regional military-patriotic tournaments, fan out along the former front lines outside the capital. They compete in teams, conducting reconnaissance, clearing imaginary minefields, and destroying bridges. The general staff of the games makes sure the past feels as present as possible; during the maneuvers, draftees receive their enlisting orders directly from veterans of the war, and the organizers consistently appeal to youths’ patriotic duty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). They must be ready “to defend the achievements of [the] October [Revolution] at each frontier and at all times.”¹

Later in the day, commemorative rituals distance the present from the war while symbolically bridging the quarter century that has passed. Participants in the games end their missions by laying wreaths at monuments before they return to Moscow, where one hundred thousand peers welcome them. They collectively take an oath: “Here, on Red Square, in front of the Kremlin’s holy walls, we, the grandchildren of those who stormed the Winter Palace, the children of those who took the Reichstag, swear with all of our hearts to be true to the cause of Lenin and the Party!”²

In order to heighten the symbolic power of the oath, the central square of the Soviet Union has been transformed into a festive commemorative landscape. World War II–era tanks, Katyusha missiles, and air defense guns create a sense of military readiness.³ Posters with the slogans “Glory to the Hero City of Moscow!” and “Greetings to the Hero Defenders of Moscow!” adorn the State Department Store. The oath takes place in front of the eternal flame, symbolizing the “fire of Leninism . . . the fire of struggle, the fire of revolution” lit by the representatives of the Hero Cities.⁴

This description of a highly significant commemorative event in 1966 gives the reader an idea of how carefully arranged Soviet ritualized space was. Red Square lay at its center, and Moscow was the primus inter pares among the main symbols of Soviet resistance during the war: the Hero Cities, eponymous with the longest, bloodiest, and costliest battles. Contemporary publications called them the “mighty bastions that rose in the path of the enemy’s hordes.”⁵

During the tenure of Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev (1964–82), these cities received the highest Soviet awards in recognition of their feats. Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Sevastopol’, Odessa, Brest Fortress, and Kiev—joined by Novorossiysk, Kerch’, Minsk, Tula, Smolensk, and Murmansk in the 1970s and 1980s—came to embody the heroism of the Soviet people.

Forming an exclusive club of quasi-sacred cities, they were the protagonists of the Soviet war cult, which reached its climax after 1965 and which continues to inspire reverence in contemporary Russia.⁶ A unique and highly significant cultural phenomenon, Hero Cities received special salutes on holidays, hosted commemorative events, and were featured in thousands of books and on such items of everyday consumption as matchboxes and postcards. Russia’s Hero Cities describes their position in Soviet society and indicates the presence of the past in their inhabitants’ lives.

A SOCIALIST CONTRACT BORN OF TRAUMA

The memory of the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) continued to occupy a towering position even decades after its end because the conflict had wreaked havoc on the Soviet Union. An estimated twenty-seven million people—the number remains contentious—had died in the Soviet Union when the confrontation with Nazi Germany ended on May 9, 1945. This abstract statistic hides a sea of suffering in a country engulfed by total war, waged by a murderously racist German occupier. Most of the victims were civilians, while millions of soldiers in both armies died on the front lines, often underfed and poorly supplied. The war devastated wide swaths of the Soviet Union and left its economy in shambles. According to official estimates, the battling armies had destroyed 1,710 cities; 70,000 villages; 32,000 industrial enterprises; and 65,000 kilometers of railway. Overall damage was estimated at 2.6 trillion rubles in prewar currency.⁷

Yet the Soviet Union emerged victorious—a superpower that would come to control all of Eastern Europe and exert its influence over large parts of the world during the Cold War. According to Amir Weiner, the Great Patriotic War came to represent the “Armageddon of the Revolution” that had proved the superiority of socialism over capitalism once and for all.⁸ The war cult was inextricably linked with heroism, even though the Stalinist regime, brought to the brink of collapse by the German onslaught, had an ambiguous relationship with commemoration. Only under Brezhnev, in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of victory in 1965, did a canonized and idealized official war memory emerge.⁹

It put an end to the intellectual and political struggles raised within the debates on the human costs of the war and the mistakes of the leadership in the 1950s.¹⁰ The Soviet ideological apparatus, which severely curtailed freedom of speech and independent academic research, drew the limits of official discourse even more tightly.¹¹ Chapter 2 deals with the social and political mechanisms by which this process took place. Jan Assmann’s assertion that any society needs collective memories to gain clarity about its values applies to the Soviet Union to an extraordinary degree.¹² The state was the main actor in the politics of history, and history was its central legitimizing force.¹³

During Brezhnev’s tenure, war memory transformed from a societal trauma into an ideology of integration due, at least in part, to the general secretary’s personality. Brezhnev’s war experience had shaped him profoundly, both physically and mentally. He had witnessed the humiliation of retreat as a party cadre in Ukraine, had been seriously wounded in the battle for Novorossiysk in 1943, and had been cherished as a war hero during the victory parade in Moscow in 1945.¹⁴

The horrors of the war and the Stalinist terror, however, had made him determined to avoid a repetition of this kind of large-scale violence—even though he remained stuck in the past values and events that had formed his worldview. His eighteen-year rule was the most humane in Soviet history, relying on a system that provided considerable stability, a comparatively decent standard of living, and ideological innovation. Only in the second half of his rule would the reluctance to change and the growing formalism degenerate into the stagnation many observers uncritically associate with Brezhnev.¹⁵

Official war memory provided a compelling narrative that turned suffering into heroism in the service of state-sponsored values. Through collective intergenerational sacrifice and discipline under the leadership of the Communist Party, the story went, the Soviet people had transcended death and destruction to build a thriving socialist society.

The promise of this “socialist contract” (to quote Christine Varga-Harris) between the population and the state—growing welfare against sacrifice for the greater good as defined by the party—was enticing in the 1960s.¹⁶ The Soviet population enjoyed unprecedented economic opportunities, limited personal freedom, and curtailed levels of repression. Many Soviet ideologues rightly feared that materialism and consumerism could threaten socialist convictions, while individualism would displace collectivism. Ideological innovations were necessary: the leadership thus bolstered socialism with official war memory and anchored state-sponsored demands in a widely revered, heroic past that virtually everyone could relate to through personal experience or family history.

Moreover, official war memory served as a tool to overcome a simmering generational conflict.¹⁷ Soviet citizens born after the war grew up in a society that had little in common with the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. They were nevertheless surrounded by their legacy—its scars tangible in city landscapes and parents’ biographies, war memory told and retold in schools, lessons taught in elaborate commemorations at monuments and former battlefields.¹⁸ This presence, as well as its appropriation by the postwar generation, is a significant focus of Russia’s Hero Cities.

During the first half of the Brezhnev era, the new socialist contract fueled ideological and social dynamism. This was particularly evident in Hero Cities, which included the economic and political centers of Moscow and Leningrad, republican capitals such as Kiev and Minsk, and many strategic industrial cities. All experienced significant immigration and turbulent growth in the postwar years; more than one hundred million Soviet citizens moved from the countryside to cities between 1956 and 1989.¹⁹

Soviet propaganda cast Hero Cities as exemplars, meant to be emulated by the entire nation. Their inhabitants were expected to live up to the feats of their forefathers, through discipline and loyalty. In particular, numerous campaigns targeted younger city dwellers, highlighting “transgenerational unity.” In return, the cities received an elevated status and an attractive local identity—well anchored in a socialist-patriotic framework.

The symbolic privilege Hero Cities enjoyed in the Soviet Union had a strong impact on their political and economic situations. The highly ritualized, politically correct interactions associated with official war memory formed the nexus within which power relations were negotiated. Alexei Yurchak and Victor Dönninghaus have singled out the crucial importance of ritual politics during the Brezhnev era.²⁰ But their mechanisms and concrete consequences remain poorly understood.

In Hero Cities, both regional and central authorities used their position in the Soviet hierarchy of heroes—the “heroarchy”—to articulate demands and gain advantages.²¹ Award ceremonies and anniversaries of the war provided the background against which cities asked for and often received investments. Conversely, they had to meet additional production obligations, with factory brigades shouldering the norms of fallen heroes. This connection of heroism, emulation, and socioeconomic issues had a long tradition in the Soviet Union, dating back to Stalinism.

This study, then, provides a unique approach to resource allocation and mobilization in a nonm...