Sunday, May 8, 2005

Putin rewrites the history of the Second World War

Wars are many things.  But all of them are this:

War is the constant possibility of death, the eternal desire to sleep, to rest from the cold, the discomfort, the feeling of torturous pity and a thousand other emotions of suffering. But in the midst of this horror we loved, laughed and kissed, and lived through dramas and tragedies, meetings and partings.

During battles we took in 500 wounded soldiers per night. [They were] freezing, heavy, wet, covered in blood. It seems as if I can still feel that cold and that blood.

That's an excerpt from a book of letters from Soviet veterans recalling the Second World War: Uncensored Memories by Kevin O'Flynn Moscow Times 05/06/05.

It was in the 1980s when the first letters arrived at the Izvestia office, bubbling up from the openness that had just started under perestroika, as the country began to re-examine its past.

The letters came from soldiers who felt betrayed by their country when they were left to fight without weapons at the start of the war, from relatives who were stigmatized for decades because their sons were labeled "missing in action," from prisoners scorned and punished for having been in concentration camps.  ...

The majority of letters relate to the events of 1941 and 1942, when the Germans destroyed a large part of the unprepared Red Army and swiftly occupied vast areas of the Soviet Union.

There is a blast of emotions throughout the book -- not just a feeling of grief for the dead, though there is much of that, but also a palpable anger at the Germans, as well as at the Soviet state for being unprepared for the attack and for seeing those who were captured as disloyal soldiers.


The treatement of prisoners of war is often neglected in historical accounts of wars, even though the treatment of prisoners of war is a highly emotional issue that can leave lingering resentments for decades.

Not many POWs survived in what for the Germans was the eastern front.  On either side.  In an earlier post, I quoted Telford Taylor, "German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern  front ... died in captivity by the millions, but many survived."

One of the great injustices done to Soviet POWs is that when they returned home, luckier than most because they were still alive, they were regarded as poltitically suspect because they had been in contact with the Germans, and were sent to prison camps when they returned home.  The USSR held many German POWs as slave laborers for years after V-E Day.  The last German POWs came home in 1956.

Apparently the book, I Saw It ... New Letters about the War is only published in Russian as of now.  O'Flynn writes:

For any generation that has not experienced war, the stories are compelling for their simple description of what would seem to be unbearable.

Soldiers' hair turns white overnight in letter after letter. Doctors remove live explosives from patients' flesh. Nurses tell horrific tales of brief moments with dying soldiers that leave an impression on them for decades. A woman who signs her letter as G. Ivashchenko recalls a mortally wounded soldier arriving at her hospital. He has serious head wounds and only one eye left intact, but the nurses help him communicate by writing out the alphabet and getting him to spell his name by blinking when they point at the right letter.

"We fought for his life for some days, understanding completely the futility of the fight," she writes.

But later generations can't resist sentimentalizing war, it seems, and instrumentalizing the memories for present-day politics.  In his speech of May 8 to leaders of the CIS (Community of Independent States), Russian President Vladimir Putin said (my emphasis):

It was on our initiative that the UN General Assembly declared 8-9 May of this year to be Days of reconciliation and memory. It called for nations to unite their efforts in the fight against the ideological successor of Nazism, terrorism, and also against doctrines founded on racism and xenophobia. ...

New generations of our citizens must know the truth about the events of those years. To know this truth means to be immune to propaganda of extremism and xenophobia, national and religious discord. Ultimately, it means to protect the world from a repeat of conflicts and warsfounded on genocide, nationalism and racism.

It is clear for all of us: Nazism, extremism and terrorism are threats that feed on the same ideology. The threats are terrible, and we are simply obliged to protect our unique peaceful community of civilisations from these dangers.

Well, no, they don't.  National Socialism was not based on the Islamic religion, or any variant of it.  Like the American war fans who try to give the Iraq War some of the "good war" aura of the Second World War, Putin wants to portray the brutal Russian war in Chechnya in a similar way.

At least he didn't use "Islamofascist," surely one of the emptiest ideological constructs ever created.

Near the end, Putin says:

For all the peoples of the Soviet Union, the war against Nazism became the Great Patriotic War.

Without exaggeration, it was a just war – for the very right to life on the Earth, to have statehood, language and culture. A war for the free development of our peoples, against the ideology of barbarism, violence, aggression, nationalism and racism.

That part is actually not bad.  Except prominently absent from his speech is any mention of democracy as a goal of the war.  Or of the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  Roosevelt and Churchill persuaded Stalin to accept those (at least nominally) as goals of the war.

Selected memory left those out of Putin's version of the war, it seems.

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