A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

IN APRIL 1995, a month before the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of V-E day, I was in Moscow researching the Russian cinema of another great war, World I, the sparse fruits of which became an article entitled A Forgotten.2 After spending hours in the library, poring over newspaper accounts of that first war, I would return to my apartment and immediately switch on the television to watch the commemoration of the war that followed. Coverage was extensive and intelligent: interviews with World II veterans, news coverage of the preparations for the festivities, and historical footage of those glorious and terrible days of heroism and anguish. The sheer quantity, and the quality, of the images and artifacts memorializing the second war, as compared to the first, struck me more powerfully than ever before. As a longtime observer of the Soviet scene, I had watched the cult of the Great Patriotic (as World II was usually called in the USSR) for many years. Particularly remarkable to the outsider was the touching custom of newlywed couples making a pilgrimage to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, the bride placing her bouquet by the eternal flame. By the 1990s, however, this was scorned as just another of the many empty rituals of Soviet power, something to be mocked, not practiced. But although the rites of commemoration had long since been divorced from memory-indeed, even official memory had once again changed, with Joseph Stalin neatly excised from the fiftieth anniversary celebrations-World II remains the War Remembered in the lands of the former USSR. Given that the USSR suffered the highest losses in the European theater (estimated at 20-27