The Great War in Russian Memory by Karen Petrone (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great War in Russian Memory by Karen Petrone Sam Johnson (bio) Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 385 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-35617-8. In November 2008, I happened to be in Paris for a conference that coincided with Armistice Day, which remains a national holiday in France. A number of friends and colleagues attending the conference were from St. Petersburg, one of whom stumbled upon a service at Notre Dame Cathedral. It was, he told me with some astonishment, a ceremony devoted to World War I. Of course, coming from the UK, where the dead of the Great War still have well-kept spaces of remembrance in every village, town, and city, these events were of no surprise to me. Walking around Paris’s hushed streets, the impression was poignant and evocative, as I inevitably recalled my own ancestors’ part in that terrible conflict. As well as memorials, everyone in Britain has their own family tales to tell, passed through several generations. That my Russian colleague was startled to find this war so publicly and officially commemorated in the twenty-first century spoke volumes [End Page 444] about our differing paths in negotiating national memories of the past century. Nevertheless, while World War I may be less remembered today in the states of the former Soviet Union, in her well-researched and argued The Great War in Russian Memory, Karen Petrone shows that it was far from totally forgotten in the twentieth century. It has often been a convention to imagine that 1914−1917/18 was officially wiped from public discourse in the Soviet Union, its effect and meaning overshadowed by more grievous wars, not least the bitter fratricidal conflict that initially ran concurrent with the final months of Russia’s Great War. But, as Petrone observes, this approach is somewhat simplistic, for World War I did not suddenly or totally disappear from the Russian imagination. It retained a place, albeit for varying reasons, especially in the first two decades that followed its end. Focusing on public representation, Petrone analyzes a number of “contested” World War I discourses: religion, gender, violence, and patriotism. Divided in two parts (though this is only made evident in the introduction; it is not indicated in the contents), the study first looks at how the above themes were manifest in the Russian account and, in the second part, explores how they changed over time. Chapter 1 focuses on the Great War in Russian memory, starting with an insightful account of the origins and later fate of the Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery, which originally held 17,500 of the war’s dead, as well as 10,000 from the Civil War. In the 1930s, its church and grave markers were demolished, leaving a single monument, to Sergei Shlikhter, who died during the 1916 Brusilov Offensive. Chapter 2 considers the extent to which religion and spirituality featured in interwar accounts, while Chapter 3 looks at the paradoxes of gender, considering how the war was viewed as an arena for contested masculinities. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the extent to which war and violence were normalized in Soviet narratives, and how this, in turn, fed into definitions of Russianness. The final three chapters are concerned with the longer view of the war’s influence and legacy. Chapter 8 brings the fate of the Shlikhter memorial up to date, as Petrone considers memorialization in the post-Soviet era. Petrone’s purpose is not simply to examine the Great War’s resonance in Russia, but also to consider “the Soviet Union’s relation to interwar Europe and […] the rhythm of transformations in all Soviet discourse in the interwar period” (P. 20). For this reason, comparative Western European totems occasionally appear, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Wilfred Owen’s posthumous Dulce et Decorum est. [End Page 445] Most of the sources Petrone uses are literary and, for scholars of East European history, several familiar names recur: Il’ia Erenburg and Mikhail Sholokhov are the most well-known. The former, who wrote of his own experiences as a war...