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

Abstract

REVIEWS 911 Petrone, Karen. The Great War in Russian Memory. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2011. xv + 385 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. By the end of the first ten months of World War One, Russian losses — killed, wounded and made prisoner — were estimated by Sir Bernard Pares, a British diplomat attached to the Russian army from 1914 to 1917 — at 3,800,000. In 1915, Grand Duke Nikolas Nikolaievich stated, as Warsaw and then Vilna fell to the Germans, ‘The army is drowning in its own blood’. This level of horrendous loss went on until Russia withdrew from the war at the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And yet, as pointed out by Karen Petrone in her well-researched new book, The Great War in Russian Memory, the Soviet Union, the successor to the Russian empire, ‘was unique among the combatants in the virtual absence of public commemoration of World War I at the level of the state, community, and civic organizations, or even individual mourning’ (p. 5). Her book explores a fascinating and hitherto undertreated facet of Russia’s Great War, arguing that while ‘never officially commemorated’, it was not forgotten. Using a wide scope of material — memoir, literature, film, posters and military histories — she demonstrates persuasively that ‘there was World War I remembrance’ (p. 289) and that it developed and evolved within the Soviet Union in the interwar period. Soviet censorship however, dedicated to creating the myth of the glorious Revolution and ensuing Civil War, consigned World War One memory to the ‘margins of Soviet culture’ (p. 6). Marginalized it may have been, but that did not stop the Soviet state from constantly kneading the official memory into different shapes. This process of change makes the topic particularly challenging. Petrone divides the book into halves: the first dealing with the interwar period, and the second identifying the forces behind its ever-shifting reshaping from the time of the Soviet takeover through to the contemporary Russian Federation. She is thus covering a very wide arc of time. World War One is a distant past for most Russians; but in post-Soviet Russia, with the renewed interest in the tsarist era, this past has become newly relevant. Petrone identifies four key themes that occur from 1914 to 1945: religion, heroic masculinity, violence and patriotism. She devotes a chapter to each, and then in the next chapter, ‘Arrested History’, examines ‘why, when, and how World War I discourse disappeared from Soviet public consciousness’ (p. 199). This chapter inevitably leads to an analysis of Soviet censorship, which Petrone examinesusingfivecasestudies:theriseandfalloftheMoscowMilitaryHistory Museum; the outcome of the Red Army’s projected twelve-volume document collection on World War One; changes in the representation of General Aleksei Brusilov; responses to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front; and finally the fate of three World War One works as evaluated or re-evaluated during the twentieth anniversary of the war’s outbreak. The works chosen here are Sof´ia SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 912 Fedorchenko’s The People at War, Lev Voitolovskii’s In the Footsteps of War and Il´ia Feinberg’s 1914. The reader expects her to immediately begin analysing the rise and fall of the Moscow Military History Museum, but is disconcerted to find eight pages of intervening discussion of Glavlit before the subheading, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Moscow Military History Museum’, appears (p. 208). Fortunately for the reader, the narrative then returns to its original plan, and some of the book’s finest material and illuminating insights occur here. She is greatly to be commended for having researched and recorded reader reactions to All Quiet on the Western Front which was officially translated and published in 1933. In these voices from ordinary Stalingrad workers, a sixth grade student who read the novel as a class assignment, and peasants and Komsomol activists, published in 1933 and 1934, we feel the Soviet population’s horror of war. And knowing as we do the enormity of the catastrophe which will hit the Soviet people after the German invasion of 22 June 1941, the sense of doom palpable in a...