Revising the Perspective on Russia in the 20th Century
I visited Russia with my wife in 2010 and had the good fortune to be there for May Day, a holiday roughly equivalent to the 4th of July in the US. The Russians honor their military veterans with celebrations largely focused on the Soviet victory in World War II which the Russians refer to as “The Great Patriotic War.” I was struck to see Josef Stalin not only represented but presented in a positive light. Stalin’s reputation continues to improve in Russia which is difficult for a westerner to understand. How could Russians venerate the man responsible for brutally and often randomly murdering and imprisoning his countrymen in horrific conditions?
Growing up, when Russia came up in history classes, the topics often centered on the Revolution of 1917, the violent Russian Civil War and Stalinist purges. We learned about mass murder, gulags and show trials in classrooms and in popular media in movie theaters, newspapers, and television. The Soviet Union was the great “red menace” ruled by autocrats who brutally and mercilessly repressed their own population and threatening democratic western nations with nuclear weapons and a modern, massive army and navy. I remember watching into alternative history television shows, movies and reading books always depicting the Soviets as aggressors often ready to use torture and repression to win at any cost. *(I have listed my favorites at the bottom).
Twenty-six years ago the Duma suspended the Communist Party formally bringing to a close 74 years of communist rule in Russia and marking the end of the Cold War. The new Russian government opened up previously secret archives and pulled down statues of Lenin, Stalin, et al. With the Soviet Union relegated to the “ash heap of history” (to borrow from President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 prediction), a gradual reassessment of the history of the twentieth century began.
Like many Americans I love reading and learning about history and in particular, World War II. Indeed, we are rabid consumers as can be attested by the myriad best-selling books, television shows/documentaries and blockbuster movies on the subject. In the 1990s we began to realize a critical piece of the history was missing: the Eastern Front. While we can celebrate the sacrifice of those who landed on the Normandy beaches and the genius of George S. Patton, we became more aware of the awful struggle that took place in the East. The Germans suffered 80% of their war casualties fighting the Red Army. The war took on a far more personal nature in the East as Soviet soldiers were literally fighting for their homes.
In the 1990s, the Russian government released an estimate of casualties: 8.6 million soldiers killed with over 18 million wounded. The devastating losses on the battlefront only told part of the story, civilian losses were even greater: over 15 million dead. In the last 25 years, westerners have gained an appreciation for the enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet Union. Popular media has produced a more sympathetic portrayal in movies such as Enemy at the Gates, a story about Soviet sniper Vasily Zaytsev in the Battle of Stalingrad. Western scholars like British historian Sir Anthony Beevor have also exposed us to the other half of World War II. In Stalingrad, desperate fighting in an urban center found a range of misery from civilians hiding in dugouts to close order fighting lasting for weeks to control a single building. The Soviets resorted to any measure to cling to their positions. On a few occasions, T-34 tanks built in the city’s Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Factory rolled off the assembly line, unpainted, directly into combat.
On our trip, I became acutely aware of just how central the Great Patriotic War is to Russians. There are museums, statues, monuments, plaques and other reminders everywhere. The Russians have endured at least four major invasions in the last 800 years. The Mongols arrived in 1237 and were not ousted for 250 years. Napoleon invaded in 1812 and captured Moscow only defeated by the Russian scorched earth policy. The Germans invaded in 1914 and again in 1941 separately resulting in millions of casualties. All four invasions left a high percentage of the Russian population dead and the countryside wrecked leaving deep physical and psychological scars on the Russian populace.
So from the Russian perspective, the 1941 German invasion was not an isolated event, but the third invasion from the West within 200 years. In 1945, the US had just dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The Soviets would not develop their own nuclear weapons until 1949. When Stalin forced puppet communist governments and repression on Eastern Europe, it was not simply out of an ideological desire to spread the communist revolution, there was real fear of yet another devastating invasion.
I am not writing a defense of Soviet foreign policy here. I do not believe the Russian fears of invasion justified the domination and repression of Eastern Europe. A reassessment of the Russian perspective should also not ignore the excesses of Stalin’s megalomania. For example, of the 15 million civilians who died in World War II, one scholar estimates as many as 2 million may have been killed by Stalin’s regime, not at the hands of the Germans. And these estimated two million deaths are only a small percentage of the number of Russians murdered, imprisoned and terrorized in Stalinist purges.
But at the same time maybe we can better understand how modern Russians might be nostalgic for a leader like Stalin who successfully ousted a dangerous invader, secured Russian borders and made the Soviet Union one of the world’s two great powers. We might even be able to use a more comprehensive understanding of Stalin’s resurgence in popularity and recent Russian history to help explain how an autocrat like Vladimir Putin can rise to and retain power by promising to return Russia to the prominence it enjoyed in the era of Stalin.
For additional discussion on Stalin’s legacy, please check out: The Godfather: Soviet Style
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*There are too many to list, but some of the best remembered presentations:
Red Dawn—A star studded cast of actors play American teens who become guerillas after Cuban paratroopers shoot up their high school in a Soviet/Cuban invasion of the US. In the opening scene a history teacher describes a ruthless Mongol slaughter which I have since realized is a clear allusion to what a Soviet invasion would look like.
Gulag—Actor David Keith plays a journalist kidnapped and framed by the KGB where most of the movie highlights the barbarity of Soviet gulags.
World War III –A tv movie where Soviet paratroopers invade Alaska to cut the pipeline. The movie ends with the US president learning the Soviets have launched a nuclear strike and he tearfully orders a counterstrike.
The Day After—An apocalyptic tv movie about life in the Midwest after a Soviet nuclear attack.
Firefox—A Clint Eastwood film about an American pilot who infiltrates the Soviet Union to steal an advanced stealth fighter. Eastwood’s character is assisted by a Russian underground and the scientific designers of the plane. The movie plays on western fears the Soviets could gain a decisive edge at any time.
The Hunt for Red October—The Tom Clancy classic about a Soviet stealth submarine defecting to the US. Clancy wrote numerous books dealing with the US-USSR rivalry and the threat the Soviets posed, I could list several here.
Rambo II—Built on the still fresh trauma of the loss in Vietnam including a sadistic Soviet interrogator who tortures Rambo on an electrified bedspring and slashes his face with a knife before Rambo exacts his revenge.
Rambo III—This movie took place in Afghanistan as Rambo teams up with Afghan rebels confront Soviet forces. Rambo’s mentor, Colonel Troutman (Richard Crenna) delivers a memorable speech defiantly telling his Soviet captors that Afghanistan is going to be their Vietnam.
Rocky IV—Sylvester Stallone delivers another Cold War classic where the undersized but tenacious American boxer Rocky Balboa dons his American flag trunks and defeats Soviet fighter Ivan Drago, more machine than man, who takes steroids and is nothing short of a manifestation of Frankenstein. The Mikhail Gorbachev lookalike Soviet premier angrily gesturing from his seat high in the arena as Drago begins to lose was a nice touch.
Third World War by British General Sir John Hackett— A fictional but realistic account of a conventional Soviet invasion of West Germany. The book explores ways such a war could become nuclear.