Ekaterina V. Haskins’s new book, Remembering the War, Forgetting the Terror: Appeals to Family Memory in Putin’s Russia, comes at a timely moment. In the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, interest in the relevance of World War II to contemporary Russian national identity has exploded. Haskins tackles this topic directly, asking why memory of World War II has superseded memory of the Great Terror to emerge as a key pillar of Russian national identity today. As she observes, Russia’s twentieth century was wracked with violence that engulfed millions of Soviet families. It was never a foregone conclusion that the cult of World War II would so thoroughly eclipse other episodes of violence and cement national identity under Vladimir Putin. On the contrary, in the late 1980s, the emergence of Memorial and other groups dedicated to public commemoration of Stalin-era human rights violations suggested that reckoning with state-sponsored terror had the potential to anchor post-Soviet national identity. That trend has since been decisively defeated.To Haskins, the inverse correlation of the importance in the rise of World War II in national memory and the gradual eclipse of the Great Terror is not accidental. She fully acknowledges official efforts to foreground World War II in public memory and, simultaneously, to discourage or derail attempts to question the state’s official narrative. However, she contends that official policies alone cannot fully explain the World War II myth’s broad popular appeal and resonance, which is, she contends, rooted in long-standing memory practices that are conditioned by the broader environment. Under Putin, the patriotic, triumphalist World War II myth has evolved in an emotionally compelling manner to offer everyone an opportunity to celebrate family members, regardless of their actual experience during the war. Pride in family memory has thereby become a unifying celebration of victory that leaves no room for counternarratives, thereby rendering memory of the purges and the Gulag comparatively inconsequential and unpatriotic.Each of Haskins’s four chapters uses a unique “scenario of remembrance” to examine how some memories have been socially internalized and come to dominate at the expense of others. The first two chapters are very accessible by virtue of their well-known subject matter. They trace the trajectory of World War II narratives in Soviet and post-Soviet film alongside the evolution of the March of the Immortal Regiment. Starting out a spontaneous popular initiative with a slightly oppositionist bent, they become a mass movement co-opted by the state for its own aggrandizing purposes. The final two chapters are both longer and slightly more theoretical; they deal with the built environment and what Haskins terms ambient Stalinism as well as with Internet commemorations in the form of digital archives.The chapter on World War II films posits that cinema is one of the most powerful affective media for creating group memories. Post-Soviet films in particular dispense with Party glorification to enable even those purged, dekulakized, or sentenced to a penal battalion to reclaim agency and citizenship in death for a noble cause. The films’ capacity to transform all participants in the war into heroic sacrifices for the nation enhances viewers’ emotional attachment by extending the promise of full community membership to all descendants. While both Soviet and post-Soviet films insist that “it is right and just to die for the motherland” (17), more recent films encourage audiences to remember their own family’s contribution to the war effort by depicting even those victimized by the Stalinist state as sacrificial heroes who ultimately redeemed themselves by dying for the sake of the nation. For contemporary viewers, the overwhelming message that all sacrifice is worthy of celebration creates a shared environment in which all ancestors deserve “pride and veneration” (29). Their descendants can, in turn, claim membership in the nation. Haskins finds the gratification and redemption offered by these films problematic. The emphasis on heroic sacrifice discourages exploring the memory of state terror as it might challenge the narrative of national unity and “civic prestige” the films promote. The overwhelming temptation is simply to accept the offer of community membership extended in the films without further challenging it.The second chapter explores how the marches of the Immortal Regiment evolved from a spontaneous, independent movement that sought to sidestep grandiose and state-led formal commemoration of the war by focusing on family members to the current prominent place they hold in official Victory Day celebrations. It illustrates best of all the degree to which post-Soviet fixation on memory of the war is not just a state-led project, in part by making interesting use of Haskins’s own participation in the 2015 march to convey the full sensory nature of the experience. When they began in 2012 in Tomsk, the marches invited everyone to honor their family members who experienced the war. Their innately nonhierarchical, decentralized, and democratic nature thus challenged the triumphalism of state narratives. However, their informal organizational structure ultimately turned out to be a weakness. Haskins shows how state-led copycat organizations ultimately capitalized on the popular family-oriented nature of the marches to redirect them toward state interests, resulting in the enormous and explicitly patriotic Moscow March on May 9, 2015. The marches, now subverted to glorify the state as well as the ancestors, have become integral elements of Victory Day celebrations, suggesting how easily remembrance patterns and the desire to honor family members can be exploited.The third chapter is the longest, delving into the elusive topic of what Haskins terms ambient Stalinism, by which she means a phenomenon in which the physical environment of Moscow and other cities subtly blends tourism and museum exhibits to link victory in World War II with peacetime achievements. Haskins presents this environment as producing benevolent attitudes toward Stalin without people even realizing it. Moscow, she argues, is suffused with both old and new architecture representative of Stalin’s supposed achievements. Little can be done about the built environment; however, its impacts are compounded by museum exhibitions that spring up appealing to family piety as they underscore its connection to a narrative of greatness.Haskins’s final chapter takes on the question of Internet commemorations in the form of digital archives. Archives in general create shared imaginaries, narrating the past and offering particular visions of the future. However, as Haskins points out, the proliferation of digital archives invites people to write themselves—and their families—into history. This is a particularly interesting topic as, when the communal archive movement that arose in the 1980s gradually evolved into the digital space of the early years of the twenty-first century, Soviet state-led repression received quite a bit of popular commemoration online. Yet Haskins demonstrates that here the government has intervened: first, to make it more difficult to acquire the necessary information to support Internet commemoration of repression and, second, at the official level, to overlook remembrances of repression, which remain sponsored almost entirely privately. At the same time, as Haskins shows, the government has also inserted itself into online commemorations to promote popular participation in ways that contribute to a “triumphalist, self-congratulatory” (96) narrative of the war. At least three state-sponsored digital databases encourage people to identify with their ancestors’ role in World War II. By highlighting individual war losses, these databases promote the Soviet slogan “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgiven,” and, indeed, they have enabled people to learn the specific details and fates of their ancestors who died in the war. However, by their very nature, they also limit certain elements of memory, most notably by excluding the armed conflicts in 1939 and 1940 and by categorizing search terms in particular ways. Essentially, they subtly compel any prospective contributors to fit their accounts into preexisting formats that, in turn, support state narratives. By contrast, although the communal archives of terror share the joint goal of collecting and publicizing the names of victims of Soviet repression, beyond that there is little consensus about the correct way to use such archives.Overall, this is a probing, nuanced, and innovative look at phenomena with which many readers in the field of Russian studies will be familiar and a new angle that they will appreciate. While readers outside the fields of memory or communication studies might not fully grasp the nuances of the theory, they will still come away with a much deeper understanding of the progressive importance that World War II acquired in Putin’s Russia as well as the reasons it struck such a broad chord. This book will be useful to a broad audience looking for a clearer understanding of how and why World War II has risen to such prominence in Russian national identity.
Erina Megowan (Sun,) studied this question.