"Молодые воспринимают войну в конфетном обличии"

“Young People See the War in a Candy-Coated Form”

Anews Interview, 21 June 2018

On 22 June we mark a tragic anniversary — seventy-five years since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. On the eve of that date, an Anews.com correspondent spoke about the war with historian Oleg Budnitsky, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics.

Professor Budnitsky studies and publishes wartime diaries, memoirs and letters, among other sources. In this interview he discusses how the most terrible war in the history of our country began, how people reacted to it, what occupation meant in practice, and what made victory over Nazism possible.

“There is no scholarly problem here. There is an ideological problem.”

— You work on the history and problems connected with the Great Patriotic War. In our public consciousness “the war” means the Great Patriotic War, although the Second World War began earlier and ended later. How would you define the place of the Great Patriotic War within the Second World War?

— That is easy to answer. The Great Patriotic War is part of the Second World War. It was not some separate war. The term itself appeared in the very first days and, as they say, came from above. Molotov already called it a Patriotic War in his speech of 22 June.

The second point that should be emphasized is that the USSR was a participant in the Second World War even before the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The so-called Liberation Campaign of the Red Army into Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia was already Soviet entry into the Second World War. It was the partition of Poland together with Nazi Germany. And we should not forget that the USSR occupied not only territories populated mainly by Belarusians and Ukrainians, which according to the Curzon Line could have gone to Soviet Ukraine and Belorussia after the Soviet-Polish War of 1920, but also part of Poland proper, including Białystok and the surrounding area.

After the signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union

All subsequent territorial changes of 1939–1940 were a direct consequence of the agreement with Nazi Germany. This is unquestionably part of the Second World War. So there is no scholarly problem here. There is an ideological problem, because for various reasons there are different interpretations of these events. From the standpoint of academic historiography, however, I do not think there is much room for doubt.

“They did not care who it would be — Germans, British, French or Martians.”

— The Great Patriotic War began. How did Soviet citizens react to the news, and how did their attitude change over time?

— Soviet citizens were very different people. There were those who lived in large cities and owed much, if not everything, to Soviet power. There were others to whom Soviet rule had brought more suffering than benefit. If we compare inhabitants of the Baltic states or Western Ukraine with inhabitants of Moscow or Leningrad, the reaction was naturally different. So it is simply incorrect to speak of “Soviet citizens” as one homogeneous group.

We have to understand what the Soviet Union was at that time. We often project our own ideas backward. People in the past were, on the one hand, people like us, but on the other hand they were very different from us. First, one should not forget that the USSR was still a peasant country. Two thirds of the population lived in the countryside. Second, the Soviet Union was not a highly educated country. According to the 1939 census, one fifth of the population was illiterate. Out of every thousand people, roughly six had higher education and seventy-seven had secondary or incomplete secondary education.

We also have to remember that the country was not well supplied with radio. Information reached people at different times and in different ways. It is therefore impossible to speak of one single reaction of “the Soviet people” to the beginning of the war. Young people who identified themselves and their future with the Soviet system rushed to military enlistment offices because they were afraid they might miss the war: they had been told the enemy would be defeated “with little blood and a mighty blow.” That was one tendency.

Muscovites listen to the announcement that war has begun

But most adults understood that war meant disaster. Part of the population waited for the Germans as liberators. One should not imagine that all of them were admirers of Nazi Germany. Many did not care whether the people who removed Soviet rule were Germans, British, French or Martians. They simply wanted Soviet rule to disappear.

— Was that primarily true of people on the western border of the Soviet Union, where the first blow fell — the newly annexed territories?

— Not only there. Certainly it applied to an overwhelming majority of people in territories that had only recently been annexed to the Soviet Union and had immediately experienced repression: confiscation of property, persecution of religious institutions, deportations. In the annexed Baltic territories, for example, deportations took place literally one week before the war began, on 14 June 1941.

“The Nazis were the best agitators for Soviet power.”

We should not forget that the peasantry — the largest social group in the country — had suffered most under Soviet rule. Some peasants had adapted to the Soviet system; others had not. If we look at NKVD reports, which have been published for the prewar years and the first months of the war, we find openly anti-Soviet and defeatist remarks alongside patriotic ones. Naturally, NKVD material must be treated cautiously: informers could misunderstand what they heard or have motives of their own. All security-service records require great care.

Yet the overwhelming majority of people who had hoped Soviet power would collapse after the outbreak of war, and who initially greeted the Germans as liberators, very quickly experienced the Nazi occupation regime for themselves. Their mood changed sharply. The Nazis were the best agitators for Soviet power.

— Jews were exterminated mercilessly. But what happened to ordinary Russian peasants?

— About forty percent of all Holocaust victims were Soviet Jews — roughly 2.5 million people, about one third of all Soviet civilians murdered by the Nazis. The Nazis had no intention of liberating anyone. They intended to exploit the conquered territories and, of course, the people who lived there.

The occupation regime could not consist only of direct violence; there simply were not enough Germans to impose violence everywhere. Occupation policy was therefore somewhat more complicated than we sometimes imagine.

Sergei Gerasimov’s painting “The Partisan’s Mother”

At its core, however, lay exploitation of the local population. Agricultural produce was taken from peasants. One revealing detail is that the Germans did not dissolve the collective farms: they renamed them, but essentially kept them, because collective farms were a convenient mechanism for extracting agricultural products from the countryside. Peasants were permitted larger private plots so they could feed themselves, but taxes were very high and they were also subjected to outright plunder.

The Nazis were not interested in educating the population. Higher educational institutions were virtually eliminated in the occupied territories. Public executions were used to intimidate people and force obedience.

“We used to say the Communists were Antichrists, but it turns out this Hitler is the Antichrist.”

Soviet power had also relied on violence, and the Great Terror of 1937–1938 was dreadful, but people were not generally hanged publicly in the streets. I published the diary of a collaborator, Lidia Osipova, from Pushkin near Leningrad. She hated Soviet power with all her heart. Yet seeing gallows in the streets, where people who resisted the Nazis or merely violated occupation rules were hanged without trial, was a shock even for her.

School textbooks of my generation contained the photograph of three young people, including a girl, being hanged in Minsk. This happened in the first weeks of occupation, and similar things occurred in many other cities. It was a deliberate policy of intimidation.

Before the execution of Soviet underground fighters in Minsk

The Germans also pursued a policy of depopulating cities. At one point, for example, they effectively blockaded Kyiv by refusing to allow peasants to bring goods to urban markets. This created artificial hunger and pushed people to leave for the countryside. The policy was later somewhat relaxed.

Many other examples could be given. It was unquestionably an extremely brutal occupation regime: hostage-taking, mass shootings and the mass deportation of civilians to Germany because the Germans lacked labor.

German propaganda poster inviting inhabitants of the occupied territories to work in Germany. Image text: “We are going to Germany to work for peace and a better future. With the knowledge you acquire, when you return home you will always be able to find a good position.”

At first there was propaganda and many people really did leave voluntarily. They were told: “You will learn a profession, see Europe and earn money.” Many naïve people believed it. Then the first reports arrived about the real conditions, and almost nobody wanted to go. People were simply caught, loaded into railway cars and sent there. Those who had hated Soviet rule now understood that there could be something worse.

In Vasily Grossman’s Notebooks there is a kitchen conversation between two women: “We used to say the Communists were Antichrists, but it turns out this Hitler is the Antichrist.”

“Never had either the Russian or Soviet army suffered such monstrous defeats.”

— What caused the defeats during the first stage of the war? Why did the Germans advance so far into the country? There is a version that the USSR itself planned to attack on the same, longest day of the year, but was half an hour late, and that defensive fortifications had been removed so they would not obstruct the victorious advance of Soviet troops.

— That is nonsense. There is nothing to discuss. The reason is clear: in 1941 the German army was much stronger than the Red Army. It was superbly trained, technically superior, better commanded and vastly more experienced. In a sense it was a war between a country of urban industrial civilization and a country that still remained to a significant degree agrarian.

But that was not all. Germany possessed an enormous advantage in aviation and in the practical quality of its equipment. People sometimes say that the USSR had more aircraft and tanks and therefore must have been preparing to attack. But much Soviet equipment was obsolete, while a large part of the newer equipment was in poor technical condition. Fuel was short, and so on. The Red Army also had glaring weaknesses in transportation and communications. These were later overcome in part with Allied assistance.

There were also major mistakes by the high command and by Stalin personally. The story of Kyiv is well known: Stalin refused to abandon the city despite the recommendation of Zhukov, then chief of the General Staff. The result was the Kyiv encirclement. The largest grouping of Red Army forces was surrounded there, and the number killed or taken prisoner was enormous — more than six hundred thousand men.

All these factors together produced the catastrophe of 1941. Never had either the Russian or Soviet army suffered defeats as monstrous as those of the summer and autumn of 1941. The situation began to change in November, and at the beginning of December the Soviet counteroffensive finally began. In my view that was a turning point in the Second World War.

“Victory over Nazism cannot be divided. But we should understand what each side contributed.”

— The Soviet Union nevertheless won the war. Obviously it did not do so alone, although propagandists in both the USSR and Russia speak of the USSR’s leading role in victory over Nazi Germany. How was victory actually achieved?

— The combined power of the Soviet Union, the United States and the British Empire was substantially greater than the potential of Nazi Germany. This concerned population, economy and industrial resources. To conduct such a prolonged war, a country needs access to resources: oil, nickel, manganese and roughly twenty other key commodities that make it possible to maintain a mass army and fight for years.

The USSR and its Allies had practically all of them. Germany had practically none.

That means that if Germany failed to achieve a lightning victory and the war became prolonged, it was ultimately doomed. In that sense the Battle of Moscow and the failure of Operation Barbarossa were, in my view, the decisive events of the Second World War. Three quarters of Nazi Germany’s armed forces were defeated on the Eastern Front — defeated by the Red Army.

Red Square, 9 May 1945

This does not mean that the USSR could have won the war alone. Even when the Allies were fighting on limited fronts, they tied down German forces — in North Africa, in Italy, and finally through the full-scale Second Front in Western Europe. There were also the “total” bombings of Germany. Without the massive military-technical and economic assistance the Allies provided to the Soviet Union, the outcome could have been very different.

Arguments over who has priority are meaningless. Victory over Nazism cannot be divided. But we should understand what each side contributed. Our contribution in blood was the greatest.

Victory salute over Moscow

“Veterans sometimes retell what they saw on television and in films.”

— You have done a great deal of work on the unofficial history of the Second World War. How did you come to search for and publish diaries, letters and memoirs of soldiers and civilians? How do you collect your material?

— I am interested in the social history of war. I do not study the operational history of campaigns. I am interested in people at war — a people’s history of war, if you like. In Soviet times a canonical history of the war took shape: victory was achieved thanks to the leading role of the Communist Party, the superiority of the socialist economy, and so forth.

But diaries are among the most important personal sources because they were written here and now, when the writer did not know how the war would end or even whether he would be alive tomorrow or that same evening. He did not know what the official canon of the war would later become. He wrote what he himself saw and felt. The picture of the war that exists in our heads after decades of propaganda and the picture that emerges from genuine human documents often have very little in common — sometimes nothing at all.

The view of direct participants, these human documents, is extremely important. We will never know exactly “how it really was”; we cannot travel back to 1942 in a time machine. But of course we must try to understand events. When memoirs are written many years later, events often merge together because of the nature of human memory. I have seen this in hundreds of people whom I interviewed or whose memoirs and interviews I read: people adjust themselves to what has become accepted and try to fit their memories into what they think is supposed to be written.

Among elderly veterans there can be a kind of distortion of memory: sometimes they retell things they actually saw on television or in films. Those images become superimposed on their own memories.

If we study the history of the war only through official documents preserved in archives, we will obtain a distorted picture. Those documents are important, but we must remember that they were written for specific purposes. If we read reports by political officers, we have to understand that they had their own viewpoint and angle. That is why, returning to where we began, diaries are so important.

“Wartime diaries are very rare. Extremely rare.”

How do I find them? First, quite a lot has already been published and these texts can and should be studied. I myself have published some, as have colleagues at our Center. Second, some diaries can be found in archives, especially manuscript collections in libraries, while others survive in family archives. The archive of the Center for the History and Sociology of World War II at the Higher School of Economics, which I head, contains a number of diaries we have managed to collect. Usually people simply send them to us, or acquaintances tell us about them. I sometimes appeal on radio or television for people to send us wartime diaries and other materials, and it works.

Wartime diaries are very rare. Extremely rare. First, there were not that many highly literate people. Second, not everyone kept a diary. Third, keeping diaries was discouraged.

It is often said that keeping them was formally forbidden. That is not quite true. There was no single formal order of that kind, but there was a general requirement to preserve secrecy, and a diary was considered potentially dangerous — what if the enemy found something in it? Nevertheless, many people kept diaries: hundreds and perhaps thousands. Through your outlet I would again like to appeal to anyone who has wartime letters or papers to send them to our Center. Our contact details are easy to find on the Higher School of Economics website by searching for my name or the name of the Center.

“The author was a graphomaniac: he wrote everything down, very frankly.”

— Did you follow what happened after the war to those rare people who kept such diaries?

— Of course. We know the fate of the overwhelming majority. Their lives turned out differently. Most, unfortunately, have already died. Once I spoke by telephone with the author of one such diary, former Sergeant Boris Komsky, but unfortunately we never met. He died in Lviv. He wrote a remarkable diary, which I published.

Vladimir Gelfand’s diary caused a great stir, and deservedly so. First, it is enormous. Its author was a compulsive writer — he wrote down everything and did so very frankly. Second, it covers the period from 1941 to 1946. He was a rather naïve boy who went into the army almost straight from school.

Vladimir Gelfand near the Reichstag, Berlin, 1946

The German section is especially interesting. He entered Germany in January 1945 and remained there until the autumn of 1946. It is an extraordinary part of the diary. The German section was first published in Germany, where it became a genuine bestseller: eighty thousand copies were sold, an astonishing number. The author later became a teacher of history and social studies at a technical school in Dnipropetrovsk.

Some other diarists became famous figures. David Kaufman, as he had planned, became a poet and wrote well-known poems about the war; he published under the name David Samoilov. Nikolai Inozemtsev became an academician, institute director and speechwriter for Leonid Brezhnev. He too kept a remarkably frank wartime diary, which was published after his death.

“Young people see the war in a somewhat candy-coated form.”

— What do you think of the modern, highly propagandistic approach to Victory Day on 9 May? Is it justified, or should we say that the war ended long ago and it is time to move on?

— What has been happening around 9 May in recent years has, of course, very little to do with the history of the war itself. It belongs to our contemporary history — to contemporary politics and propaganda. That day should be a day of remembrance for the dead, not a triumphalist celebration.

Young people see the war in a somewhat candy-coated form. Things are projected onto the present that are completely inadmissible and have no relation to the historical reality.

But the day must under no circumstances be forgotten. As the song says, it is “a holiday with tears in our eyes.” We lost an unimaginable number of people — almost twenty-seven million. It is an incredible figure, almost impossible to comprehend. We have to remember the price that was paid. To turn that day into a celebration of militarism is, in my view, sacrilege.

Alina Fomicheva
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