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History Done Right: War and the Dynamics of Triumphalism in Contemporary Russian Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gregory Carleton
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Extract

So far in the twenty-first century, triumphalism has dominated Russian culture. As manifest in popularized history and film, this wave has often been described by recourse to interpretive paradigms derived from a neo-Soviet or neo-socialist realist orientation, particularly when the subject is war. While understandable, this interpretive practice cannot account for salient productions that upstage Soviet conventions by reconfiguring the Russian historical experience along a narrative trajectory anchored by two scenarios diat constitute the alpha and omega of national achievement and pride: Aleksandr Nevskii and the Time of Troubles. Tapping into deep structures of myth, contemporary reproductions of these two tie their significance explicitly to the post-Soviet period. Supported by the state and church, their increasing traction in war narratives facilitates a new discourse of nationalism that supersedes Soviet precedent, reconfigures traditional domains of triumphalism, and sets a standard for future constructions of Russian history that eclipses key problems of the real or imagined past.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , Fall 2011 , pp. 615 - 636
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.2011

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References

1 As examples from these fields, the following are typical: Victor Yasmann, “Russia: Nostalgia for USSR Increases,” at www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1073655.html (last accessed 1 June 2011); Lionel Beehner, “Russia’s Soviet Past Still Haunts Relations with West,” at www.cfr.org/society-and-culture/russias-soviet-past-still-haunts-relations-west/p!3697 (last accessed 1 June 2011); Holak, Susan L., Matveev, Alexei V., and Havlena, William J., “Nostalgia in Post-Socialist Russia: Exploring Applications to Advertising Strat-egy”, Journal of Business Research 60, no. 6 (June 2007): 649–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arkady Ostrovsky, “Flirt-ing with Stalin,” Prospect Magazine 150 (28 September 2008), at www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2008/09/flirtingwithstalin/ (last accessed 1 June 2011); Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Putin in the Shadow of the Red Czar,” New York Times, 24 August 2008, at www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24sebag.html?pagewanted=print (last accessed 1 June 2011).

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3 Lipovetsky, “Post-Sots,” 361–62.

4 Official support for patriotic initiatives in history, culture, and the arts is encapsu-lated in the government decree of 16 February 2001, “Patrioticheskoe vospitanie grazhdan Rossiiskoi Federatsii na 2001–2005 gody,” reprinted in Tiushkevich, S. A.,Vproshlom ishchut nepepel-ogon’ (Moscow, 2005), 335–42.Google Scholar

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22 This understanding of the war, which became and has remained dominant since the turn of the twentieth century, is best reflected in cyclical commemorations of the battle of Gettysburg, from President Lincoln’s address in November 1863, to Shaara’s, Michael Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Killer Angels (New York, 1974)Google Scholar. See also, Amy Kinsel, “From Turning Point to Peace Memorial,” in Borrit, Gabor, ed.,The Gettysburg Nobody Knows(New York, 1997), 217–21Google Scholar; Desjardin, Thomas A.,These Honored Dead: How the Story of Get-tysburg Shaped American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)Google Scholar; LaFantasie, Glenn W.,Gettysburg Heroes: Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground (Bloomington, 2008).Google Scholar

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42. Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (directed by Valerii Babich, 2007). The series was produced for rJY Tsentr and is narrated by Iurii Shevchuk, the lead singer in the famous rock band DDT.

43 This is not to say that falsification does not occur, as with the Ministry of Defense’s claim (now rescinded) that Poland was guilty of provoking World War II. Other possible realms for falsification include the push to criminalize questioning the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II as well as to redo the history curriculum in schools. See Liudmila Rybina, “Istoriia bez prava perepiski,” Novaia gazeta, no. 71 (6 July 2009), at novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/071/00.html (last accessed 1 June 2011).

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48 Exemplary here is the encomium in the Nikonian Chronicle on the death of Iziaslav (1078) and the invocation of Christ in John 15:13 (“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”). See The Nikonian Chronicle, 1:183. For a dis-cussion of this phenomenon, see Gregory Carleton, “Victory in Death: Annihilation Nar-ratives in Russia Today,” History and Memory 22, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 135–68.

49 Segen’, Aleksandr,Pop (Moscow, 2010), 99.Google Scholar It was first published in Nash sovremen-nik in 2006. Neither the novel nor the film was the first to frame the war as smuta saved by divine intervention. Nikolai Dostal’s 2004 miniseries, Shtrafbat, presents a similar scenario of a nation at war with itself and the Germans but with the Virgin Mary as intercessor against the latter.

50 Referencing recent Russian movies on World War II, Youngblood observes, ‘Just as many Americans resent the revisionist history of the United States, many Russians yearn for a usable past, one that inspires pride rather than shame.” Youngblood, Russian War Films, 230.

51 Lipovetsky, , “Post-Sots,” 374.Google Scholar

52 Svetlana Boym popularized the term glocal to describe such a phenomenon whereby “local color” conditions the expression of a global language or orientation. See Boym, Svetlana,TheFuture of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), 67.Google Scholar