For Russians, the story is slightly different, for this was largely Russia’s war, and certainly it remains a touchstone for those who are struggling, in the confused, post-imperial present, to find anything to celebrate in their country’s last hundred years. The Museum of the Revolution in Moscow is a good place to see how these tensions are playing out. Formerly a shrine to the achievements of the Communist Party, the museum was refitted after 1991, when the very idea of communist achievement had become an oxymoron. Today’s museum displays the bitter fruit of the utopian project. In one room there are photographs of queues; in another, scraps and relics from the Gulag. Two further rooms display a selection of the presents that Stalin received from comrades all around the world. The cabinets are stuffed with kitsch: painted china, woven rugs, cut glass and inlaid hunting knives. For some reason, the gift that his admirers in Mexico selected for the great leader was a stuffed, gold-plated armadillo, which stands on fragile golden feet in its glass case.
Most of the exhibits in the museum are new, but two of its rooms have not been touched. The first houses formal cabinets of medals, portraits and regimental flags. The second, where the light is always low, is draped with camouflage netting. There are helmets and rifles caught up in the web, and recorded gunfire echoes in the gloom. ‘People seem to need it,’ the curator explained. ‘We have never been asked to change those rooms.’ The opposite may well be true; there may still be a real demand. Another Moscow attraction, the Park of Victory in the Great Patriotic War on Pokhlonnaya Hill, was under construction when communism fell. At that moment, some critics urged planners to allow the site to revert to pine forest.10 But the work continued, and the park is now complete, an eclectic fantasy of gold leaf and marble in the Disneyland style. Its vast war museum, which sprawls round the parade ground, is a white monster whose faux-classical colonnade would have delighted Mussolini.
An industry has taken over the business of war commemoration. The beneficiaries of its peculiar economy are seldom veterans themselves. Instead, they tend to be state functionaries, soft-fleshed and middle-aged. Their self-importance is nourished by frequent anniversary dinners, large-scale planning meetings, and even by the arrogance of sixty-year-old triumph. ‘British,’ a woman in uniform remarked as she checked my passport at the door to the administrative block behind the museum in the Park of Victory. ‘They were on our side, weren’t they?’ I nodded meekly, biting back a comment about 1939. It is absurd to argue about decisions that were made by strangers who are so long dead. ‘You can go up,’ she said. ‘But it was not good that it took Churchill so long to open the second front.’
To criticize this cult of patriotic war still sounds like carping. ‘If you do not like the war the way it was,’ the poet Boris Slutsky wrote, addressing the young, ‘try winning it your way.’11 It is a refrain that war veterans of many different points of view can echo. Soviet history has been a battleground since the archives were opened in the 1980s, but the soldiers claim to hold true to the real war. The Russian state, however, has abandoned the old dogma in at least one important way. Faced with the loss of an empire, and with it, of a mobilizing creed, Gorbachev’s successors in the Kremlin chose to turn to one of the ancient pillars of Russian identity, the Orthodox Church. ‘I call those politicians podsvechniki,’ a veteran quipped in disgust. He was punning on the Russian word for candle, svechka, and the effeminate associations of podsnezhniki, snowdrops. Today’s Russian leaders are always well-represented at church festivals. Vladimir Putin carries his pious candle at the great ceremonies in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, a building that is an exact replica of a church that his Bolshevik predecessors blew up in 1931. And just as they bless former agents of the KGB in their new role as statesmen, priests of the Orthodox Church must now pray for Red Army dead.
Religious faith was not widespread among soldiers during the war. There were a few believers, but most used prayers and ritual gestures out of superstition, as spells, crossing themselves to ward off death. After two decades of godless socialism, most Red Army soldiers fought without looking for priests, and many rejected religion absolutely. It is incongruous, then, that today’s Park of Victory in Moscow should include a cathedral. Several hundred miles away, at Prokhorovka, the builders have just finished another, designed to look exactly like the kind of nineteenth-century Russian church that 1930s komsomols liked to demolish. In place of traditional frescoes, the walls inside are decorated with the names of the Soviet soldiers who died in the battle for Kursk. The vault is massive, too high to capture in a single photograph. The cruciform shape also defies the camera, for the church is a traditional one, octagonal within and built around a central dome. And though the lettering for every name is small, there is not one inch of plaster on its eight walls that is not covered in writing. The numbers overwhelm imagination, and the monument at least makes sure that visitors will be aghast. But every soldier’s name is now a hostage in the Russian church.
The Orthodox Church’s claim might well have provoked a clash of dogmatisms, but few veterans have complained. Some even find that churches suit their taste more than the offerings of socialist realism that were favoured in the Brezhnev years. Incense and priests seem fitted to the grim business of mourning, and in its guise as the soul of their nation, the Orthodox Church offends today’s elderly far less than does pornography or the materialism of the new rich. But the new piety also has a way of troubling the very old. When they look back at the war, they remember how death seemed simple, part of the patriotic fight. The comrades of their youth died for a cause, whatever happened afterwards. By contrast, their own deaths, as they approach, have become confusing. It is hard to be sure what lives spent under communism mean now that the ideology has gone. It is even harder, for the grand old men, to make sense of post-Soviet death.
It was Anatoly Shevelev who described this dilemma best. ‘My wife was dying,’ he explained. ‘She had throat cancer. They made her have nine operations in the end. She became a Christian believer because of that. I don’t have any time for it myself, I am an absolute atheist. I go to church sometimes because I like the music. But anyway, my wife asked me to pray for her. It was a problem because I don’t know a single prayer, and I hadn’t been to church, really, in my life. But when I came back from the cathedral that day and told her what I’d said, she threw her arms round me. She was so grateful that she wept. She knew, you see, that I’d done the best that I could.’
Shevelev cleared his throat and began to recollect that prayer. ‘Dear God,’ he began, ‘forgive me that I have been an atheist all my life. Not because I chose to be but because from my childhood no one took me to the church. I was brought up in an atheist world. I admire the Russian Orthodox church, and these days I’ve started to value it, because if it had not been for the church, there would have been no Muscovy, and that was the foundation of our state. So I have no quarrel with the church really, and in my own defence, please remember that I, along with millions of other atheists, saved our motherland. By doing that, indirectly, we saved your Orthodox Church. I’ve come to pray for the recovery of my wife, please, God. And forgive me,’ he paused. ‘How did I finish?… That’s right. Forgive me because for my entire life I have been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’