On New Year's eve, the Soviet Information Bureau published a report entitled 'A Summary of the Past Six Weeks of the Stalingrad Offensive'. This finally announced the encirclement of the German armies in Stalingrad.
A change in popular consciousness was about to become manifest; the first stirrings of this had taken place subconsciously; as secretly as the preparations for the offensive itself. For all the apparent similarities, this change in consciousness was to prove very different indeed from that which had followed the earlier victories near Moscow.
The Moscow victory had served chiefly to change people's attitudes towards the Germans. After December 1941, the mystical fear aroused by the German Army disappeared.
The Stalingrad victory, on the other hand, served mainly to change people's attitudes towards themselves, to develop a new form of self-consciousness in the army and in the population as a whole. Soviet Russians began to think of themselves differently, to adopt a different manner towards other nationalities. The history of Russia was no longer the history of the sufferings and humiliations undergone by the workers and peasantry; it was the history of Russian national glory.
People's way of thinking at the time of the Moscow victory was still fundamentally the same as it had been before the war. The reinterpretation of the events of the war, the new consciousness of the power of the Russian armed forces, of the power of the Russian State, was part of a long and complex process. This process had begun long before the war, but only on an unconscious level.
Three major events formed the basis for this new vision of human relationships and of life itself: collectivization, industrialization and the year 1937. These events, like the October Revolution itself, involved the displacement of vast sections of the population, displacements accompanied by the physical extermination of numbers of people far greater than had accompanied the liquidation of the Russian aristocracy and the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.
These events, presided over by Stalin himself, marked the economic triumph of the builders of the new Soviet State, the builders of 'Socialism in One Country'. At the same time, these events were the logical result of the October Revolution itself.
This new social order – this order which had triumphed during the period of collectivization, industrialization and the year 1937 with its almost complete change of leading cadres – had preferred not to renounce the old ideological concepts and formulae. The fundamental characteristic of the new order was State nationalism, but it still made use of a phraseology that went back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the formation of the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party.
The war accelerated a previously unconscious process, allowing the birth of an overtly national consciousness. The word 'Russian' once again had meaning.
To begin with, during the retreat, the connotations of this word were mainly negative: the hopelessness of Russian roads, Russian backwardness, Russian confusion, Russian fatalism… But a national self-consciousness had been born; it was waiting only for a military victory.
National consciousness is a powerful and splendid force at a time of disaster. It is splendid not because it is nationalist, but because it is human. It is a manifestation of human dignity, human love of freedom, human faith in what is good. But this consciousness can develop in a variety of ways.
No one can deny that the head of a personnel department protecting his Institute from 'cosmopolitans' and 'bourgeois nationalists' is expressing his national consciousness in a different manner to a Red Army soldier defending Stalingrad.
This awakening of national consciousness can be related to the tasks facing the State during the war and the years after the war: the struggle for national sovereignty and the affirmation of what is truly Russian, truly Soviet, in every area of life. These tasks, however, were not suddenly imposed on the State; they appeared when the events in the countryside, the creation of a national heavy industry and the complete change in the ruling cadres marked the triumph of a social order defined by Stalin as 'Socialism in One Country'.
The birthmarks of Russian social democracy were finally erased.
And this process finally became manifest at a time when Stalingrad was the only beacon of freedom in the kingdom of darkness.
A people's war reached its greatest pathos at the time of the defence of Stalingrad; the logic of events was such that Stalin chose this moment to proclaim openly his ideology of State nationalism.
20
A new article, 'Always with the People', appeared on the wall-newspaper in the hall of the Physics Institute.
This article said that the Soviet Union – under the leadership of the great Stalin, who was guiding the country through the tempest of war – attached immense significance to science; that the Party and Government honoured and respected scientists as nowhere else in the world; and that even during the current difficult times the Soviet state was providing scientists with all the conditions necessary for normal, productive work.
It went on to list the great tasks now facing the Institute: the new building work, the expansion of the old laboratories, the bringing together of theory and practice, and the importance of scientific research for the armaments industry.
Mention was made of the patriotic élan that had seized the collective of scientists; the collective was determined to justify the concern and trust of the Party and of comrade Stalin himself, determined not to disappoint the hope with which the people looked on this glorious vanguard of the Soviet intelligentsia.
The final part of the article was about the unfortunate fact that there were certain individuals in this healthy and fraternal collective who lacked a sense of responsibility to the People and the Party -individuals who were isolated from the great Soviet family. These individuals were opposed to the collective and considered their personal interests of greater importance than the tasks entrusted to them by the Party; they tended to exaggerate their own scientific achievements, real or imaginary. Deliberately or not, some of these individuals became mouthpieces for alien, anti-Soviet views and attitudes; the ideas they spread were politically dangerous. These individuals often called for an 'objective attitude' towards the idealist, reactionary and obscurantist theories of foreign idealists. They even boasted of their links with these idealists, thus belittling the achievements of Soviet science and offending the patriotic pride of Russian scientists.
Sometimes these individuals posed as defenders of a supposedly flouted justice, trying to win a cheap popularity among the shortsighted, the gullible and the naive; in fact they were sowing seeds of discord, seeds of a lack of faith in Russian science, of a lack of respect for its splendid past and great names. The article called on scientists to liquidate every sign of decadence, everything alien and hostile, everything that might hinder the fulfilment of the tasks with which, during the Great Patriotic War, they had been entrusted by the Party and the People. The article ended: 'Forward, towards new peaks of science, following the splendid path lit by the searchlight of Marxist philosophy, the path we have been shown by the great Party of Lenin and Stalin.'
No names were mentioned, but the article was obviously about Viktor. It was Savostyanov who first told him about it. At that moment Viktor was with a group of colleagues putting the last touches to the new apparatus. Instead of going to read it immediately, he threw his arms round Nozdrin's shoulders and said: 'Come what may, this giant will do its work.'