Ochirov told me that when his family arrived at their new Siberian home, the villagers looked at the Kalmyks with disgust, scared by their Asian faces. For the first few months the newcomers were referred to as 'cannibals'. His schoolteachers did not use his name but referred to him as 'Enemy of the People' when calling the register. In the first five years of exile, over 90 percent of Kalmyk newborn babies were stillborn or died in infancy, as whole families went starving and succumbed to illness.18 It was only in 1957, during Khrushchev's 'thaw', that the Kalmyks were allowed to return. Many of them found the houses they had once lived in had new occupants, ethnic Russians who had moved in during their absence.
Perhaps, given the primary purpose was not physical extermination, the deportations were not technically genocides. But the Kalmyks, like
all the deported nations, were scattered across a huge territory, with the goal of destroying any sense of national cohesion. Mentions of them were excised from official Soviet encyclopaedias and textbooks, and discussion of the deportations was taboo. It was as if these peoples had never existed, had never had homelands. By the time Stalin died in 1953, thousands of Kalmyks had perished in Siberia. If it was not genocide, it certainly came close to it.
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Most Russian settlements of more than a few hundred people have a monument to those who perished in the Great Patriotic War, and often it carries the inscription: 'No one is forgotten; nothing is forgotten.' But in reality, in order to provide the required narrative, first for the Soviet war legend and then again for Putin's updated version, millions of people had been quite deliberately forgotten. If the war was to become the event that bound the nation together, dark chapters like the deportation of millions of Soviet citizens by their own government were best left unexplored. The spirit of enquiry that characterized perestroika and the early 1990s dissipated, as the war narrative gradually became more and more central to the nation-building project.
Yeltsin resumed the Soviet tradition of victory parades every 9 May in 1995, but they were modest affairs. With the economy imploding and the army mired in a horrendous war in Chechnya, there was little appetite for victory celebrations, especially for a victory linked to a country that had recently ceased to exist.
In 2000, Victory Day came just two days after Putin's inauguration, and this time, the ceremony of the day was much more pronounced. The celebration was the biggest since the Soviet collapse. On Red Square, thousands of soldiers lined up alongside veterans, who proudly wore their vintage uniforms, the lapels dripping with medals. They marched across the square in columns arranged by their wartime battlefronts.
In a speech given from outside Lenin's mausoleum, Putin described the war as a severe test of our statehood and people's spirit'. That Putin saw the devastation of the Second World War first and foremost as a challenge to statehood is telling, illustrating again that he saw sovereignty and the strong state as sacrosanct, and more fundamental than the well-being of individual citizens.
'Today you stand together with the new generation of defenders of the motherland,' Putin told the assembled veterans. 'Through you, we got used to being winners. This entered our blood. It was not just responsible for military victories, but will also help our generation in peaceful times, help us to build a strong and flourishing country.'1
In fact, the current generation did not feel much like winners, and there had been little by way of victories to celebrate in living memory. A few months later, the disconnect between the glorious military rhetoric and the modern Russian reality was underlined when the Kursk submarine sank in the Barents Sea. The country watched in horror as 118 sailors died, while the generals appeared indifferent and Putin did not return to Moscow from holiday for five whole days. Putin learned a number of lessons from the public relations disaster, including the potential bite of a free and critical media, and the urgent need to modernize the vast but creaking military resources inherited from the Soviet Union.
Amid the disintegration of the present, the memories of the war were a rare and powerful symbol of what it meant to triumph through adversity, of how it felt to be a winner in life. Putin wanted to imbue young Russians with this philosophy of winning. As the economy began to stabilize during Putin's first years, and people were paid pensions and salaries on time for the first time in more than a decade, there was more appetite for talk of a victorious nation. On occasions, the idea of'handing down' the victory from one generation to the next was explicitly ritualized. Shortly after Victory Day in 2005, sixty thousand members of the Kremlin-sponsored youth group Nashi marched through central Moscow in matching T-shirts. When they reached the end of their route, they were handed bullet casings by war veterans, which bore the inscription: 'Remember the war, defend the Fatherland'. Then, the youth swore an oath: 'I take the homeland from the hands of the older generation. Yesterday, you fought at the front for freedom, independence, and a happy life. Today I continue this fight—wherever my country needs me.'2
The strength of feeling that the victory narrative evoked in people of all ages did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin. The post-Soviet years
had bred a generation of cynics, and it was common among the country's political technologists' to see ideology as merely a useful tool with which to manipulate popular opinion. People had watched the once- rigid ideological constraints of the Soviet Union crumble, and had then seen the lofty democratic slogans of the 1990s disintegrate in an orgy of cynical stealing. It led to a situation where nobody really believed in anything at all. It was a society where, as the author Peter Pomerantsev put it, nothing is true and everything is possible'. I once visited a political technologist who was working on an electoral campaign for a regional mayor. He welcomed me to an office covered from floor to ceiling with Orthodox religious icons; behind his desk was an extra-large image of a dusky Byzantine Christ. I mentioned to him that the devout backdrop seemed slightly at odds with his outfit, a black jumpsuit and a fluorescent orange bandana. 'Oh, I'm not at all religious,' he told me with a laugh. 'I just like to change my ideological surroundings every few weeks for inspiration.' Ideas were a means to an end, not something genuine. With the Second World War, though, it was different.
Over the years, Putin's chief strategist Vladislav Surkov concocted all manner of fake movements, political parties, and ideologies that were run from the Kremlin, with the aim of keeping Russians occupied in a giant political matrix'. Pro-business liberals, hardcore Russian nationalist movements, and pro-Putin youth groups were all conjured into existence by Surkov's magic wand, to give the impression of a vibrant political culture and to allow safety valves for protest. But most of these ventures soon reached their sell-by date and had to be replaced.
Amid this cynicism, the war victory was a rare case of something genuine. It was a unique event that evoked real emotions and uncontested agreement from the vast majority of the population. As well as the personal sacrifices in almost every Russian family, the victory narrative also deeply resonated among a population that was hungry for things to be proud of, for good news. Its rise to prominence came about symbiotically. 'You can't say that Putin forced the war cult on the people, but you also can't say that the people independently demanded it,' the far-right Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin opined to me. 'It was a natural process that flowed in both directions. It was organic.'