The Whisperers

beings’ because they had to help and trust one another; a time when their lives had greater purpose and meaning because, it seemed to them, their individual contribution to the war campaign had made a difference to the destiny of the nation. These veterans recalled the war as a period of great collective achievement, when people like themselves made enormous sacrifices for victory. They looked back at 1945 as an almost sacred time-space in Soviet history and memory. In the words of the war veteran and writer Kondratiev:

For our generation the war was the most important event in our lives, the most important. That is what we think today. So we are not prepared to belittle in any way the great achievement of our people in those terrifying, difficult and unforgettable years. The memory of all our fallen soldiers is too sacred, our patriotic feelings are too pure and deep for that.31

The commemoration of the Great Patriotic War served as a reminder of the success of the Soviet system. In the eyes of its loyal citizens, including Simonov, the victory of 1945 justified the Soviet regime and everything it had accomplished after 1917. But the popular memory of the war – in which it was recalled as a people’s war – also represented a potential challenge to the Soviet dictatorship. The war had been a period of ‘spontaneous de- Stalinization’, when, more than at any other time, the Soviet people had been forced to take reponsibility for their own actions and organize themselves for the war effort, often in the absence of effective leadership or control by the Party. As the post-war regime feared, the collective memory of this freedom and initiative could become dangerous if it gave rise to ideas of political reform.

For many years the memory of the war was downplayed in the public culture of the Soviet regime. Until 1965, Victory Day was not even an official Soviet holiday, and it was left to veterans’ groups to organize their own celebrations and parades. Publications on the war were tightly censored, and war novels politically controlled.* Wartime newspapers were withdrawn from public libraries. After 1956, there was a partial relaxation of these controls on the memory of the war. Memoirs by war veterans appeared in print. Writers who had fought in the war as young men published stories and novels drawing on their own experience to portray the reality of the soldiers’ war – the ‘truth of the trenches’ (okopnaia pravda) as it was often termed – which functioned as a moral counter-balance to the propaganda version of the war.† But these publications were pushing at the boundaries of what was permitted by the Khrushchev thaw: the Party was prepared to blame Stalin for the military setbacks but not to challenge the official narrative of the war as a triumph of Communist discipline and leadership. In 1962, Grossman was told by Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo chief of ideology, that his war novel Life and Fate, which had been seized by the KGB after its submission to the journal Znamia, could not be published for at least 200 years (it was first published in Russia in 1988).

The memory of the war was even more tightly controlled by the Brezhnevite regime, which used the commemoration of the Soviet victory to create a powerful display of public loyalty and political legitimacy for itself. In 1965, Victory Day became an official Soviet holiday, celebrated with enormous pomp by the entire Party leadership and featuring a military parade on Red Square. A new Museum of the Armed Forces was opened for the anniversary; its vast display of memorabilia elevated the remembrance of the war to the level of a cult. Two years later, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected near the Kremlin Wall, quickly becoming a sacred site for the Soviet state and a place of ritual homage for Soviet brides and grooms. In Volgograd (previously Stalingrad) a monumental site of mourning was completed in 1967. At its centre stood a vast sword-bearing Mother Russia, the tallest statue in the world at 52 metres high. It was at this time that the endlessly repeated statistic of ‘ 20 million dead’ entered Soviet propaganda as a messianic symbol of the Soviet Union’s unique sacrifice for the liberation of the world.

Mother Russia, part of the Mamaev Kurgan War Memorial complex in Volgograd

Simonov was too much of a soldier, he had seen too much of the war’s realities, to have any part in the manipulation of its public memory. He had thought for many years about the meaning of the war and about the reasons for the Soviet victory. His thinking on the war became a sort of moral contemplation about Stalin and the Soviet system as a whole: whether it was justified to spend so many lives to win the war; and whether it was force that had spurred the people on to victory or something deeper inside them, the spiritual force of patriotism or stoical endurance, unconnected to any politics. During the last decade of his life, Simonov collected soldiers’ memoirs and testimonies. By his death, in 1979, he had amassed a large archive of memoirs, letters and several thousand hours of taped interviews.* Many of these testimonies were recorded in A Soldier Went (1975), a ‘film-poem in seven chapters’, each one reflecting on a different aspect of the soldiers’ experience, with interviews and readings from the works of Simonov. In a way that was extraordinary for its time, the film brought to life the horrors of the war and the suffering of the soldiers, who were portrayed as ordinary human beings behaving with courage and resilience in the most difficult circumstances. One of the film’s longest chapters dwells on the soldiers’ injuries, featuring an infantryman who was wounded seven times yet still marched on to Berlin. The film was a homage to the Red Army rank and file – to the courage and endurance of millions of unknown and neglected heroes who brought about the Soviet victory – by a man whose writings on the war had usually taken the perspective of the officer. According to Marina Babak, the film’s director (and Simonov’s lover at that time), there was a strong personal motive in this act of homage, because ‘Simonov felt that he had never shown sufficient courage’ in his life. ‘Simonov insisted that he should not be seen in the film at all,’ recalls Babak. ‘He said that he was unworthy to appear alongside a soldier.’32

The film ran into trouble with the military establishment, which took exception to its gritty realism and populist conception of the war (the censors insisted on the addition of a sequence paying homage to Brezhnev as a war leader). The Brezhnev leadership regarded all attempts to commemorate the suffering of the people in the war as a challenge to the government. From the mid 1960s, many of Simonov’s writings on the war were either banned from publication or published in a censored form. His war diaries from 1941, prepared for publication as a book (A Hundred Days of War) in 1967, were turned down by the Soviet censors, despite Simonov’s personal appeal to the Party leadership (the book was finally published in 1999). The same fate befell his essays on Zhukov and his war diaries of 1941–5 (Various Days of War), which were published with major cuts in 1977.33 His documentary film If Your House Is Dear to You appeared in 1966 only after a long battle with the censors, who cut it heavily, while the film version of his novel Soldiers Are Not Born (1964), the second volume of The Living and the Dead, was so badly butchered by the Soviet censors that Simonov withdrew the title of the novel and even his own name from the final version of the film, which was screened as Retribution in 1967.

These battles with censorship strengthened Simonov’s determination to search for the truth about the war and about the Stalinist regime. His notebooks from this time are filled with reminiscences about his encounters with Stalin, with self-interrogations about what he knew and did not know (or did not want to know) about Stalin’s crimes when he had been part of the dictator’s court. The more he learned of Stalin’s lies and murders, the more he tried to distance himself from his past.

‘There was a time when, although I had some doubts, I loved Stalin,’ Simonov wrote in 1966. ‘But today, knowing all the things that I know about him, I do not and cannot love him any more. If I had known then what I know now, I would not have loved him then.’34

During the last years of his life Simonov became increasingly remorseful about his role in the Stalinist regime. As if to redeem his sins, he tried hard to promote the work of writers and artists who had been censored or repressed in Stalin’s time. Encouraged by his wife, Simonov became a private collector and champion of the Soviet avant-garde in art (he organized a major retrospective of the long-forgotten artist Vladimir Tatlin). He played a leading role in the campaign for the publication of works by Osip Mandelshtam, Kornei Chukovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov and for the Russian translation of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik. He gave money to writers who had suffered in the past – including Borshchagovsky, Vera Panova and Nadezhda Mandelshtam – and petitioned on behalf of many others for housing, jobs and readmission to the Writers’ Union.35