Victory Days: The Great Patriotic War in the Stalinist Commemorative Landscape

• In Event: The Great Patriotic War and the Problem of Representation in the USSR: 1941-1960s

Abstract

This paper examines victory in the Great Patriotic War as an object of commemoration in the late-Stalinist period. It attempts to square an all-Union commemorative mold that cast victory as a uniquely Soviet feat—and that compelled Russians to shed the trappings of their pre-Soviet selves—with the simultaneous public veneration of key events and personalities from the prerevolutionary Russian past. The paper argues that this seeming paradox is best understood as a reflection of the highly-compartmentalized nature of patriotic discourse more generally. A holdover from the war, ideologists never fully resolved the "national Bolshevik" tension between primordial/russocentric and revolutionary/pan-Soviet tendencies; rather they produced contradictory narratives that did not so much coalesce as provide a distinct set of tools that could be applied to specific ends. As will be discussed, Cold War hostilities, among other factors, necessitated that the war myth advocate pan-Soviet bonds, even at the expense of competing, russocentric variants of the war theme.

Author

• Jonathan Brunstedt, Utah State U