Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

09/05/2005

Stalin for president

By Sonja Margolina

The celebrations marking the end of the "Great Patriotic War" are underway in Moscow. But behind the ceremony, Russia is marked by deep hankerings for the past.

Russia, alongside the USA, the glorious victor of the Second World War, stands sixty years on as the great loser. After the collapse of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, the phantasm of the Russian superpower has not only evaporated into thin air, but hopes for a better future in a civil society are still in vain. The only thing to cling onto is the old dream and its triumphant figure – Stalin.

In 1945, the Soviet Union achieved victory over Nazi Germany at the horrendous cost of 27 million lives. The country annexed half of Europe and rose to superpower status. Forty years later, no longer able to compete with the capitalistic enemy in the arms race, the post-Stalinist dysfunctional party dictatorship collapsed. The break up of the Soviet Empire and the end of socialism, followed by economic chaos, social collapse and ethnic conflict was perceived in Russia as a defeat to the West: they had won the war but lost the peace.

The war veterans in particular felt betrayed when they were forced to recognise that even their former defeated opponents enjoyed more respect from society and a incomparatively higher standard of living than those who had sacrificed their lives to liberate the world from the "fascist plague". At the end of the eighties it suddenly became frowned upon to wear war medals in public, and the media reported on public abuse of war veterans in incidents such as the following: A highly decorated old man tried to jump the queue at a bar where beer was in short supply. Some drunken teenagers pushed him to the ground and while they urinated on him one of them explained why they hated him and all his war medals. "If you hadn't won the war you idiot, we'd all be drinking Bavarian beer now."

Such extreme desecration of the Soviet shrine was perhaps a rare event, but defamation of the historic victory and the war heroes was an everyday occurrence during Perestroika. One only had to look at the vast amounts of war medals sold for a pittance by impoverished and embittered veterans at flea markets. But initially the shock of defeat was at least partly compensated by the newly awakened great expectations for the future. The slaughtering of yesteryear retreated behind the promised share in immediate prosperity.

But the bright capitalistic future was in no hurry, and by the mid-nineties nostalgic yearnings for the Soviet past – and the Brezhnev era in particular - started to gain the upper hand. And the symbolic significance of "the Great Patriotic War" grew accordingly, particularly as the other objects of collective pride such as the October Revolution, industrialisation, military superpower had lost their sheen. And so the myth of war and victor, which had first started to take shape in the seventies, eventually found its way back to its original role as the symbol of national identity. Today "victory towers over us", as Muscovite sociologist Lev Gudkov so vividly described it in his exceptional essay in the magazine Osteuropa (4/5, 2005), "like the stone columns left standing in the desert once the remaining rock has been weathered away."

In 1996, when asked which event in Russian history they were most proud of, 44 percent of the people questioned said the Second World War victory; in 2003 the figure was 87 percent. As the war gained in importance, so too did Stalin's authority as the commander-in-chief and leader. Between 1998 and 2003 the number of people giving Stalin a positive evaluation tripled from 19 to 53 percent. And accordingly, memories of Stalinist repression shrunk from 29 percent at the end of the nineties to less than 1 percent. According to the survey carried out by the Levada Center, which produced these results, almost a third of the population declared they would vote for Stalin as president.

On the eve of the victory celebrations, attempts to rehabilitate Stalin are springing up all over the place. The deputies of the City Duma in the central Russian city of Orel appealed to President Putin and the State Duma "to reinstall Stalin's name in the streets and squares in our cities, to rebuild the memorials to the commander-in-chief and to bolt the door on the falsification of history." They also called for the re-installation of "historic justice" in the Siberian city of Mirni and in the republic of Sakha, where once Gulag prisoners froze to death in the perpetual frost of the diamond mines. In line with the wishes of the veteran associations, a bust of Stalin is be erected there bearing the inscription "from the grateful descendants". For years, the City Duma of Volgograd has been pushing to change its name back to Stalingrad. For now it will have to make do with a ten tonne, four metre high bronze statue by Moscow kitsch-sculptor Surab Zereteli, depicting the leaders of the Anti-Hitler Coalition. In a letter to the Isvestiya newspaper protesting against the re-Stalinisation of society, a group of writers and artists, among them Andrei Bitov and Fasil Iskander, wrote that the figures of Churchill and Roosevelt were merely a blundering attempt "to conceal the shameless glorification of Stalin, and that at a time in which the memory of his crimes lives on in millions of families."

Literary academic Marietta Chudakova also sees evidence of a rehabilitation of Stalin and his abettors in the discontinuation of the inquiries by the Russian military prosecution authorities into the mass executions of Polish officers in Katyn "due tolack of evidence". The edict which closed the case is being kept secret and the Russians are refusing to hand over the majority of files to the Poles, despite the fact that important steps towards unlocking information and co-operating with Poland were taken back in Yeltsin's day. According to Chudakova, the secret services and the military believe that the truth about Katyn and a confession to the annexation of the Baltic states would diminish the greatness of victory. Liberal intellectuals believe that in terms of political history, Russian society has rolled back to pre Kruschevian de-Stalinification days. But the current "siloviki" regime, with its close ties to the secret service and the military, needs the myth of untainted victory as a sort of substitute belief to legitimise the incompetent and corrupt arbitrary rule. And it can still build on collective longings for the Breshnev era and the frustrated dreams of superpower shared by significant swathes of the population which seems to live in two contradictory realities.

Russia is a residual superpower fighting a losing war in the Caucasus and plagued by Islamic terrorism. The Russian army is demoralised, unfit for battle and homicidal. And the country is in the throes of a demographic and health crisis unparalleled in the world. With an average male life expectancy of 59, only a minority of war veterans will live to see the 60th anniversary of the "holy" victory. The so-called "monetarisation" of welfare benefits which is being fought by pensioner and veteran associations has further worsened their situation. Furthermore, the victory over fascism has not been able to keep the population immune to its own fascist tendencies, particularly among the younger generation who have grown up in the 90s in an atmosphere of chaos, violence and hopelessness. Over half the population agree that "Russia belongs to the Russians". Every day witnesses new racist attacks, and the skinheads often kill their victims. The "Weimar Syndrome", that results when revenge is sought for dishonour suffered, and the right of the Kremlin to play the saviour of civilisation are hard to unite.

The symbolic date of the end of the war has not taken root in the deeply divided Russian society, split over the war and its consequences. The memorial celebrations seem to have little in common with the expectations and emotions of the population. The Yeshednevnaya Gazeta criticises that at the people's festival, which is apparently intended to unite the population, the people are unwelcome. The war veterans have been allocated the role of extras in a spectacle, whose protagonist, surrounded by a handful of foreign dignitaries and state guests, is Vladimir Putin. The newspaper's reaction to the announcement that Moscow would be sealed off during the celebrations, as it was during the notorious Olympics in 1980, was to suggest to the inhabitants that they would be better off leaving town. And indeed Moscow's security forces seem to have no better way of protecting the people against the attacks that have already been announced by Chechnyan terrorists. But that is the point: the myth of the untainted "holy" victory and the dirty war in Caucasus are difficult to hold apart.

The Stalinism-lite so widespread in Russia, which appears so daunting to outside observers, is not aimed at the world outside. It is above all a yardstick for the moral and economic decline in which Russian society finds itself after fifteen years of "transformation". If progress fails, people carry on living in an imaginary past. Russia's historic clock seems to be winding down. In this atmosphere the approaching memorial day arouses feelings of unease, more than anything else.

*

The article was originally published in German in the Neue Zürchner Zeitung on 30 April, 2005

Sonja Margolina is an author and journalist living in Berlin. "Das Ende der Lügen" (the end of lies, 1992) is published by Siedler Verlag. "Wodka" (vodka, 2004), is published by Wolf Jobst Siedler jr. Verlag.


Translation: lp.

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

Poison envy

Tuesday 22 November, 2011

Read the first English excerpt from historian Goetz Aly's new book "Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Equality, Envy and Racial Hatred 1800 - 1933". In response to this question that has been hanging in the air since the end of WWII, Goetz Aly points to the lack of education and fear of progress in so many German Christians at the turn of the century - and to the contrasting readiness of the Jewish population to embrace the new opportunities and education as the ticket to social mobility. Shamed by their shortcomings, the Germans soon turned to racial theory to conceal their envy and resentment.
read more

Pas teutonique du tout!

Tuesday 11 July, 2011

TeaserPicAn exhibition in Naumburg celebrates the greatest sculptor and master builder of Medieval Germany, famed for the creation of Uta, the ideal German woman. But patriots be warned! By Sven Behrisch

read more

Rocking remembrance

Thursday 15 June, 2011

Berlin is rich in authentic places where history can be experienced in a tangible and personal manner. We don't need simulation, we should just listen more closely to the genius loci. The planned Memorial to Freedom and Unity is a case in point. By Karl Schlögel
read more

Mass murderers of conviction

Monday 18 April, 2011

TeaserPicThe trial of SS officer Adolf Eichmann began fifty years ago. Research continues to show that many of the perpetrators were not just bureaucrats and cretins but educated men who acted out of intellectual conviction - Eichmann, contrary to what Hannah Arendt said, included. An interview with Holocaust historian Ulrich Herbert by Stefan Reinecke and Christian Semler. (Photo: Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem)
read more

A visit to the house of dreams

Monday 21 March, 2011

TeaserPicSir Sassoon Eskell was a Jewish Iraqi and the country's first minister of finance. His magnificent house, once home to the largest private library in Iraq, sits between Baghdad's Al Rashid Street and the River Tigris. After a close brush with death, author Najem Wali revisited the building, which young Iraqi filmmakers and the army both dream of making their own.
read more

A very different sort of banker

Monday 4 October, 2010

An exhibition in the Amsterdam Verzetsmuseum celebrates Wally van Hall, the banker who used his financial connections to fund the Dutch Resistance movement during WWII. By Dragan Klaic
read more

The Russians must reflect on the evildoings

Thursday 29 April, 2010

The historically strained relations between Russia and Poland seem to be improving at long last, thanks to the considerable show of Russian sympathy at the funeral of the Polish president Lech Kaczynski. It remains to be seen whether these positive developments will continue beyond a short-lived expression of mourning. An interview with Arseni Roginski, the president of the Russian human rights organisation "Memorial", by Ulrich M. Schmid.
read more

Musicology and mass execution

Wednesday 6 January, 2010

Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht was one of Germany's most influential musicologists. His magnum opus "Music in the Occident" sits on the shelves of many a music lover. Ten years after his death, historian Boris von Haken has now revealed that Eggebrecht was involved in mass shootings of Jews during the Second World War.
read more

The element of madness

Monday 7 December, 2009

The history of German terrorism was also the story of the amour fou between Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader. But this affair caused the breakup of Ensslin's relationship with Bernward Vesper, who was also the father of her child. Their letters, dating from 1968/69, while Ensslin was in Stammheim, offer profound insights into the political pathology of the time. By Gerd Koenen.
read more

The starting gun for a student movement

Monday 8 June, 2009

The death of student Benno Ohnesorg saw the birth of the West German '68 movement. Now evidence has emerged that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West German police officer who shot him during a demonstration against the Shah, was a Stasi spy. Wolfgang Kraushaar, an acclaimed chronicler of '68, asks whether the killing was an unofficial East German act of state.
read more

The black marketeers of Bahnhof Zoo

Tuesday 24 March 2009

TeaserPicThe idea that 1989 came out of thin air speaks volumes about historical insensitivities and limited horizons. The fall of the Berlin Wall was preceded by years of erosion and attrition. Historian Karl Schlögel looks at the molecular movements on the margins of history that are much more powerful than any deeds of "great men".
read more

Beyond the war hero

Tuesday 17 February, 2009

TeaserPicBernard-Henri Levy looks at some of the problems posed by the film "Valkyrie" which are too complex and delicate to be resolved within Hollywood logic. First on the list: the Scientology question.
read more

Unmasking the July 20 plot

Friday 13 February, 2009

To deny Stauffenberg and the other conspirators any moral and cultural relevance is blinkered and consitutes intellectual bigotry. Even if their ideas seem politically anachronistic today, these men showed the sort of noblesse and strength of character of which today’s politicians and other bureaucratic elites can only dream. Karl Heinz Bohrer responds to the thesis of British historian Richard J. Evans.
read more

Why did Stauffenberg plant the bomb?

Tuesday 10 February, 2009

TeaserPicWas it because Hitler was losing the war? Was it to put an end to the mass murder of the Jews. Or was it to save Germany's honour? Whatever his motives, he was no role model for future generations, says British historian Richard Evans. (Photo: Deutsches Historisches Museum)
read more

Evil and the upright citizen

Monday 4 February, 2008

A large-scale and long-overdue project has begun. German historians are documenting the persecution and extermination of the Jews in 16 volumes of primary source texts where metal merchants and budgie lovers all have their say - with no recourse to hindsight. By Eckhard Fuhr
read more