In 2016, two years after Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, I used to be invited to the Kyiv Suvorov Military School to current the Ukrainian version of my novel set in Afghanistan. The auditorium was largely full of fresh-faced cadets and their instructors, a few of whom had lately returned from preventing within the east. After an hour’s dialogue, the cadets filed again to their barracks. Then, out of the darkish recesses of the auditorium, three males of their mid-50s approached me.
They every had a thick neck, cropped hair, and a thigh-length black leather-based jacket. One spoke quickly with my interpreter. When he took one thing from his pocket and reached for me, I flinched. But he was already holding my lapel as he pushed a pin by it. My interpreter defined that these three males had been Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet struggle in Afghanistan. Because I used to be a veteran of the American Afghan War, they needed to current me with a lapel pin from the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan as a gesture of friendship. All three of them wore the identical pin.
[Elliot Ackerman: The rivalry that defines America]
After the occasion, my interpreter informed me that veterans of the Soviet struggle existed in a cultural limbo in Ukraine, which was why these males so appreciated any public dialogue about Afghanistan. They had served within the Soviet army, which—adjoining because it was to the modern-day Russian army—made their service suspect to many youthful Ukrainians. However, once they’d fought within the Soviet army, they’d performed in order Ukrainians. The Soviet army legacy—in Afghanistan however much more importantly within the Second World War—wasn’t merely a Russian one however a Ukrainian one.
Last week marked the eightieth anniversary of the Battle for Stalingrad, the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, which turned the tide of the Second World War. To mark the event, President Vladimir Putin traveled to Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd. In a televised speech, he mentioned, “The legacy of generations, values and traditions—this is all what makes Russia different, what makes us strong and confident in ourselves, in our righteousness and in our victory.” What he uncared for to say was that the victory at Stalingrad over the Nazis and fascism wasn’t merely a Russian victory; it was a Ukrainian one too.
After I met these Ukrainian veterans of the Soviet struggle in Afghanistan, my interpreter really useful I learn the work of Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Soviet Jew born outdoors Kyiv. Grossman was at Stalingrad and have become maybe the best chronicler of the Soviet expertise within the Second World War. Although he was Ukrainian, he wrote in Russian and died in Moscow.
Grossman authored a number of novels concerning the Second World War, however the interaction amongst Ukrainian, Russian, and Soviet identities and narratives is most prominently on show in his 1942 e book, The People Immortal. Told by a sequence of interconnected vignettes, the e book chronicles the Red Army’s retreat by Ukraine within the months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941:
Dust hangs over Ukraine and Belorussia; it swirls over the Soviet earth. At night time, the darkish August sky reddens from the sinister glow of burning villages … Old males, girls and youngsters in villages and hamlets wave the retreating troopers on their method, providing them curd cheese pies, cucumbers and glasses of milk. The previous girls weep and weep, looking out amid hundreds of grim, dusty, exhausted faces for the face of a son. And they maintain out the little white bundles with their items of meals, “Take this, love. You are all my own sons. Every one of you has a place in my heart.”
In the pages that comply with, calamity piles on calamity because the assembled solid—troopers, political commissars, and civilians alike—take up the brunt of Hitler’s invasion. The place names learn as in the event that they had been taken from right now’s headlines: Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chernihiv.
The drumbeat of army disasters in The People Immortal would make for intolerably darkish studying if not for our information that this string of Soviet army defeats is solely a prelude to the victory at Stalingrad and the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. From the primary web page, we all know the ending, and it’s a triumphant one. The e book derives its momentum as a result of the reader is located inside a well-understood narrative. However, when studying The People Immortal by the lens of Russia’s present struggle towards Ukraine, there isn’t any clear ending to position the reader comfortable.
Putin has repeatedly justified his invasion of Ukraine underneath the pretense of de-Nazification. Grossman’s descriptions of the Nazi army machine, nonetheless, are disturbingly paying homage to right now’s Russian-invasion power. Sergey Bogariov, one of many Soviet commissars within the novel, describes the Nazi invaders as follows: “Every realm of German creative thought has been rendered sterile. The Fascists are powerless to create; they cannot write books or compose music or poetry. They are stagnant—they are a swamp. They have brought only one new element to world history and politics: shameless brigandry and organized atrocity!”
Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities from Mariupol to Kherson actually seems like “shameless brigandry and organized atrocity.” Grossman’s recounting of the relentless Nazi bombing of civilians reads like a dispatch from Bakhmut, which the Ukrainians are defending a lot as their Soviet forebearers as soon as defended Stalingrad. Tragically, the societal sterility that Grossman associates with fascism is relevant to Russia right now. Putin’s struggle has made Russia a pariah, relegating its traditionally vibrant tradition to the margins.
Many Ukrainians—each earlier than and after February 24, 2022—have been suspicious of any narrative that locations blame for Russia’s aggression solely on Putin and doesn’t lengthen that blame to the Russian individuals who have enabled him. Russia has a historical past of paternalistic attitudes towards Ukraine, attitudes that persist and have contributed to the present struggle. The two nations stay intently certain, although, regardless of their distinct identities. It’s not possible for both Russia or Ukraine to assert sole possession of the heroic narrative of Soviet resistance within the Second World War. Grossman’s work proves solely how inextricably linked each nationwide identities are to the Soviet narrative legacy, one which Russia has weaponized towards Ukraine whilst Ukrainians are displaying the mettle of their Soviet predecessors in battles fought on the identical floor the place Nazis and Soviets clashed 80 years in the past.
Grossman revealed The People Immortal in serialized kind in Red Star, the official newspaper of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. It was acquired with basic acclaim each at dwelling and overseas as the primary e book on the Soviet army expertise towards the Germans. Grossman, who ultimately turned the Soviet Union’s preeminent struggle correspondent, steers away from criticism of the Stalinist regime. In the fingers of a lesser author, Grossman’s tales of heroism, of the solidarity between common troopers and political commissars, and his romanticized descriptions of Soviet life underneath Stalin, could be sentimental, besides Grossman is self-aware to a fault. He understands that, just like the soldiers and tankers he describes, he’s a soldier, too, solely tales are his weapon.
As a storyteller, he has a lot in widespread with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has additionally demonstrated a preternatural understanding of the significance of narrative in struggle. Zelensky, like Grossman, has taken a facet and is a participant within the occasions, however as storytellers, neither hides their biases and each will be subversive. The world will lengthy keep in mind Zelensky’s publicized response to the Biden administration’s supply of an evacuation: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
[Read: Liberation without victory]
Grossman is commonly subversive, maybe no extra so than in his e book’s title, The People Immortal, which, as its chapters unfold, begins to ask: Who are the immortal folks?
It could be the Soviets, besides the Soviets now not exist as a folks. A passage within the e book’s last pages appears to reply the query for right now’s readers:
The wind whistled over the fields. Two males appeared from the place the fires had been beginning to die out … Blood was seeping by their garments. They had been taking gradual, heavy steps, every supporting the opposite. Where it flowed down onto the bottom, the blood of the 2 males combined collectively. They had been brothers; nothing in life or loss of life might now separate them.