The Great War in Russian Memory

2 Spirituality, the Supernatural, and the Memory of World War I

2 Q Spirituality,theSupernatural,and theMemoryofWorldWarI In the classic The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell identifies the desire to create “myth, ritual, and romance” about World War I as one of the key elements of wartime memory. Among his most noteworthy examples of myth is the “Golden Virgin” atop the ruined basilica at Albert in France. The statue of the Virgin and Child leaned precariously from the top of the basilica without falling. Rumors abounded that the war would end when the statue fell, or that whoever knocked it down would lose the war. This was but one example of “dozens of miracle-­ rumors of crucifixes and Madonnas left standing amid chaos. In a few cases the image dripped blood or spoke words of prophecy concerning the duration of the war.”1 One of the ways in which World War I participants dealt with the inhumanities of war and the experience of death was through this turn to the supernatural.2 “The bizarre and unnatural world” of the battlefield turned out to be “the perfect environment for the spread of tales of the supernatural,”3 particularly in the Catholic and Orthodox countries that had a strong native tradition of popular spiritualism. Historians’ analyses of bereavement in postwar Europe also demonstrate that Europeans attempted to come to terms with war grief, in part, by drawing on religious notions of sacrifice, death, and resurrection.4 The creation of tombs of the unknown soldier in several European capitals in the early 1920s demonstrates that the symbol of the fallen soldier played a crucial social and political role in coming to terms with the tragedy of mass death in Western European nations. Europeans engaged in civic rites and traditional religious 32 Q The Great War in Russian Memory practices to comprehend the fates of their loved ones, and they also explored means such as séances to communicate with the dead. In the context of mass death and mass mourning, the imaginative boundaries between the natural and the supernatural and between the living and the dead remained porous. There has been little study of Russian spirituality during wartime (1914– 1921) or of the spiritual aspects of coping with the consequences of war in the postwar period. My work places World War I spirituality in a comparative framework that is cognizant of revolutionary and Soviet myths as well as European ones. Though the notion of analyzing spirituality and World War I memory is a conscious borrowing from the European historiography, there is no doubt that this analy­ sis is pertinent to the Russian context. World War I produced a torrent of spiritual discourse in the Russian Empire. Religious institutions and rhetoric played a key role in mobilizing imperial Russia for war;5 at the same time, popular notions circulated in both the front and the rear that the war was God’s punishment for the people’s sins.6 Soldiers employed religious and spiritual idioms to discuss their actions, misfortunes, and relationships to their dead comrades both during the war and afterward. Lenin himself acknowledged the “growth of religious feeling” that the war produced. He noted, “Again the churches are crowded, the reactionaries joyfully declare. ‘Wherever there is suffering there is religion,’ says the arch-­ reactionary Barrès. He is right, too.”7 This wartime turn to the mystical did not suddenly evaporate with the founding of an atheist state in October 1917. The study of World War I memory illuminates Russian and Soviet attitudes toward death and the afterlife and provides insight into how the spiritual realm was imagined between 1914 and 1945.8 Although World War I did not figure positively in the mythology of the Soviet state, the Soviet government nonetheless had to come to terms with the wartime loss of millions of its people despite the fact that the Russian Revolution had dramatically overturned the spiritual order along with the political order. While tsarist militarism was supported by the idea that fighting for the tsar was a sacred duty, this notion was challenged by Soviet atheism and a postrevolutionary scientific discourse that emphatically rejected the existence of God and, therefore, religious justifications for war. Soviet authors argued that the clergy of all countries were tools of “the bourgeoisie and landowners” who cunningly used the name of God to trick the soldiers into going “submissively into battle.”9 As an “official” atheistic worldview replaced an “official” Orthodox Christian one, Soviet propagandists sought to create an alternative philosophical [3.145.108...