The Great War in Russian Memory

4 Violence, Morality, and the Conscience of the Warrior

4 Q Violence,Morality,andthe ConscienceoftheWarrior The French historians Stéphane Audoin-­Rouzeau and Annette Becker have suggested that the historical profession may be complicit in mythologizing and sanitizing war because, when it comes to describing wartime violence, “‘memory serves to forget.’” The testimony of combatants was largely silent about transgressing the “fundamental taboo . . . not to kill.” Few Western Europeans were as candid as the French veteran who wrote in 1936 about taking pleasure in killing, in jumping on the enemy and enjoying the enemy’s terror “like those unfortunate drug addicts who know the magnitude of the risk but can’t keep themselves from taking more poison”; and historians have often failed to seek out evidence about the willing perpetration of violence.1 By focusing on Soviet depictions of wartime violence from the point of view of both perpetrators and victims, this chapter sheds light both on the question of brutalization and on the extent and nature of the “mythologizing” of violence that took place in the Soviet Union in the interwar period. The issue of brutalization is particularly important, because the Soviet regime was considerably more violent toward its own citizens in “peacetime” than any other European government. The normalization of war was also an important part of the Soviet Union’s preparation of a militarized citizenry to fight what its leaders saw as the inevitable coming war against capitalism. How, then, did Russian combatants, literary and cultural figures, and propagandists represent the violence of World War I and the soldiers who perpetrated it in the interwar period? To what extent did Soviet treatments of World War I normalize and 128 Q The Great War in Russian Memory glorify the violence of war, and to what extent did they reveal an unsanitized view of the violence? What kinds of violence remained central to Soviet notions of citizenship and manliness?2 Historians of World War I have sought to understand the impact of wartime violence on postwar European society. Some have argued that the effect of the extensive exposure of millions of European men to violence was a brutalization of politics in interwar Europe and a growing indifference toward mass death. George Mosse argued that the “myth of the war experience” was “central to the process of brutalization because it had transformed the memory of war and made it acceptable.”3 Other analysts of Germany and Italy have likewise linked war experience and memory to a heightened willingness to commit violence. They cite German Freikorps literature and the Italian Fascist writer Gabriele d’Annunzio to show the appeal of racial and sexual violence in mobilizing men to fight for their nation. In 1935, for example, d’Annunzio invited fellow Italians to join the Ethiopian campaign: “Do you want to fight? To kill? See rivers of blood? Great heaps of gold? Herds of female prisoners? Slaves?”4 Such appeals both aestheticized and normalized violence. In contrast to these scholars, Jay Winter has rejected the notion of World War I as a rupture and has emphasized soldiers’ ability (especially in England and France) to overcome the horrors that they faced through traditional modes of mourning and commemoration and to resume relatively normal lives. He argues that “whatever was true in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and (after June 1941) the Soviet Union, the rest of European society greeted war as the abomi­ nation that it was.”5 Winter’s line between the “nonviolent” and the “violent” also marks the line between interwar democracy and dictatorship, suggesting a peculiarly violent Southern and Eastern European path that separated the Germans, Russians, and Italians from the rest of Europe because of their­ inability to overcome the traumas of war. In his World War I–era writings, Vladimir Lenin himself speculated about the effects of battle on the Russian soldier and hoped that “horrors of war would not only intimidate and repress [the semi-­ proletarians and petty bourgeoisie] but enlighten, teach, arouse, organize, steel and prepare [them] for the war against the bourgeoisie of their ‘own’ country and ‘foreign’ countries .”6 The violence of World War I could thus productively lead to the violence of revolution. Modern analysts have argued in a similar vein that “the revolutions of 1917 had woven together an ethos of violence emerging out of the Violence, Morality, and the Conscience of the Warrior Q 129 First World War with a belief in the revolution’s promise to remake the...