Remobilizing the Dead: Wartime and Postwar Soviet Burial Practices and the Construction of the Memory of the Great Patriotic War

Exploring the memory of the Great Patriotic War presents difficult methodological problems. Since the war’s end 75 years ago, several layers of official and popular myth have accrued around the narrative and meaning of Soviet victory. Successive campaigns to shape its memorialization have colored popular memory. Commemoration of the Soviet war dead has been overshadowed by the gigantic Soviet memorial complexes built at the height of the Brezhnev-era war cult. These powerful statements of Soviet pride and heroism dominate the memorial landscape. However, before their construction in the mid-1960s memorial culture was far humbler. Although official Soviet practice was informed by tsarist precedents, many aspects of this patriotic war cult were new. They bore the hallmarks of an “invented tradition.”¹ During the war and in its immediate aftermath, war graves were liminal spaces, which quickly fell into disrepair, prompting official consternation. The shortages of money, materials, and labor that dogged reconstruction prevented the orderly preservation of war graves.² Memory work was at best a secondary concern for communities experiencing the grinding poverty of late Stalinism.

This article explores concerns about the upkeep of Soviet graves and the appropriate treatment of the war dead during the war (1941–45) and in the first postwar decade (1945–55). It makes a critical intervention in discussions about the dynamics of war memory in its initial phase of development by examining the conditions in which serving soldiers were buried during the conflict as well as attempts to consolidate graves in its wake. It focuses on three pieces of legislation—passed in February 1946, October 1948, and September 1950—intended to preserve war memorials and soldiers’ graves. Drafts of these laws and investigations into their implementation reveal a damning picture. The widespread neglect of military cemeteries and individual graves, which these documents reveal, complicate scholarly understandings of Soviet memory of the war. Oĺga Berggoĺts’s phrase, “Nobody is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,” was already in circulation by 1945, but it did not accurately describe late Stalinist memorial practices.³ War’s divisive legacy remained too painful for many people to go digging around in. Only after Stalin’s death in March 1953 and a subsequent cultural thaw did campaigns to bring order to military cemeteries and collective graves gain traction. If memorializing the war dead was a sacred duty, it was one that many late Stalinist citizens were unable or unwilling to fulfill.

To understand how mass wartime death was initially remembered and memorialized, historians must move beyond a simplistic binary of remembering and forgetting. In these years, there was neither a surfeit of war memory, as some scholars have suggested of contemporary Russia, nor an absence of memory, as others have perceived in the immediate postwar period.⁴ The ways in which burial sites fell into dilapidation after 1945 were not the product of, to use Lisa Kirschenbaum’s phrase, an “amnesiac agenda.”⁵ Many scholars have discerned an impulse to repress memory of the war, obliterate its material traces, and forget inconvenient aspects of war experience. Stalin’s personal determination to erase public commemoration of the war in favor of self-glorifying narratives is routinely cited.⁶ The recategorization of Victory Day (9 May) from a public holiday to a normal workday in 1947 is often highlighted as the beginning of a more repressive phase of Stalinist memory politics.⁷ In contrast, this article argues that official policy sought to mobilize Soviet citizens, albeit unsuccessfully, to restore war graves as important sites of national memory, rather than repress wartime memories. The failure of ordinary citizens to embrace memory campaigns did not represent a desire to forget war’s horrors. Despite the party-state’s attempts to ensure that the war dead were appropriately commemorated, many sections of Soviet society preferred to remember the war on their own terms. It was not that ordinary people wanted to forget, but rather that they were reluctant to be forced to remember in ways structured by official campaigns. The remains of...