‘We the People’, the Russian way

This little writer has been silent for a long time. Apologies. There was just no way I could break the daily discipline demanded by the ‘Russia book’. Over the last few months, constant focus was demanded by that biggest turning point of the twentieth century, World War Two, or the Great Patriotic War as the Russians rightly call it (‘Patriotic’ doesn’t begin to express in English the intensity of what lives in the Russian term).

That it was a big turning point for the west and for the colonized people of the world seems to have fallen into oblivion. A big turning point ushering in the nuclear arms race, and a newly bipolar world, and decolonization - these aspects were results of the turning point. What created the turning point was the unprecedented and massively manifested assertion of ‘We the People’ by the Soviet people, in defense of their land and of the state built by their own phenomenal effort.

The message was clearly received by the working classes and colonized populations round the world. It was no less clearly received by the bosses of the capitalist sphere to whom it was an absolute abomination. Hence two utterly different dynamics developed simultaneously. Liberation or decolonization momentum grew in what we now call the global south, along with the spread of ‘communism’. In parallel, the acquisition of the atom bomb proceeded apace in the prosperous USA, while the war was ongoing. The Anglo-American plan to nuke Soviet cities was devised at the very time when the Red Army was doing most of the fighting to liberate European countries one after another - to liberate them, and itself, from the murderous effects of the devious scheme pushed by the ‘elites’ of a certain insular nation using Germany as its proxy. The victorious but exhausted Soviet Union under threat of nuclear attack had no time to catch its breath. It had to devote yet another huge effort to fast-tracking an atom bomb of its own, while fast-tracking the rebuilding of its devastated western regions.

I have nearly finished writing the chapters devoted to the ‘Great Patriotic’ (in Russian they often drop the last word), which feels like a major milestone. So I am taking a couple of days out of the trenches, for a quick - but very densely packed - offering before I go silent again.

As already mentioned in an earlier post, I am using near-exclusively Russian sources, untranslated and thus unknown in the west apart from, presumably, a tiny number of academics whose scholarly work seldom reaches us unwashed masses, whose occasional objective assessments are frowned upon by their peers, and whose underlying tacit position remains that of western superiority.

The common understanding of WW II in the west nowadays seem limited to a few boilerplate notions - primarily the holocaust, secondarily the tens of millions of Soviet deaths, perhaps also the battle of Stalingrad. Many believe that Europe was liberated by the western Allies while the Soviets just did their complementary bit on the eastern front. I too was hardly more knowledgeable that that, even with a masters in Slavic studies. But, you might say, what does it matter anyway, eighty years after the event?

It matters that we have a short memory and that we did not learn the right history. For instance, as regards the concentration camps that, in their motivation, design, policies, and ultimate insanity, look suspiciously like a rehearsal of what is being attempted today. If I find spare time and energy (?) I might write up a piece about this. Today I want to stay with the life-affirming side.

Does a phenomenal, real-life, enormously human story of We the People matter across historical time and space? Does it matter if the human depth of the Soviet war story remains occulted?

I hope the book will be able to do justice to it all, including to what the Great Patriotic crystallized, within the arc of time stretching from a key trigger event in the seventeenth century all the way up to the present (leaving for a second volume the exploration of what is known and unknown about ‘Russia’ further back in time).

Within the Soviet story of the Great Patriotic let us zoom in on the ‘We the People’ dimension that is actually the heart of the story.

In a nutshell: the Soviet people experienced a war of annihilation. More specifically against the people themselves and against the state that they had built. A war the meaning of which they changed for themselves into a war of the people to invalidate the might of an alien anti-human agenda (make what you will of the ambiguity of the word ‘alien’).

Most military history logically talks in great detail about armies, hardware and weaponry, commanders and officers, strength of the rear, strategy and tactics, numbers of dead and captured soldiers, defeats, victories and resulting treatises. Soviet and post-Soviet books on the Great Patriotic do that very meticulously. My anthropological focus looks for something else, for instance when I find page after page in such books with the names, origins (usually modest), ranks, awards and accomplishments of heroes. Page after page of a long yet forever incomplete list, making for what I had assumed to be a compulsory ritual of Soviet historiography. Eventually I sensed the underlying subtlety of a deep emotion discreetly inhabiting the formality of these endless pages. Repeatedly, with every new WW II book, those pages re-enact a heart-felt memorialization. Thereby the sheer number of countless exceptional individuals, each one acknowledged with formulaic words unsuited to intensely singular valor, hits you with the power of a massive heroism, the indelible human signature of We the Soviet/Russian People on world history.

Heroes listed in the books are usually those of the Red Army. Much less well known, and less memorialized, are those of non-military categories. From one such category we get the heroic selfless commitment of countless ordinary civilians in the factories and mines of a superheated war economy. They operated in the rear, at safe distances from the front, but under extraordinarily demanding conditions. They went hungry and often worked round the clock to feed the army and its operations. Many of them received abundantly deserved medals and awards.

The other massive segment of We the People on which I want to dwell waged a literal and extreme war of the ordinary people amidst constant acute danger. They were those who lived in the Wehrmacht-occupied Soviet territories. Unlike the armies behind the front line, these people’s story most poignantly combines extreme victimhood and extreme ‘ordinary’ heroism.

The occupied territories, spanning a vast area from the Baltic sea to the Black sea, were the places where the first great extermination drive of WW II  occurred - along with the Jews, it targeted all Soviet prisoners of war, all Soviet communists - and any and all Soviet people of all ages. In these territories, concentration camps of many kinds operated in such a way as to enable the highest and fastest mortality. Starvation and sadistic ill-treatment of such ‘animals’ were official policy. The official plan (plan ‘Ost’) for these regions included the elimination of thirty million Soviet citizens as fast as possible. The concept of gas chambers was first tested in these regions - in the form of mobile vehicles to ‘serve’ in different locations.

Conversely, the occupied territories saw the greatest ever partisan movement of the people emerge spontaneously in the grassroots. Within the first year of the war, the partisans became ubiquitous across the vastness of those regions, with a bewildering array of initiatives and achievements, with all manner of courageous ingenuity. Many were caught, tortured and killed, yet underground numbers grew, and partisans grew increasingly adept at evading deadly surveillance and terror.

This ‘war of the people for the people’ was such that it elicited exceptional developments possible only in a country ‘of the people’. The partisans did not ask for this, but they were officially recognized as a sui generis part of the Red Army. Their significance - as constituting literally a ‘second front’ - was well perceived by Stalin for its strategic and tactical potential in the enemy’s rear, for its sheer charge of human heroism in the face of utter adversity, and for its acute needs for food, weapons, medications and more. He instituted for them a dedicated central HQ under a highly skilled leader (the head of the central committee of Bielorussia, where the partisan movement was the most intensely active) to manage their needs, and their assignments coordinated with army operations. And he placed them in direct communication with the Air Force to expedite air-lifting of weapons and ammo to them, as well as evacuation of the wounded, women and children - an incredible number of flights would be deployed over the whole period, to reach partisan units including under harsh weather conditions and of course great danger. Serving the partisans was a ‘favorite’ assignment for Air Force pilots.

Even more significantly, the partisans were placed directly under Stalin’s sole authority as commander-in-chief, bypassing the normal chain of command of the Red Army.

That is how crucial the ordinary people - and the most heavily oppressed - were to this war. Their ‘ordinary’ heroism amidst acute danger was at least as great as the feats of trained officers, soldiers, pilots. Stalin made a point of having medals and distinctions issued to them no less than to Red Army heroes.

That is one large human story of ‘We the People’. It takes on even deeper significance when seen against the backdrop of what the people had experienced through three centuries (from the turn of the seventeenth to the late nineteenth) of very literal enslavement of the Eastern Slavs by their own aristocracy; of the 1917 revolution where the people rejected the former regime; of a bloody ‘civil war’ actually fostered by foreign ‘intervention’; of the frantic drive to build up a modern Soviet economy from scratch, to serve the people and fend off further foreign aggression.

‘We the People’ is loudly proclaimed by Americans. For the (post-)Soviets, ‘We the People’ is etched in the land itself by the masses, their phenomenal suffering, and their heroism seeded by an untold force of yearning.

In the story of those people, a nested story is that of one man who was not even Russian, but who felt that force of yearning, was compelled by it to serve it. His is another large human story, buried by those who betrayed his legacy. Of his many pseudonyms, ‘Stalin’ remained. The son of a drunken Georgian cobbler, he grew up in poverty with a devoted mother who did menial jobs to pay for him to get a few years of education. His mind was bright. His memory was legendary. Throughout his life, he read at least 200 pages a day, about every topic under the sun.

In 1941, without  any officer training, he became commander-in-chief of the largest army of the largest country in a war the likes of which had never been seen. He was the central decision-making node juggling simultaneous operations across multiple fronts, across thousands of kilometers - and synchronized all that with incredibly tricky international diplomacy and overseeing a vast war economy to keep a huge army going. All intelligence reports flowed to him. A bewildering array of moving parts were held and constantly reassembled thanks to his extraordinary memory and systems thinking ability. He hated yes-men, listened far more than he talked, and made extensive consultations before taking a decision. He disliked the ‘personality cult’ that ambitious mediocrities developed around his figure. He took seriously ordinary people’s letters to him - they provided local information or candidly reported on people’s good ideas and initiatives. He made arrangements for food relief where supplies were failing, and for families of fallen soldiers to be provided for. He made mistakes, of which a few big ones, and consciously bore the moral burden of their consequences.

He who described himself as a ‘Russian of Georgian origin’ honored the people of Russia more than anyone before and after him. He crystallized for them a true leader’s ability to be the central figure strong enough to hold the collective spirit of a nation. His authority was earned, the hard way.

This small snapshot of who Stalin was in the Great Patriotic War (much more about him in the book) hardly aligns with what western people think they know about a reputedly bloodthirsty tyrant. By the way, Stalin did not have a policy of starving millions to holodomor death, nor of sending tens of millions to Gulag death. While the objective situation in the young USSR in the 1920s and 1930s demanded to be handled extremely firmly (which sometimes went too far), the horrors attributed to the ‘tyrant’, to ‘stalinism’, to ‘communism’, to ‘the Soviets’, were committed by others who transferred the blame. While real, the horrors were not as immense as we have been propagandized to believe - in particular because Stalin actually intervened to minimize the damage.

The very fact that torrents of mud have been persistently thrown for eighty years at a major figure, a major country, a great people, should be enough to make us suspicious, especially now that so many have awakened to the falsifications of history… All the hostility, slander, aggressiveness - cui bono? Another perspective is of pure logic - can any nation achieve by terror and enslavement great things of the magnitude of what the USSR accomplished? There are a lot of unquestioned assumptions that western minds still seem intent on holding about Russia. As we examine and tear down our own internalized programming, let us remember that the western variety of propaganda has anti-human dimensions absent in the Soviet variety.

A few post-Soviet authors are now bold enough to state that Stalin was a man of exceptional humanity. The publication of uncensored, undistorted accounts by people close to him, and by historians working from authentic archives, has only become possible very recently. 

Ordinary people are putting up commemorative plaques or busts of Stalin here and there around the country. Stalin’s ratings in the Russian population keep rising in spite of persistently negativity pushed by the media and influencers.

School books of the Stalin era (the basis for what was deemed the best education system in the world) are being reprinted, and are in demand.

Stalin’s legacy was, still is, the legacy of the people who took up his call in the 1920s to build their great nation out of the ruins of a collapsed state, and again out of the ruins of World War Two that destroyed so much of what they had so recently built.

Most of us think the root of ‘why the west hates Russia’ resides in the polar opposition of capitalism versus communism. Actually, the western desire to dismember, enslave, expropriate, colonize Russia goes back not one or two centuries, but ten (historically documented) or more. And while its overt expressions reveal a persistent lust to appropriate a vast resource-rich territory, Russianness is also ‘something else’ which the puppet masters intensely dislike. Probably a good reason for all of We People to respect it, even if we don’t know what it is.