The appearance of a paradox: a regime that builds its legitimacy, ideology, and propaganda on historical memory has blurred, "noised," and blocked the mechanisms of transmitting this very memory. Benefiting from the actual halt of individual memory transmission within the family: the war is little remembered and recalled. Family war or Gulag stories are forgotten, and they almost do not affect emotional or cognitive representations of what and why is happening today in the country and the world.
Cap for an Infant
And in place of informational noise and historical emptiness come myths and rituals. History is now embodied by an infant, who is given to the mother in the maternity hospital immediately in a cap and cloak-tent, defining such a past for his future.
Everything goes into the furnace of mythology — the state feels at ease. It turns out that at the end of 2024, the Russian authorities, for convenience in neglecting copyright, made an amendment to the law "On the perpetuation of the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945." According to this amendment, the government can create a publicly available list of works, whether poetic or musical, that can be performed and used publicly without the author's or copyright holder's consent (and, of course, without remuneration). To put at the service of its historical mythology or to justify the thesis "SVO is a continuation of the Great Patriotic War", for example, any works of Bulat Okudzhava, a refined liberal and opponent of any autocratic power. To use the great song from the outstanding film "Belorussian Station," which forces people with a minimal threshold of emotionality and a sense of historical continuity to swallow involuntary tears. This emotionality, this sense of historical correctness is precisely what is lacking in what Putin started and implemented in February 2022.
Bulat Okudzhava. Photo: "Culture RF" website
"Do you not approve of his choice?"
This playful liberty in dealing with delicate history, leading to its mythologization and mutilation, also has its courtly side. Successfully distracting from truly essential problems and questions related to a particular historical figure. For example, who only in the spirit of glossy, almost erotic drama used the image of Konstantin Simonov. The 80th anniversary of Victory in the style of Kremlin propagandists cannot but give off a spirit of some directly organic vulgarity. And the complex figure of the poet, court writer, functionary, fighting his demons, and in the last years of his life becoming a fighter against censorship for the truth about that very war, in the Kremlin's execution is reduced to the level of a character in a social chronicle.
It was in this light that he appeared in one of Margarita Simonyan's programs, long aimed at our Iskanders at "decision-making centers." The broadcast seemed to be dedicated to the classic poem "Wait for Me," but in the end, it turned out to be a vulgar story about Valentina Serova, her son Anatoly, about the "triangle" Serova-Simonov-Rokossovsky — after all, they held a candle! Even quite loyal characters were outraged and wrote an open letter, which, however, did not hang long on the site of the loyal (and thereby also vulgarized) "Literary Gazette" — probably the editorial board removed the epistle out of fear of an influential lady, one of the supporting structures of the gigantic, like a Soviet computer, machine of Putin's propaganda.
Back in March, the writer's son, Alexey Kirillovich Simonov, responded to Simonyan's broadcast with a completely brilliant, including in a literary-journalistic sense, letter. The now unattainable signature irony of a sixties intellectual in addressing Simonyan, a character in a social chronicle (since all propagandists are our secular celebrities, for whom the SVO has turned into a podium):
"...Whom do you sympathize with, madam? The handsome colonel, laureate of Stalin Prizes, author of widely performed plays, who wrote one of the best poems in Russian poetry, which, in fact, served as your pass into this humanly forbidden topic?
The fiancé, and then the husband of the actress — one of the most beautiful women in Russia?
Do you not approve of his choice?..."
And to the point:
"...And, in fact, who are you to bring your private judgments and assessments to the wide television field? Where does such fearlessness of your claims to the heroine come from? Where does such categoricalness in the judgment of Simonov's choice of the woman to whom he dedicated cherished lines come from?
Do you hold a high position in the information empire of the new era? Heard. But you know the material presented very superficially. Let me help you clarify something..."
Alexey Simonov — Soviet and Russian journalist, film director, human rights activist. Photo: P. Netupsky
Alexey Kirillovich's letter can be found on the internet, where the facts are presented with elements of unique family memory. But in the context of the style and content of the official celebration of the 80th anniversary of Victory, it makes sense to refer to some truly important facts from the biography of Simonov Sr. — his attempts in those years, when he, according to his son, became already a historian of the war, and not just its poet and writer, and began to fight for the very truth, which is now not just swept under the carpet, but made almost criminally punishable.
"Much will be forgiven to Simonov"
By the way, if we are to talk about the relationships between men and women during the war years, it is worth recalling the outstanding work of Konstantin Simonov and Alexey German "Twenty Days Without War" (1976), complemented by no less outstanding work of the acting tandem Yuri Nikulin–Lyudmila Gurchenko, reaching stunning dramatic heights. And here it was not without censorship, which Simonov was habitually fighting.
Habitually, because he, with his colossal literary and nomenclature weight, from the mid-1960s waged an exhausting war with the fierce, hysterical, and boorish distortion and silence of the truth about the war. The degree of pain of any truth, especially regarding the "suddenness" of Hitler's attack, Stalin's unpreparedness to repel the blitzkrieg, panic, and chaos of the first months of the great confrontation, is evidenced by the story unfolding at the same time of the author of the book "1941. June 22" Alexander Nekrich. The book was published in 1965, just when Brezhnev began to forge a solid foundation for his personal legitimacy on military mythology, in the "Science" publishing house. For the truth about the beginning of the war, the historian was slandered and worked over in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, as a result, the book was withdrawn from libraries, Nekrich himself was expelled from the party at a meeting of the Party Control Committee, and even pushed into emigration.
This was generally a time of tightening ideological restrictions, one of the signs of which was increased pressure on Alexander Tvardovsky's "New World": just one example — for 1967, Anatoly Rybakov's novel "Children of the Arbat" was announced, but this work saw the light... 20 years later.
Konstantin Simonov. Photo: "Culture RF" website
And it was on this very well-shot field by ideologists that Simonov found himself with his diaries and comments on them, describing impressions of the first months of the Great Patriotic War. "A Hundred Days of War" were not just typeset in "New World" and did not just pass censorship, but real battles took place around, first of all, the comments, but the printed issue was stopped. And when Tvardovsky's faithful deputy Alexey Kondratovich asked the head of Glavlit Romanov what to do with the 10 thousand rubles spent on printing, he received the answer: "Can we talk about money when it comes to ideology."
Kondratovich believed that "the diaries are better than any novel (including his (Simonov's. — A. K.) novels... Already for this document alone, much will be forgiven to Simonov".
The story of Simonov's battle with censorship — civil and military — is a whole thriller, in which all the first, second, and third persons of the state responsible for ideology and culture were involved, including Brezhnev himself, to whom Simonov wrote two letters. Here's a message from 1966:
"...I sat three times in censorship and made corrections. Including in connection with the review requested by the censorship from the Military-Memoir Commission of the PUR(Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and Navy. — A. K.). The workers of this commission wrote their anonymous review in places in an offensive tone for me. But I made corrections according to their comments where there was a grain of truth..."
And yet the printed issue of "New World" disappeared. Simonov continued:
"...Apart from the principled disagreement with censorship, I cannot reconcile with the fact that some people are trying for the first time in my life to make me a "forbidden" writer. And I do not understand who and for what purpose needs this?..."
Tvardovsky was going to talk with Brezhnev or Suslov about "A Hundred Days" and the situation around the magazine in general. Simonov evaded participation — "wants to have apples in the garden in a non-apple year," the editor-in-chief noted in his diary with displeasure.
A quite official Soviet writer, one of the most important in the country, could acquire the status of a dissident when the manuscript leaked abroad and was almost published in Italy. In 1967, Simonov wrote to the head of the culture department of the Central Committee Shaura:
"...the excessively grown and unprecedentedly active censorship of recent times, continuing to expand the list of so-called prohibited works, increasingly objectively plays into the hands of foreign anti-Soviets..."
An important argument: in those times, unlike now, the reaction of the West was taken seriously, Tvardovsky also wanted to draw the attention of the state's leaders to this ("what would happen if we, seeing how the West praises Shostakovich, continued to scold him in the spirit of articles about "confusion in music""). At the same time, Simonov wrote to the Central Committee Secretary Demichev:
"...I completely removed the place in my comments where the arrests of 1937-1938 were mentioned as one of the main reasons for our army's failures at the beginning of the war..."
Konstantin Mikhailovich began to give up: the diaries later, in the 1970s, began to be published without comments, first in "Friendship of Peoples," then in two volumes.
Nomenclature Dissident
Here is what is symptomatic — almost six decades ago, censorship was not satisfied with exactly what is now considered an encroachment on the military-historical canon. Here are fragments from the note of the head of Glavlit Okhotnikov. In September 1966, he writes to the Central Committee:
"...the facts are presented as a catastrophic failure of the front, which was the result of the absolute unpreparedness of our army for war... In the comments, the pre-war foreign policy of our state and the military doctrine of I. Stalin is depicted as erroneous..."
But here's something even more terrible:
"...K. Simonov revises the significance and true nature of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of 1939, considering that the conclusion of this treaty allegedly set our country back, forced us to abandon the socialist principles of our foreign policy, placed the USSR as a state on par with fascist Germany..."
Is it necessary to remind that in accordance with today's Russian repressive legislation, Simonov would go under the article for such statements...
Well, and another greatest sin:
"...In the comments, the problem of the suddenness of the fascist Germany's attack on the USSR is also revised. Speaking about abuses of power and Stalin's responsibility for the war and its victims, K. Simonov at the same time raises the question of the responsibility "of society when it, in the course of its history, entrusts too extensive power into the hands of one person"..."
Right before our eyes, the writer-functionary, a former Stalinist, a participant in some unsightly campaigns of harassment, but at the same time a skillful master of compromise, who helped many of the most important works find their way to print, turns into a malicious dissident.
A month later, the head of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army, General Epishev, famous for his unyielding orthodoxy, in a letter to the Central Committee adds some assessments, because of which the manuscript hung for years:
"...If such malevolence and bitterness were spoken about our society by some bourgeois troubadour, then it would be understandable... The publication of the book... could cause serious damage to the authority of our country..."
It is not by chance that Ivan Shevtsov, the vigilant author of the sensational anti-liberal novel "Tlya" in his letters — both private and "where necessary" — put the concept of "Simonists" next to the term "Zionists"...
A few years later, Simonov will write in frustration: "If only oaks went to coffins, not to foreheads."
Historical Insensitivity
The writer painfully — painfully for himself, because it was a dialogue with his own conscience — dealt with two plots: the truth about the war (he seriously began to think, speak, and write about this just about starting from the 20th anniversary of Victory) and understanding the phenomenon of Stalin. He dealt with this when accumulating materials for the biography of Georgy Zhukov (Zhukov's memoirs themselves — a varnished product of censorship, where very little of the author remained), when recording conversations with generals of the Great Patriotic War, many of whom spoke very frankly about what was happening (what is one conversation with General Mikhail Lukin worth, with his story about humiliating ordeals and the struggle for an honest name after returning from German captivity). He dealt with it when, in the year of his death, he dictated a book about the perception of Stalin "Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation." Including deconstructing his fear, his admiration, and his bewilderment.
All this found its place in his prose and poetry. For example, in a poem, perhaps the best one, although not so widely quoted, "As if looking through inverted binoculars..." It was written by a very young man, just in the tragic 1941, when doubt about Stalin crept into the mind and soul. Alexey Kirillovich Simonov once told me that his father was frightened of himself, and until 1955, almost until the XX Congress, he published this poem with a few more stanzas, camouflaging the lyrical hero's experiences as love (they are given in the notes in the "blue" collection "Library of the Poet" 1982).
And without camouflage, without a love helmet and protective ammunition, they look like an accusation:
"...We, having passed through blood and suffering,
Will again approach the past with a glance,
But at this distant meeting
We will not be humiliated to former blindness.
Too many friends will not be reached
By the generation that has seen death,
And not everything will increase back
In our vision tested by grief..."
The poet turned into a historian because he kept diaries and recorded the direct speech of participants in events, because he was a journalist. He had enough intelligence and tact, but also courage, especially considering what happened in May 1968, to say in a speech "On Soviet Patriotism" at the Fifth Writers' Congress in 1971:
"...there should be no place for one feeling — historical insensitivity to other peoples, to their history... Yes, my Motherland is the most precious thing in the world for me. For me, it is — better than all, more beautiful than all! But it is worth throwing out two words from these phrases: "for me," and they will turn from patriotic into nationalistic..."
These are the words of a historian.
This is what is worth thinking about in the year of the 80th anniversary of Victory, and not about how much and how Valentina Serova drank — with the same success, one can deconstruct the biographies of many, for example, Olga Berggolts. And what? Her biography is also a textbook on how painful the reflection on that very historical truth about the war, occupying such a significant place in Russian consciousness (as well as in the collective "unconscious"), is.
It's easier to shout "Hooray!", to go now to Warsaw instead of Berlin, to beat oneself in the chest, as well as on "decision-making centers," to figure out who drank how much and with whom they slept, than to seriously engage in one's own national history, conscience, and responsibility. All it takes is to think. And to gain "cruel vision," which the 26-year-old war correspondent was not afraid to write about in 1941 in a poem about "inverted binoculars."
* Andrey Kolesnikov is considered a "foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.