Ivo Mijnssen - Russias Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to the Soviet Heroarchy

Contents

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Indiana University Press

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2021 by Ivo Mijnssen

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Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-05620-7 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-253-05622-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-05621-4 (ebook)

First Printing 2021

For Jessy

CONTENTS

THIS BOOKS GENESIS BEGAN IN May 2009, not far from Saint Petersburg. That the Hero City of Leningrads past continues to shape the identity of the Northern Capital is obvious to all visitors who pass the neoclassicist columns on the highway from the airport and the war monument on the outskirts of townnot to speak of the imperial palaces.

But on that warm spring day, the traces of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians still call World War II, presented themselves in a different form: on a battlefield called Nevskiy Pyatachok, just about fifty miles from downtown. German and Soviet forces fought over this tiny but strategically significant bridgehead for a year and a half. Tens of thousands were killed.

When I approached it in 2009, I first noticed the pompous Soviet memorial next to the street. When we got out of the car, we walked past mass graves full of names, followed by newer graves with room for more names. Then, and without warning, we found ourselves in the middle of the battlefield, superficially grown over with grass. Right underneath, we saw trenches and remnants of field kitchens, but also boots, gas masks, and so many bones. The river Neva, immediately behind, still runs rusty brown because of all the metal in it.

I realized how close to the surface the war remains in contemporary Russiaboth literally and figuratively. The political level is more obvious, the towering significance of war memory a key to understanding Putins rule. Other aspects remain harder to discover, hidden in shame, unknown to the younger generation, shrouded in the secrecy of closed archives.

For a Swiss citizen whose country has been spared from the twentieth centurys wars, the experience on Nevskiy Pyatachok was a physical reminder of their horror. And for someone like me, a historian of Eastern Europe, who had mostly approached the past through books, it felt like an impulseto find out more about the Great Patriotic Wars legacy, to go closer and to places that are perhaps lesser known. I chose the Hero Cities and the provincial centers of Tula and Novorossiysk.

In both cities, I not only found people who taught me a lot but also true allies, to whom I am very thankful. If I had not met Dima and Masha in a rather odd international youth camp at Lake Seliger in 2010, I do not think I would have ever even traveled to Tula. But they and their families hosted me and made sure I also experienced some of the more agreeable aspects of suburban Russian life.

Memorial, a crucial organization for anybody who is interested in Russias difficult history provided me with amazing supportespecially activist Pavel Ponarin and Memorials honorary chair, Sergey Shcheglov. The journalist Irina Paramonova showed herself to be one of the best experts on the citys politics, and Natalya Spiridenko of the Levada Center Tula helped me identify additional respondents.

Novorossiysks cultural life would doubtlessly be much poorer without the untiring local historian Sergey Novikov, who also read my chapters on the city and made sure I corrected some errors. Tamara Yurina wrote the most meticulously researched book on the battle, and she always answered all my detailed questions. Lyudmila Rostovtseva and Denis Konyukhov provided invaluable assistance in finding interviewees.

I am deeply grateful to the archivists and librarians in Tula, Novorossiysk, and Krasnodar. They do amazing work, with very little financial assistance, in rundown buildings, and for low wages. Even if this meant that I sometimes had to pay to use electricity and that regulations tended to be complicated and bureaucratic, they helped me where they could.

In the Moscow archives, I spent an unforgettable time in Galina Mikhailovna Tokarevas kingdom, the Komsomol archivesoften with cookies and tea.