Studying the Great Patriotic War in the Shadow of the Current Crisis Free

Several years ago, I set out to research the history of the “Vlasov Movement,” a common term used to describe the political and military activities pursued under captured Soviet general A. A. Vlasov on the German side during World War II. My decision to engage the topic stemmed from the shortcomings I saw in the existing literature. The major studies on the subject, published in English and German well over 30 years ago, depicted Vlasov as the head of what was primarily an anti-communist political movement, one that emerged almost accidentally in the context of war (Andreyev 1987; Hoffmann 1986). Recent scholarship, particularly works written in Russian, show quite a different picture (Martynov 2014). Vlasov’s “movement” was primarily a construct of Nazi propaganda for most of the war; therefore, the proper context for understanding the general and his “Russian Liberation Army” (ROA) is that of wartime collaboration, not anti-communist political ideas per se (though they were also part of the story). Given archival materials now available, the direct or indirect connections of the Vlasovites (as Vlasov’s followers are called) to war crimes and the Holocaust are a necessary part of any contemporary scholarly reappraisal.

Ongoing work on this topic has underscored the predicaments of undertaking scholarship on ideologically sensitive topics of the Great Patriotic War, especially in the current moment of rupture and reevaluation. Most of all, it has forced an uncomfortable realization. In memory studies literature, it is customary to draw a distinction between history and memory in an ideal type manner, with the first being something viewed from multiple perspectives and with an eye to complexity and the second representing a “single, committed perspective” on the past (Wertsch 2002, 18–20). In the context of Russian memory of the 20th century and the GPW in particular, such a distinction is porous and sometimes nonexistent. Such an intertwining of history and memory poses thorny problems for scholarly analysis of the war and its legacies.

The scholar of the war or its memory must confront the wider memory landscape in Russia, and particularly Putin-era efforts to use wartime history to entrench state patriotism. By its nature, wartime collaboration raises fundamental questions about what constitutes loyalty to one’s country and therefore the borders of the national community. If memories of war rest on seeing warriors as embodiments of the nation, then revisionist or even more balanced scholarship of fighters on the other side—collaborators or deserters—calls this association into question.² Inherently controversial, the study of collaboration is particularly divisive and toxic in contemporary Russia given the country’s violent upheavals during the 20th century, which are usually grouped under the rubric of “Stalinism.” Official historical narratives in Russia may not dismiss the crimes of the Stalin period, but they do subordinate them to the GPW in order to produce an edifying and militarized national history (Malinova 2017). Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army claimed to constitute a force of resistance to Stalinism, and his many postwar defenders accepted this narrative. Accordingly, unorthodox scholarly treatment of Russian collaboration—or, indeed, other aspects of the Soviet history of the war perceived as being unheroic—challenges the wider historical framework that is hegemonic in today’s Russia.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that the Russian establishment has sought to control scholarly treatment of the Vlasov question. In the ideological maelstrom of the 1990s and into the 2000s, alternative ideas about Vlasov and his men found expression in Russia, as some staunchly anti-communist scholars, writers, and churchmen presented the Soviet general and his men as victims of war or even anti-communist martyrs (Tromly 2023). These counter-narratives met with harsh responses from state authorities and state-connected organizations, especially after the patriotic turn that marked Putin’s third term in office starting in 2012. The state education authorities intervened to deny a doctorate degree to the pro-Vlasov St. Petersburg historian Kirill Aleksandrov in 2016 (Edele 2017a, 111–112), while the federal archival agency sought to forestall debate on Vlasov through the publication of a massive volume of archival documents on the subject carrying the categorical title “Vlasov: A History of Betrayal” (Artizov and Khristoforov 2015). The politicized field surrounding collaboration also encouraged denunciation and score-settling, such as when the patriotic filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov made the baseless accusation in 2016 that the El’tsin Center in Ekaterinburg had called for the full rehabilitation of Vlasovites (Regnum 2016).

In the wake of the full-scale war against Ukraine, the Putin government and its supporters have gone further by utilizing Vlasov as a tool with which to repress its opponents. For some years, the Russian press has linked Vlasov to Ukraine: just as the rehabilitation of collaborators in Ukraine led to post-Maidan disorder, the story goes, revisiting the reputation of Vlasov (the “Russian Bandera”) would destabilize Russia (Kolobrodov 2019). In the current hyper-patriotic context, officials and pro-Kremlin journalists have used comparisons to Vlasov to taint opponents of the Kremlin, including the former Duma deputy and head of the Ukraine-backed Legion of Free Russia Il’ia Ponomarev and also Evgenii Pregozhin (Versiia 2023; Lenta.ru 2023). The state has also used memory of wartime collaboration to take aim at civil society, with the authorities opening criminal cases against several members of the International Memorial Society on accusations of “rehabilitation of Nazism.” The basis for such charges is the fact that Memorial’s sprawling database of victims of Soviet repression was found to contain a relatively small number of “Vlasovites.”³ Presumably, the Memorial Society had little or nothing to do with the rehabilitation of most of the individuals in question. Since the early 1990s, local offices of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs have been granting official rehabilitation to small numbers of “Vlasovites”—meaning people categorized as such when they were consigned to the special settlements after the war—who subsequently were included in Memorial’s list (Trud-Enisei 2002). Nevertheless, the notion, popular in nationalist circles, that Memorial engaged in “mass rehabilitation of Vlasovites” provided the state with a useful pretext to depict memory activists and also Russian liberals as being a “fifth column” sympathetic to fascism—in effect, inserting them as villains into the virtually ubiquitous and all-consuming political imaginary of the Great Patriotic War (RIA-Novosti 2020a).

The hyper-politicization of the Great Patriotic War in Russia today poses a dilemma for scholars who wade into these murky waters. How can one pursue critical examination of Russian wartime collaboration without giving credence to the highly politicized collective memory of the war that is dominant in Russia? The problem is a pressing one for both historians of the war and specialists in memory, particularly in a time of “soul searching” among academic specialists. Historians must acknowledge basic truths about the Soviet Union and World War II, such as the staggering suffering of the Soviet people during the war and the USSR’s unique contribution to victory. But how does one articulate them without providing cover for the Kremlin’s manipulation of memory? Indeed, scholars engaging sensitive topics on World War II should be prepared to have their work either attacked or manipulated in the Russian information space (EADaily 2016). To take an egregious example related to the topic at hand, the official Russian media used the words of Israeli historian Aron Shneer—who alleged that three individuals on the Memorial list of repressed individuals were guilty of war crimes—in order to justify the shuttering of Memorial (Sologub 2023). Similarly, the current author discovered that his comments made on an online forum on the Vlasov topic were misquoted or taken out of context and broadcast on Russian media (RIA-Novosti 2020b).

It is possible for foreign scholars, then, to cross the permeable border between professional history and collective memory in today’s Russia almost accidentally. Unfortunately, some Russian scholarship on collaboration demonstrates a more voluntary straddling of this line.

To be sure, parts of the historical profession in Russia have proven resistant to the interference of political power in past years, and some excellent historical work has been published in Russia on the sensitive topics of collaboration and wartime society (cf. Budnitskii 2014; Makhalova 2019; Men’shagin and Polian 2019). Yet it remains the case that a good deal of historical scholarship in this area articulates positions bearing a strong resemblance to the Kremlin’s official politics of memory. In particular, some historians take the simplistic view that a clean divide existed between traitors and war criminals, on one side, and Soviet patriots and partisans—sometimes described using Soviet clichés as “the people’s avengers”—on the other (cf. Kovalev 2009). In support of these views, Russian literature on collaboration has often treated the topic of war criminality in a superficial manner, in part by drawing on Soviet source material uncritically (cf. Zhukov and Kovtun 2012; Martynov 2017).

One can posit that such perspectives are reflective—and perhaps even productive—of the dominant politics of memory in today’s Russia. To be clear, I see it as inevitable that collective memory shapes the ways scholars undertake their research, and this is particularly true when addressing such foundational events as World War II. But in this case we are dealing with a narrative on the past that has been shaped by political manipulation, first by late Soviet officials who entrenched the GPW myth in public discourse at least in part for instrumental ends and then by a post-Soviet elite that revived it and made it at a cornerstone of Russian political ideology (paradoxically, even after most people with a direct memory of the war have passed away). Going further, scholars must grapple with the fact that the legacy of the Great Patriotic War has been weaponized to wage a new war of aggression.

The challenges of navigating literature on Vlasov and collaboration, however, do not stop there. If much Russian scholarship on wartime collaboration is colored by Putin-era constructs of collective memory, works that are sympathetic to Vlasov also carry undesirable associations with collective memory projects. As elaborated above, some scholars treat the Vlasov episode as an anti-communist political movement (and a democratic one, as is sometimes argued). Such an interpretation has a fraught historical pedigree in the Cold War, when Russian émigrés—many of whom had been associated with Vlasov during the war—conveyed a biased view of collaboration that was taken up by anti-communist interlocutors in the Cold War West (Tromly 2019, 48–92). More troubling still, scholars taking the “anti-Soviet movement” approach tend to avoid discussion of Nazi genocide in the East and the involvement of Russian collaborators in it. Aleksandrov’s mammoth dissertation devotes roughly 4 of its 1,145 pages to the question of the relationship of the Vlasovites to Jews, while he and other scholars articulating similar views try to downplay evidence of anti-Semitic propaganda that was released in association with what the Germans called Aktion Wlassow (Aleksandrov 2015, 457–460; Andreyev 1987, 133–135; Batshev 2005, 230).⁴ At least implicitly, these works convey the perspective that the murder of Soviet Jews was a matter of no great consequence for ethnic Russian interests.⁵

The historian of Vlasov, then, is caught between two established narratives that are analytically limiting and of problematic ideological pedigree: one condemns collaboration in a way that feeds into official Russian politics of memory, while the other obfuscates collaboration entirely by recoding it as a democratic and anti-communist movement. How to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of literature on Vlasov and collaboration? A necessary step is to consider the Russian body of scholarship as a single field of discourse. Whether they condemn Vlasovites as a reprobate band of mercenaries or hail them as a movement of national resistance, Russian commentators on Vlasov have much in common. They operate within a single set of national values, judging Russian collaborationists according to a litmus test of devotion to Russian statehood. Moreover, both sides act as “mnemonic warriors” seeking to establish a single version of national history (Bernhard and Kubik 2014). To some extent, the clashing national narratives even complement each other, as their dialectical opposition blocks out alternative views that might transcend the inflexible and nationalist construct of the Great Patriotic War. In this area—and, surely, in analyzing other controversial aspects of the war—there is a need to seek out new approaches that eschew entrenched narratives.

History writing on Russia’s most sensitive wartime topics, then, reveals that the boundaries between history and collective memory in contemporary Russia can be perilously thin. To its credit, memory studies literature poses an effective antidote to highly politicized fields of history such as the one under discussion here. After all, the core methodology of memory studies—the contextualization of historical narratives in present realities—allows one to offer neutral evaluations of the most acrimonious historical debates rather than getting bogged down in them.

And yet studying memory of the Great Patriotic War in Russia poses its own challenges that are not totally unlike those facing scholars analyzing the events of wartime that have already been discussed. In particular, two issues are particularly pressing for scholars of Russian memory studies in the current moment, one more conceptual in nature and the other dealing with methodological issues.

Looming large over the study of memory of the Great Patriotic War is its very centrality to Russian identity today. For Russian scholars of memory, the dangers of destabilizing identity-shaping collective memories of the war are all too obvious, as suggested by the careful efforts of scholars in the field to avoid offending national sensibilities (Voronina 2018, 5–6). More broadly, one can suggest that all scholars of Russian war memory face a common dilemma of addressing collective memories that are the objects of both governmental manipulation and widespread societal affirmation. In other words, there is a need to acknowledge the importance of war memory for Russian identity while also exploring how these very recollections of the past have been shaped by political agendas.

This core problem shapes analytical approaches to studying collective memory in the Russian context. Traditionally, scholars have been divided on whether to adopt a “top-down,” state-centered view of Russian collective memory or a “bottom-up,” societally rooted one (Hoffmann 2021, 11–12; Tumarkin 1994). To some extent, this conundrum—and the recourse to unidirectional causal models and terminology adopted from social history—are endemic to memory studies, which has been criticized for a lack of rigor in analyzing the processes by which collective memories emerge and are shaped (Kansteiner 2002, 184). But the methodological issue is particularly problematic for studying memory of the Great Patriotic War in contemporary Russia, where the omnipresence and salience of war memory are overwhelming.

The question of causality is particularly troubling in the way it encourages scholars to take normative stances on the hyper-politicized Russian memory landscape that is their object of study. (Is the way a majority of Russian citizens talk about the Great Patriotic War true or false? Legitimate or illegitimate?) In this context, it is worthwhile to consider how embracing either the “societal” or “statist” viewpoint on Russian war memory can result in unsatisfactory conclusions. For instance, Seth Bernstein has argued that the Putin state has merely supported narratives on the war that “already exist and are popular” in society. Such an approach risks sidestepping the question of how exactly collective recollections of war gained and sustained their “popularity,” while perhaps even offering official war memory a kind of democratic legitimization (Bernstein 2016, 433).

At the other extreme, a highly informative recent book by Anton Weiss-Wendt frames memory in contemporary Russia as being almost exclusively a matter of “falsification” imposed from above (Weiss-Wendt 2021; Adler and Weiss-Wendt, 2021). Such a perspective produces a simplistic picture of Russian memory as a clash between regime-imposed, false historical narratives and oppositional, truthful ones. The limits of this picture become clear when one reads Weiss-Wendt’s fulsome defense of Aleksandrov’s pro-Vlasov dissertation (mentioned above), ignoring the complicated ideological positions involved (Weiss-Wendt 2021, 36–37). On another level, Weiss-Wendt’s Kremlin vs. opposition frame for understanding collective memory implies that a categorical division exists between countries holding “false” or “true” views of their pasts, ignoring the fact that other countries—and particularly post-colonial metropoles—have articulated collective memories marked by distortion, denial, and delusion in ways that perhaps bear resemblance to those that claim hegemony in Putin’s Russia (Geppert and Muller 2016).

If explaining Russian memory is one pressing issue in the current moment, the methodology of researching it is another. Generally speaking, despite the Putin establishment’s efforts to cement its vision of the past in society, scholars have employed myriad and creative approaches to studying collective memory in Russia. In doing so, they have unpacked a rich memory landscape surrounding the war in recent years that has been marked by debates and scandals involving scholars and politicians, mass grassroots initiatives (such as the Immortal Regiment Movement), and works of popular culture that have engaged traditionally controversial aspects of the war (for instance, the punishment battalions) (Kurilla 2021; Norris 2021). The current realities of war, political repression, and state control over cyberspace, however, raise the question of how scholars will have to adapt to meet new realities. The Vlasov case is instructive here, as the constant debates surrounding collaboration have dried up in the current situation (at least within Russia’s borders).

One can imagine several approaches to studying Russian memory in a situation in which the semi-permissible public sphere surrounding war memory in Russia is no more—and, at least for the foreseeable future, travel to the region remains virtually impossible for Western scholars. Studying official discourse and memorialization, which are never fully hegemonic, has long been a major component of memory studies and poses one response to the limiting of accepted discourse and paucity of sources. Scholars can also continue to study how official historical discourse influences state action, from “memory laws” and repression to the war in Ukraine itself (McGlynn 2020). Scholars will also need to take into account collective memory in the Russian diaspora, which so many of the regime’s critics (including professional historians) have joined in recent years. As after 1917 or after 1945, Russia’s history will be contested in a transnational framework, with the voices of Russians at home and abroad in discordant dialogue.

The current dilemmas of research underscore how important it is for scholars to explore the interpenetration of history and memory of Russia’s Great Patriotic War. Of course, scholars are well aware that history and collective memory are intertwined in any national context—and, indeed, often difficult to pry apart.⁶ However, there is a particularly urgent need to recognize the close interpenetration of these two categories in the context of contemporary Russia. As argued above, much of the literature on Vlasov has borne the imprint of constructs of collective memory, whether those of the Soviet state, Russian émigrés, or Cold War narratives in the West. In order to write the history of the “Vlasov Movement” or other controversial aspects of the war, then, one needs to deconstruct the collective memory tropes that continue to shape history-making in its various forms. The converse approach is also essential. Understanding contemporary constructs of collective memory regarding the war requires delving into the complicated historical processes by which they came to be. Indeed, some of the most compelling recent work on controversial aspects of war memory—from frontline defection to lend-lease—has approached history and memory as being mutually constitutive entities (Kucherenko 2021; Edele 2017b).

Such an approach might also, in however modest a fashion, address the current moment of controversy and upheaval in the field. Because collective memory and history are indivisible, views of the past are contingent and impermanent by their very nature.⁷ Even under the ideological conformity of the USSR, Russians and other Soviet subjects never stopped contesting memories of the Great Patriotic War and the Stalin period more generally (Brunstedt 2021; Jones 2013). And as noted above, the current discourse on the Great Patriotic War is not even “national” in a simple sense, as it has been shaped by the diaspora and other transnational influences. Surely, rethinking troubled aspects of World War II and the subsequent collective memories surrounding them does not form a sound response to Koestler’s dilemma about the obligations of intellectuals in times of crisis. But it can help to demystify the origins of the current situation and help us to appreciate the possibilities of the present.

Published online: April 5, 2024