Natalia Bubnova: The Unknown War
Natalia Bubnova is deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
As every man, woman, girl and boy in Russia knows, Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 — exactly 70 years ago. The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Russia, divided history for Russians into “before the war” and “after the war.” Yet in the West, it remains largely an “Unknown War,” borrowing the title of a Soviet documentary filmed intended for Western audiences in the final perestroika years under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Influenced by the Cold War, in which ideology played a significant part, textbooks in the West left the Soviet Union’s role in the war as something of a blank page. It was hard to acknowledge that the totalitarian Soviet Union played the key role in crushing Nazism.
Yet this can hardly be contested. Eighty-five percent of German manpower and three-quarters of Germany’s tanks, planes and artillery were destroyed on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union won, but its losses exceeded those of Germany by several times. Though exact figures are still unknown, from 27 million to 37 million Soviet citizens perished in the war, including more than 20 million civilians. Of all men born in the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1923, only 3 percent survived. The devastating demographic consequences of the war — the large gap in the number of men and women in the country — remained for 50 years.
Those who survived felt proud just because they were men. They did not have to prove their manhood; they were revered and cherished just because of their gender. It was mostly women who remained to lift the country from ruins and raise their families. They also did not have to prove anything; they had long proven that were able to do everything on their own. It also should not be forgotten that 500,000 Soviet women served in combat during the war.
World War II firmly ingrained the perception that war is disaster. Unlike in the United States, war is not a gallant, dashing endeavor for Russians, nor is it a march to a trumpet or adventure. It is a mass catastrophe. Almost every family in the country lost someone at the front. For generations after the war, one of the most common toasts at family parties was, “Let there be no war.”..