This year’s annual Sid Easley lecture at Murray State University taking place Thursday evening will feature a historian who specializes in Russian and Soviet history and is working on a book about Vladimir Putin and the Russian memory of the world wars, especially World War II.
Karen Petrone is a history professor at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of a few books focusing on Russian and Soviet history including “Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin” and “The Great War in Russian Memory.”
Although World War II – or “the Great Patriotic War,” as Russians call it – ended 80 years ago this year, Petrone said it is central to present-day Russian identity and understanding who they are as a culture and a nation. Part of the reason, Petrone said, is because 27 million Soviet citizens were killed during the war – more than any other country involved in the international conflict.
“The Soviet Union first – and then Russia – have a very different relationship to the Great Patriotic War [compared to the U.S.], and it has become more and more almost sacred as time has gone on,” Petrone said.
“In the Soviet territories, there was hunger, there was starvation and intentional blockade of civilians. Much of the Holocaust takes place in Soviet territories as well. And there were not only brutal battles between the Soviets and Germans and their allies, but also incredible mistreatment of the civilian population under occupation… that is why the war has an indelible memory within the Soviet Union. The United States has never [been] occupied, and the experience of that occupation and the battle for Soviet land is very different than anything we've ever experienced.”
Petrone said in the Russian view, of the conclusion of World War II is that without the Soviets fighting back against Nazi Germany, the Axis powers would have been victorious over the Allies had the Soviets not fought back against Nazi Germany – especially in the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
“They see [the Soviet effort] as their sacrifice on behalf of everybody else, including the Allies,” said Petrone. “And while they don't deny that other Allies participated, they were very angry with the United States and the Western Allies in general for not opening up a second front faster. There were second fronts in Africa – but in Europe, they did not come until 1944 and that was very frustrating for the Soviets.”
Petrone said that following the Great Patriotic War, the Soviets used statues and the memory of the war in political ways. Early after the war, memorials were mostly placed in the Soviet satellites to remind eastern Europeans that it was Soviet blood spilled to liberate them from fascism.
“Everything is being framed by the Soviet Union as a liberation. But what's really interesting is that domestically, the memory is very different at that moment. Memory changes over time, and what we have to do is be very thoughtful about when the memory is formed, to see how it progresses over time,” Petrone said.
“During the Stalin era, he was not eager to remember domestically the internal sacrifices of the Soviet people, nor was he willing to concede that it took more than him to win the war. Then in the 1960s when it's permissible, all of these massive monuments like the one at Stalingrad pop up in after Stalin has died, and so it's really important to think about the trajectory over time of what is permitted and when that memory really begins to flourish as a as an important part of Soviet culture.”
Now, eight decades later, with the Soviet Union dissolved and Russia now a shadow of its empire, Petrone said Vladimir Putin invokes the memory of the Great Patriotic War as a fight against fascism in Ukraine – both in 2014 when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, occupying territory in Crimea, Luthansk, and Donetsk and in 2022 with the full-scale invasion of the eastern European country. . Petrone said that he appears to be deliberately misinterpreting and changing history in an attempt to justify Russia’s actions. She said Russian culture thinks about war in cyclical terms and as just one big war against fascism.
“When the people of Russia gather together, they can defeat the enemy, and when they don't, then when they're fragmented, then the enemy can win. But here what you see is an immediate connection between Ukrainians and fascists, and also NATO and fascists,” said Petrone. “Putin is today imagining what's going on in Ukraine as a sort of redo of World War II, where the Russians stand on the right side and they're fighting the fascists. The Russians as the Soviet heroes and Ukrainians and NATO as the fascists.”
Petrone said she hopes people come away from her lecture Thursday night understanding that memory is complicated and that individuals' own perceptions of what happened in World War II, or any event, change over time and evolve.
“The most important thing is to understand that your memory is complicated. The thing that really happened at the time of the war, and then there's how people perceive and remember it afterwards, and that perception and memory is always changing, and it's very complicated,” she said. “I'd like people to come away with is thinking about not just what happened in Soviet Russia and Putin's Russia in terms of the transformations of war memory, but also thinking about how we look at the past here in the United States, and how our perceptions of what happened in the past have also changed over time and how different political actors made political decisions that changed the memory or challenged earlier memories over time.”
The annual lecture series is named in honor of Sid Easley, a Murray State alumnus, former Murray State University Board of Regents chair, and long-time supporter of the Murray State Department of History.
Petrone is presenting “Vladimir Putin and the Russian Memory of the Second World War” on Thursday, Sept. 18 at 7 p.m. in Wrather Hall on the main campus of Murray State University. It is free and open to the public.
