What happened to memory of Stalingrad after the fall of the USSR?

How are ultra-nationalist Russian groups reproducing memory of Stalingrad?

Why is science fiction a perfect vehicle for the expression of right-wing macho Russian dreams in literature?

Read on to find out the answers!

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Stalingrad was one of the Second World War’s most important and bloodiest battles. Soviets and Germans engaged in street battles throughout fall 1942, before an improbable Soviet counter-attack in late November comprehensively turned the tables, encircled the German 6th Army and, eventually, forced its surrender in early February 1943. The Soviet press instantly painted Stalingrad as a ‘the greatest victory of the war’ (“Inostrannaia Pechat’”), that, in spite of its enormous human and material cost, had laid the groundwork for the defeat of Hitler's Eastern campaign and therefore the entire Third Reich.

Soviet authors quickly produced dozens of works about Stalingrad: Konstantin Simonov's Days and Nights (1944), Viktor Nekrasov's In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946) and Vasilii Grossman’s sketches from the battle and For a Just Cause (1952) were printed and reprinted in vast quantities. In spite of the suppression of Grossman’s Life and Fate, unpublished in the USSR until 1988, Soviet writers constantly returned to the theme of Stalingrad. Nina Tumarkin describes the Soviet obsession with the politicized memory of the War as a ‘Cult of the Great Patriotic War’. This Cult legitimized the power of the USSR’s incumbent rulers by lauding the sacrifices of the older generation, which burdened younger generations with an unpayable ‘debt’ (Tumarkin 133). An inflated myth of the sacrifices of heroic Stalingrad was at this Cult’s center.

During the socioeconomically turbulent 1990s, the Eltsin government did little to support the myth or memory of Stalingrad. While Stalingrad has now almost faded from living memory, its myth – as part of the Cult of War – has been revived under the increasingly militarized Putin regime (Wood). In October 2013, Fedor Bondarchuk's Stalingrad was released at the Russian box office. Its mostly state-provided $30m budget made it one of the nation's biggest ever productions. Cinema-goers flocked to Stalingrad. Despite mixed reviews, the film took over $66m, including the Russian Federation's most profitable opening weekend in history. 

However, cultural production today is not limited to government-funded major productions. In this essay, I examine the importance of the Stalingrad myth to the users of In the Whirlwind of Time (V vikhre vremen; VVV), a Russian-language online forum founded in the mid-2000s. Dedicated to the discussion and creation of alt-history and science fiction books, VVV has become a production line for pulp fiction works spanning the gamut from medieval fantasy to science fiction works. Although it has just 2000 registered users, 400-500 visit every day, and the most successful users have published dozens of books with large Moscow-based publishers (see “Bibliografiia uchastnikov foruma”). A great number of these relate to Second World War themes, and especially Stalingrad.

Budding and experienced authors turn to forum users for help on every subject. They post drafts of pages or chapters and receive feedback on every step of the writing process. These discussions are usually littered with confrontation and vicious insults. The most important issues, especially those relating to Second World War themes, are those of ‘truthfulness’ and ‘morality’: forum users are quick to gang up on those who veer from a Russian nationalist, pro-Soviet viewpoint. While the arguments over what is true are bitter, the prevailing viewpoint is that Soviet fiction is ‘true’: the forum users’ standards for memory are not based on rigorous, historical enquiry familiar to Western readers, but on a literary corpus passed down from their fathers’ generation. Collaborative work is extremely popular on the forum: ‘Fedor Vikhrev’, a pseudonym for a large group of users who co-author the works, has published several works. The ‘truth’ here is a shared, subjective concept.

VVV is dominated by extreme Russian patriotic and nationalist voices. In principle, members can be banned for ‘fomenting ethnic and religious hatred’ (“Pravila”), yet this does not appear to extend to Westerners, especially Americans, who are regularly and openly abused on the forum and in print editions, where they effectively stand in as a modern replacement for Nazi villains, plotting dastardly moral crimes against Russia and the Russians. While one might expect an online forum to broaden geographical borders and expand the scope for literary creation, here it actually gives a relatively small group of users a chance to share and voice their strong opinions. Without the internet as a means to make contact, it is unlikely that a group like this would exist: while nationalist military-patriotic culture in the 90s was mostly restricted to fermenting in extreme conservative literary journals, especially Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary), its adherents now find like-minded men (there are almost no female users) with ease. 

Sharing their sense of the 1990s as a catastrophic, Western-led socio-cultural vacuum that lacked the communist moral compass, these men desperately try to recreate and rework the past in order to recover the lost Soviet era. Building on Soviet literary heritage, they create an ever-more mythical concept of Stalingrad as nationalist ideology, rather than historical reality. Where Stalingrad saved the Soviet Union in 1943, now these writers use its symbolic value to suggest that it can save 21st-century Russia from Western immorality.

In this essay, I do not mean ‘myth’ as a lie to be uncovered. I use it in Northrop Frye’s sense: myth informs our understanding of poetry’s interconnectedness. Communicated by repetition and the resultant (usually subconscious) expectation of the reader, pure myth indicates absolute 'metaphorical identification' with the apocalyptic—the realization of the impossible, which is usually contained by nature's limiting force. This is to say that myth is the opposite of naturalism: the storyteller has total control over events thanks to his

To establish plausibility, the purely mythological in most fiction appears in 'displaced' figurative form. In literary terms, this means the movement toward the absolutely fictional. Here, this implies the suspension of all disbelief at the implausibility of the events of Stalingrad as presented in fictional narratives, which instead function as part of a symbolic process of establishing communist utopia through the 'resurrection' of the USSR's war at Stalingrad. In spite of the misleading name of ‘Socialist Realism’, the USSR’s state-sponsored writing system, Soviet authors strove to depict this symbolic value, [see K Clark History as Ritual] rather than ‘reality’. In this sense, the writers of VVV, through their insistence on community-monitored ‘truthfulness’ through adherence to a certain Stalingrad narrative, move towards Frye’s mythical. This process is at its strongest in sci-fi and alt-history works relating to Stalingrad, where the impossible becomes ’true’ through its symbolic content: the addition of fantastic, physics-warping time travel motifs to the Stalingrad story focuses all narrative attention on the storyteller - the author - rather than on the ‘facts’ of the history of Stalingrad. 

While the fantastic content of the users’ writing is manifestly not realistic, their readers are keen to praise work that they consider to be ‘true’. This is a reflection of the Soviet penchant for fictionalized history – indeed, Grossman and Simonov's war reportage is intended to be inspirational, not informative – and the popularity of the semi-fictionalized ‘documentary tale’, or ‘fictionalized non-fiction’, as Maria Balina puts it (194). In Soviet eyes, works are true when they repeat certain key elements of an established narrative: these sci-fi works may appear to be left field, but they are a continuance of the Soviet literary tradition. This is why forum users are keen to read similar stories time and again, and why borrowing ideas is seen as homage rather than plagiarism. The works at hand share many ideas, including uncannily similar events, turns of phrase and major plot details, such as the mechanism by which their protagonists travel through time. 

In this essay, I focus on three works by forum users: Oleg Tarugin and Aleksei Ivakin’s The Shtrafbat's Constellation: From Stalingrad to Alpha Centauri (2013); Aleksandr Kontorovich’s Black Infantry: Shtrafnik from the Future (2010); and Vladislav Koniushevskii’s The Attempted Return (2008).[2] Each work demonstrates key motifs relating to time travel as a major plot device, to Soviet literary heritage, and to the desire to resurrect the moral certainty of the USSR. All three were praised by users for their truthfulness and released by major publishers.

Tarugin and Ivakin, last-generation Soviets in their early 40s, are both forum users. A teacher and a pediatrician, they are educated professionals responding to the crisis of the generation that matured in the late 80s and difficult 90s. From Stalingrad to Alpha Centauri was written on VVV: accordingly, the authors thank the users for their help in creating the work (“Ot avtorov”). Forum users received the work as an instant classic. They singled out the work’s patriotic theme of generational reeducation for praise: according to one, the novel is good to ‘teach those who have forgotten the war to be men, to die for the Motherland, to kill and to win’. One user who wondered how bloody-minded shtrafniki from the past would suddenly want to patriotically save the world was abused by regular users, who attacked him as an ‘idiot’ and ‘brain-washed’ (“Verite li v sebe, avtory?”): truthfulness and patriotic thinking does not require, for these Russians, rigorous or rational enquiry. 

From Stalingrad’s events, set in the year 2297, echo those of the Second World War. Humanity is now united and genetically engineered to remain peaceful. As a result, they have forgotten the Second World War and how to fight. Mysterious, bestial lizardmen suddenly attack human extraterrestrial colonies, overcoming the helpless defenders and slaughtering the local population (i.e. they reiterate the German invasion of 1941). The human ‘universal government’, looking for a miracle, sifts through time to find the ‘best soldiers in history’: a shtrafbat of Stalingrad veterans. They pull the soldiers from the moment of their deaths in the 1940s through time to 2297. There, they ask them to recreate the seeming impossibility of the Soviet last-stand victory at Stalingrad. 

With their military acumen and sheer bravery, the shtrafbat triumphs in a Stalingrad-like victory on Earth, conveyed through images of a hellish world of total war (‘The town was burning, the asphalt was burning, the concrete was burning, the glass was burning’, Ch.1) that reminds us of images from Soviet victory of a burning Stalingrad (e.g. see Grossman 1942). Having thus averted the danger to Earth (i.e. the threat in 1942 to Moscow and the USSR), the shtrafbat makes its advance towards the lizards’ home planet, analogous to the post-Stalingrad march on Berlin. A further battle takes places at ‘Kotel’nicheskii’, whose name alludes to Kotel’nikovo, a town close to Stalingrad that saw major fighting in 1942. Ivakin and Tarugin directly compare the ruins of a colony to those of Stalingrad and Dresden (Ch.3): ‘Stalingrad' is not only the most significant event of the future war, it is also the standard for destructive sacrifice and suffering in war.

It transpires that the lizard men are battery-farmed by shadowy members of the universal government, who have hatched a barbaric plot to control human overpopulation through mass destruction. The shtrafbat discovers their experiments on humans, which take place at a concentration camp-like extraterrestrial base. Here, though, experiments on humans are products not of Nazi racial ideology but of Western European rationalism, and inspired by Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment: ‘How are these modern scientists different from the bloody vivisectionists of the Third Reich?’ (Ch.3), asks one time-traveling soldier. Having saved the day, the shtrafbat reeducate the population, encouraging Soviet participatory activities like archeology as a means of preserving the memory of the fallen. The shtrafbat are idealized soldiers who die for the Soviet Union in 1942, die again for humanity in the future, and teach ‘generational debt’ to the young: at the story’s heart, Stalingrad is the symbolic moment that allows them to move towards these heroic feats.

Aleksandr Kontorovich, a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan War and VVV user, writes works ranging from medieval fantasy to Second World War alt-history. His Black Infantry is a typical time travel alt-history work. Unlike in From Stalingrad, Kontorovich’s protagonist, Kotov, falls backward through time, from the 2000s present to 1942, giving him the chance to refight the War and achieve an (even) better result. 

Praised for his ‘morality and ethics’ (“Verite li vy sebe, avtory?”), Kontorovich is one of the forum’s most popular authors. Black Infantry is written for a ‘small circle of familiar faces’, including several named users of VVV (Foreword). Kontorovich claims it is based on real people and events, but by mixing stories from the past with characters from the present he indicates an important trope: the VVV authors see current Russian military action around the nation’s periphery as a moral, ideological continuation of the Second World War.

Kotov is a brutish, individualist special forces soldier who has served in Afghanistan and Abkhazia. A secret government agency experimenting in time travel sends him back to 1942. Kotov’s fate is threatened not by Nazi forces, which he always brushes aside with ease, but by an opposing American intelligence agency. In the past, Kotov relives the retreat from Kharkiv to Stalingrad. Armed with his prescient knowledge of future events and military tactics, he plays through the VVV fantasy of ‘saving’ Russia in both the past and present, thereby repaying the debt to his grandfathers’ generation. Kontorovich borrows stories from Soviet Stalingrad authors to rewrite the myth, implying that Kotov’s battles have a Stalingrad-like eternal importance.

Vladislav Koniushevskii, a bodyguard, soldier and author of several works, is an active VVV user. He is the most overtly nationalist of the authors here: on his profile page on authors’ site Samizdat, he urges forum members to ‘shit on the liberals’. In The Attempted Return, his protagonist, Lisov, another macho military specialist, falls through time to 1941 after a blow to the head. Lisov relives the entire War, using his knowledge of the future to advise Stalin personally and ‘invent' a number of pieces of modern military technology. [3] He regularly visits the front and wreaks personal havoc on Nazi opponents. Thanks to Lisov’s foreknowledge, Stalingrad is avoided. He therefore negates the generational debt by single-handedly ‘winning’ Stalingrad. As a result, the Germans lose the War, and the USSR remains a dominant world power in the 21st century: there is no turbulent 1990s, and Western dominance never happens. The rewritten future ends in an epilogue set near an untouched Stalingrad, now at the center of a still-extant USSR. Unsurprisingly, the book was well received: one user writes that ‘Koniushevskii’s great achievement is in correcting the political direction of the USSR, which he does efficiently and absolutely truthfully. He has set the standard for years to come’ (“Morskoi Volk-2 VladSavin”).

All three books share formal features that link their origins to Soviet works. They reiterate Soviet stories, recreate the atmosphere of the Soviet era in both past and present, and adopt Soviet phraseology, a key feature of Socialist Realist writing. The similarity of events across the books (and across works penned by VVV users) indicates a key mode of Soviet writing: inspirational, ideologically sound stories endlessly rewritten with minor changes.[4] This is true of the Stalingrad story: over a hundred almost-identical works of fiction about the battle were printed in the five years before perestroika alone. Soviet writers, rather than reflecting reality, were expected to create reality (Markov 15). 

Accordingly, all three authors borrow symbolic locations and events from their predecessors’ (and each others’). Tarugin and Ivakin’s shtrafbat visit symbolic locations around Stalingrad in the 23rd century. The authors also recreate a significant scene from Simonov’s Days and Nights when Krupennikov, the battalion commander, looks to the sky’s starry vastness as an escape from Stalingrad. Krupennikov, unlike his predecessor, Simonov’s Saburov, takes to the stars and saves the universe: the writers’ work has its origins in Soviet fiction, but rewrites it with limitless possibilities. 

An analogous incident occurs in Kontorovich’s Black Infantry. Kotov’s first action in the past is a direct rewriting of Nekrasov’s battle for the Mamaev kurgan (a major hill in Stalingrad) from In the Trenches of Stalingrad. The protagonists in both works are asked to conduct an almost impossible operation to take German bunkers. Yet where Nekrasov’s soldier distrusts maps and strategy, operating by intuition in the chaos of battle, Kontorovich’s character just turns the map of the hill ‘here and there, every which way’ (Сh.24). He considers all possibilities to find the best method of attack, carrying it out and killing dozens of Germans. The exaggerated abilities of the time traveler give the current soldier the chance to eliminate the burden of generational debt and save the present. These borrowed elements, ramped up with the fantastical possibilities of genre writing, demonstrate the writers’ debt to the Soviet literary heritage in creating their own, modern myths.

As well as the plots, which reiterate and replay the trajectory of the Second World War, with Stalingrad its moral centre, the authors literarily recreate the cultural feel of the Stalinist 1940s by referencing seminal works. Tarugin and Ivakin’s Krupennikov, the good Soviet citizen, disapproves of his commissar’s enjoyment of Western rock music in the future, but praises Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s popular wartime poem Vasilii Terkin. Other references are to the films Chapaev and The White Sun of the Desert, the television serial 17 Moments of Spring, and popular war-era songs such as Oh, the Roads….

The VVV writers adopt another typical element of Soviet writing style, the use of blochnoe pis’mo (‘block writing’), the repetitive, often stilted, use of set phrases. Aleksei Yurchak suggests that blochnoe pis’mo allowed Soviet citizens to demonstrate their adherence to ‘correct’ Marxist-Leninist thinking (Yurchak 47). Koniushevskii’s Lisov loves Stalin as the ‘best friend of the Soviet people’ (Ch.3), a typical phrase used to describe the leader in propaganda. Tarugin and Ivakin claim that ‘the towns of Belarus […] will be written forever into the heroic annals of the Red Army’ (Ch.1), a wording frequently used in Soviet journalism; Kontorovich describes Stalingrad as ‘impenetrable [kromeshnyi] hell’ (Ch.37), a phrase associated with the battle from 1942 and often adopted as a story title by later writers. By unironically incorporating Soviet clichés, the VVV authors express a dual sense of belonging: to the Soviet past, and to the other forum members.

Though wrapped in the atmosphere of Soviet-era fiction, the books’ sci-fi and alt-history nature show a distinct movement toward Frye’s conception of the author’s power in myth, toward Stalingrad as having universal significance. By abrogating the laws of physics, the ‘glorious guardsmen’ of 1940s Stalingrad become superheroes fighting super-villains. Tarugin and Ivakin’s future Stalingrad is one of the greatest victories of all human history: they equate it to those of Epaminondas, Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great (Ch.11). Kontorovich’s Kotov acquires the identity of a Soviet soldier, Leonov: etymologically, the ‘cat' becomes a ‘lion’ by being associated with Stalingrad. Kotov is able to easily overcome incessant German air attacks and artillery might through the intuitive understanding afforded to him by the author’s control over the past. Koniushevskii’s Lisov, meanwhile, literally has a superpower: he is mysteriously regenerated after being wounded taking on an entire German army single-handed. Thus the authors not only assert total control over events, they express their own belief that Stalingrad will be refought single-handedly in a cataclysmic clash of civilizations taking place between contemporary Russia and the West. Soviet soldiers needed comradeship to win the War; these sci-fi heroes need only the nationalist, 21st-century author. 

The characters regular appear to be aware of their fictional nature, and the authors’ voices often creep undisguised into the text. All of the characters regularly note that events are ‘just like in the movies’. Tarugin’s and Ivakin’s Krupennikov notes that ‘thought-up characters from butch films and patriotic jobs [have] the job of inspiring’ (Ch.7), and one of his comrades notes that ‘It’s like we’re not real, like somebody’s writing a book about us’ (Ch.10). Koniushevskii’s Lisov notes that ‘this kind of stuff only really happens in fantasy’ (Ch.1). Indeed, all the works’ protagonists interpret the world around them through their consumption of culture, comparing people they meet outside of their own time to people from ‘historical film’ (Tarugin & Ivakin Ch.11) or ‘the main character from The White Sun of the Desert’ (Koniushevskii Ch.2). The memory of the past – and thus the events of the future – is defined not by ‘history’ but by fiction, and the interaction of fiction and reality. What is ‘true’ is what is remembered and perceived through the cultural corpus defined by the all-powerful mythical storyteller, not by the limits of the physically possible. 

Time travel is the most striking addition to the Soviet corpus, even though, as I discuss, it is not out of keeping with the fundamental mode of Soviet writing. In each work, the moment and mechanism of time travel is brief and left unexplained. Although Western science fiction tends to explore time travel’s scientific and philosophical difficulties (Wittenberg 2), for these authors, there is no attempt at even a veneer of fact. Time travel is a dream-like, comatose experience of forgetfulness which elides past and present, fact and fiction: for Krupennikov, it is like a ‘fog’ (Tarugin & Ivakin Ch.3); for Kotov, the memory of the ‘Afghan sun, burning hot in the sky’ gives way to the past (Kontorovich Ch.9); for Lisov, a blow to head knocks him unconscious before he wakes up in the past (Koniushevskii Ch.1). The moment of physical transfer is significant not for its futuristic nature, but for its ability to alter memory – to combine past and present cultural tropes in a single, imagined experience.

The manipulation of time does not occur only in relation to actual time travel. For Nekrasov’s Soviet protagonist, time on the battlefield is unreliable, subjective: generals understand strategy as exact timings, plans timed to perfection, but soldiers perceive only an imprecise ‘few minutes’ (Nekrasov 34). For Simonov’s Saburov, defending a house from German attack for several days seems to become a sleepless eternity. The VVV authors take total control over their characters’ experience of time. In Black Infantry, time slows at the moment of time travel, but Kotov always appears in absolute control on the battlefield. He knows when he has ‘exactly ten minutes’ to conduct a manoeuvre, and is later able to relate a series of precise timings of battlefield events (Kontorovich Ch.30). The reality of the chaos of battle is negated both for the participant and for the narrative as a whole. The story is, in Frye’s sense, a myth in which time and space, dictated entirely by the storyteller’s volition, are unconstrained by nature.

By asserting their power over time, affording their characters total control of strategic and tactical dimensions of the War and giving them the chance to refight Stalingrad, the VVV authors equate their heroes with Stalin’s strategic genius. Soviet writers claimed that Stalin, the great strategist, won Stalingrad through a prescient plan designed in July 1942 to trap the German army at the city (Kulikov 176). This is especially true of Koniushevskii’s work. While the situation in 1941 seems hopeless, the German forces overwhelming in number, Stalin’s foresight is now transferred to a familiar, modern-day hero: his extraordinary time traveling abilities, augmented by the author’s control, allow him to exceed even Stalin’s ability in preventing disaster. In this way, the VVV authors borrow, exaggerate and rewrite the literary past. 

Koniushevskii’s Lisov claims that, ‘We only woke up at Stalingrad’ (Ch.3), as if the battle as a turning point that saved the USSR was a dreamlike achievement, unrestrained by nature and therefore close to a living ‘myth’. Death, though, is the opposite of this waking up. Gregory Carleton explains that for Soviet culture, the hero-soldier’s death, unlike the Hollywood soldier who survives against the odds, is seen as essential, a ‘positive outcome’ (Carleton 136). The shtrafbat heroes of the three works at hand are ready to die. However, the mythological nature of the time travel trope allows their heroes to die several times. 

If Carleton’s understanding of the centrality of death to the Soviet war story is correct, then in order to ‘wake up’, soldiers had to die. Where time travel permits the VVV authors’ heroes to seamlessly span universal space and time, death is, in Tarugin and Ivakin’s words ‘emptiness. It’s when there is nothing’ (“Interliudiia”). Time travel is a method to negate one’s own death and the results of the USSR’s ‘death’: the troubles of the 1990s; the ‘forgetting’ of Stalingrad; and the generational debt established by the death of millions of Soviet soldiers in the Second World War. For these authors, the greatest hero must therefore be the shtrafnik, who must die to pay off their debt to society (‘We are obliged to pay off our debt’, repeatedly explain the soldiers in all of the books, aping Soviet official phraseology). The most heroic place therefore must be the slaughterhouse of Stalingrad, where sacrifice turned defeat into victory.

The authors make it clear that memory is the most important of the books’ tropes. By traveling in time, the protagonists of each work resolve the moral crises of the post-Soviet era. Ivakin and Tarugin’s battalion are able to reeducate their descendants, telling them that, ‘[The West] shit all over our [Soviet] Union’ and describing the architects of perestroika as ‘traitors’ who ‘betrayed’ the Motherland (Ch.8). Coming face-to-face with the younger generations, they are able to interrogate, scold and educate: Krupennikov asks, ‘Why were you and I, Il’chenko and Zaits, sent to our deaths? […] For what? For these lazy, self-satisfied descendants, who don’t even remember the Great War?’ (Ch.10). The world of the future, meanwhile, is one in which Western sexual promiscuity and drug-taking shocks the moral Soviets. Koniushevskii’s Attempted Return, abounds with anti-Western sentiment: the Americans are a ‘despicable people’ whose behavior in the 21st-century is like that of the Nazis (Ch.5). Lisov is delighted to return to the Stalin era’s morality.

This sense of fear that Western methods, morals and governments threaten to destroy the sacrifice of the War pervades all three of the works described here. The VVV forum’s authors seek to preserve the essential ‘truth’ of this sacrifice by colliding past sacrifice and present suffering in the hope that Russia will avoid further crisis: memory, essentially, is a flexible concept whose ‘truth’ is a moral, rather than a factual, one. The fight of the ‘average height, average build’ (Koniushevskii Ch.8) Lisov is indicative not just of a mythical bent but also of the desire of the storyteller – and his online associates – to change history and reassert Russia’s status in the world. In this sense, unlike Western fiction’s use of time travel, which generally seeks to change the present in order to improve the future, these works indicate a desire to reassert the past in the present. Vicariously achieving this through reading, writing and rewriting a myth of Stalingrad is a reaction to the emptiness and impotence of the Russian post-Soviet space. 

The authors and users of VVV have developed in this reassertion of the past a specific code of etiquette. This code, as described here, demands an unfamiliar, non-Western understanding of ‘truth’ in history. Deference to the cultural and literary past is far more important than describing events as they were. A science fiction rewriting of the Stalingrad story is ‘true’, therefore, so long as it retains the key Soviet element of Stalingrad as a symbolic turning point in Russia’s war against Western inhumanity, creating its own ‘reality’ as Soviet writers created theirs.

Works Cited

Literature

Grossman, V.S. “Stalingradskaia bitva.” Krasnaia Zvezda 27 Oct. 1942: 3.

Koniushevskii, Vladislav. Popytka vozvrata. St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2008. Ebook Edition.

Kontorovich, Aleksandr. “Chernaia pekhota”. Shtrafnik iz budushchego. Moscow: Eksmo, Iauza, 2010. Ebook Edition.

Nekrasov, Viktor. V okopakh Stalingrada. Moscow: Terra, 1946, ed.2004.

Simonov, K.S. “Dni i nochi. Povest’.” Znamia 9-12 (1943).

Tarugin, Oleg, and Aleksei Ivakin. Sozvezdie shtrafbata. Ot Stalingrada do Al’fy Tsentavra. Moscow: Eksmo, Iauza, 2013. Ebook Edition.

Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

From V vikhre vremen

“Bibliografiia Uchastnikov Foruma.” V vikhre vremen. Web.

“Morskoi Volk-2 VladSavin.” V vikhre vremen. 2012. Web.

“Pravila.” V vikhre vremen. Web.

“Verite li vy sebe, avtory?” V vikhre vremen. 1 Aug. 2014. Web.

Secondary Sources

Alekseev, Mikhail. “Seiatel’ i khranitel’.” Nash sovremennik 9 (1972).

Balina, M. “Literatura non-fiction: vymysly I real’nost’.” Znamia 1 (2003).

Carleton, Gregory. “Victory in Death: Annihilation Narratives in Russia Today.” History and Memory 22.1 (2010): 135–168.

Johnson, Priscilla. Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964. Ed. Leopold Labedz and Priscilla Johnson. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965.

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Kulikov, V.G. “Iskusstvo pobedy.” Znamia 1 (1983).

Markov, G., “Sviashchennyi dolg sovetskikh pisatelei.” Druzhba narodov 1 (1983).

Tumarkin, Nina. The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. BasicBooks, 1994.

Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. Fordham University Press, 2012.

Wood, Elizabeth. “Performing Memory: Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of WWII in Russia.” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38 (2011).