Никто не забыт и ничто не забыто
“no one will forget and nothing will be forgotten” written on the wall in the Piskaryovskoe memorial cemetery
As I sit here, in the sunlight shining through towering birch trees gazing out around me and the hundreds of graves and mass graves holding hundreds of thousands of people, I would like to get a few things out in the open about Russia, things that are now easily forgotten.
When people in the US think about and talk about Russia, it’s about Putin, and Bears wondering the Russian streets, and about alcoholism and the evil soviet army. I’ve not yet seen a bear here, no I don’t know how Putin is doing, TVs advertise non-alcoholic beer, and the Soviet army wasn’t always evil. That doesn’t mean that this country doesn’t have its problems. There is still a population crisis and alcoholism is still a problem, especially in the older generation, but even my expectations, formed by years of studying Russia and speaking with Russians and people who live there, were not exactly accurate. There are certainly cultural differences, but the Russia of today is not even like the Russia of 10 years ago. And even when thinking and talking and making fun of Russia’s soviet history and the strange, almost otherwoldnesss of Communism with a capital ‘C,’ things are easily looked over, to make a prettier picture of the American stereotype.
In 1941, the German Nazis attacked the city of Leningrad, now known as St Petersburg. From that time forward ensued an 872 day long blockade of the city, which most people know as the Siege of Leningrad. Now the siege was mentioned during high school as one of the battles that took place in Russia, but from my Russian classes in college and now from my time in the city itself, and it’s memorial, I realize that what I knew about the event was greatly underemphasized. A city of over 2 million innocent people was subjected to the German wish to wipe the city out. The casualties of the Siege of Leningrad exceeded those of the battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, and the bombing of Tokyo. The German Army cut off almost all flow of goods to and from the city, save a sliver of ice that as many people died on as were evacuated. People died from starvation, dysentery, tuberculosis, as an entire city was subjected to a winter with an average temperature of -22F on 200 (125 if you were elderly or a child) grams of bread a day; bread that consisted of 50% sawdust. Every person suffered. Children were left without families. One girl, Tanya, famously wrote in her diary after all her family were killed “all are dead, only Tanya remains.”
This is a human tragedy on par with the holocaust. It is widely known that over 1.5 million people died, but not all the information was released by the Soviet government, and the number could be much higher. It was an ethnically determined attempt to utterly wipe out an entire city. And it wasn’t supposed to end there. Adolf Hitler planned to follow his destruction of Leningrad with the destruction of the Donetsk Basin, and finally Moscow. He wanted to thus wipe out an entire country, but he didn’t get the chance. He didn’t get the chance because of the resilience and bravery of the country he was trying to evaporate. The people of Leningrad never stopped fighting. Stepping over dead in the streets, soldiers held the blockade. When spring came the entire capable city gathered to plant vegetables. Libraries still functioned, the theater was open. Even after a winter during which the 2 kilometer walk to get food was as deadly as the starvation without it, the city survived and fought. I’ve hardly heard a greater success story than that of the survival of this, then communist city.
But this is forgotten when we joke about drunk Russians and soviet repression, during which, by the way, soviet people suffered psychological and real terror as they and their sons and daughters were made slaves to the gulags for “political crimes” they knew nothing about. Russia is far away so we laugh it off. We think of Russians as cold oligarchs and ruthless abusive mafia, while almost every person in this city is a descendant of one of the mothers and daughters and brothers and fathers who suffered and survived this immense tragedy.
People in DC avoid Russians, don’t trust them, and look to lessen our President because of his involvement with them. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but we as a country, liberal or conservative, have decided to categorize an entire nation based off of its leader and his politics. I myself am guilty of bashing communism and its countries. I very rarely hear Russians spoken of in terms of the repression they’ve suffered ethnically, it’s much more common to hear stories about evil Russian spies or hackers tampering with our elections in service to a completely authoritative and iron-fisted leader who rides on the backs of bears. We can’t seem to wrap our minds around Putin’s popularity, despite the fact that Russians are living better than they have in their entire history. After suffering centuries of subjugation as serfs and a century of terror and poverty under the soviet fist, people here are now freer than they’ve ever been, and living comfortably. But we ignore that, we refuse to pay attention to it as we loudly and assuredly claim the repressiveness of Putin’s regime, because it isn’t identical to what we have at home.
Walking past the graves and feeling thе weight of what is around me, the bickering about Russia that goes on in our everyday media seems so very small. This is a place of people, of strong people who have endured tragedies we couldn’t even imagine. People, who then were Communists with a capital ‘C.’ I’ve gotten a chance to reorient my perspective here and add a little humanity to the narrative touted in our country, and perhaps reading this you might do the same.
