Soviet Union

There Were Not Only Heroes

The period of de-Stalinization and of the "thaw" enabled a critical treatment of the master narrative of the heroic victory for the first time in the Soviet Union. At first, writers began by replacing the accepted patriotic-heroic clichés of the Stalin era with a realistic description of the War. Now the affairs of daily life, the wartime experiences of ordinary soldiers and the horrors of injury and death were packed into the hero cult. A short time later, toward the end of the 1950s, the first films began to appear which no longer described the War through the eyes of a hero alone, but rather as individually experienced suffering. This period also saw the first descriptions in literature and music of the terror under the German occupation, such as the massacre at Babi Yar.
This development came to a halt with the ousting of Khrushchev. The personality cult returned with the period of stagnation, now centring on Leonid Brezhnev. Stalin was also partially rehabilitated. The "Great Patriotic War" became the subject of propaganda films again. Critical analyses of this topic were difficult to publish. A number of films from the early 1970s were not released until the period of perestroika.
The image of the war-disabled appeared in literature, film and the fine arts in the 1960s for the first time since the end of the War. But the disabled veteran was no longer portrayed, like he was during the War, as a hero who accepts his mutilation with courage and unbending will or even enthusiasm. Rather, he was now perceived as a broken man in need of help who returns to a traumatized society in which everyone is occupied with themselves. Vadim Sidur took up this problem in his sculpture "The Wounded Man". The work did not become known in Russia at the time. It was not until perestroika that Sidur's work was acknowledged in his own country. In 1987 a museum dedicated to his work was opened in Moscow.

In 1977 Ales Adamovič published interviews with survivors of the German occupation in Belarus, later published in English under the title "Out of Fire". These interviews formed the basis for the film "Come and See", directed by Elem Klimov. The film describes with relentless naturalism the brutality with which the German occupation treated the Belarus population.
Like Tarkovsky before him, Klimov chose to tell the story from the perspective of the child, a boy named Florya, who is recruited by a group of partisans, but soon loses them. He returns to his village, which has meanwhile been invaded by the Germans. Some of the villagers have fled to the swamps, but his mother and his sisters have been killed. Driven by a sense of guilt and the need for revenge, Florya wanders about. He becomes a witness to atrocities of the Germans and to acts of revenge by the partisans. The poster produced by the distributor for use abroad stylises the face of the boy so that it reflects both revenge and reconciliation.

   
 
   
 
 
 
   
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