‘NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN, NOTHING IS FORGOTTEN’
No family was spared during the Second World War, survivors say. Like millions around the world, hundreds of Russian-born Montrealers and their descendants marched in the streets May 9, holding aloft photographs of the fallen. Arthur Kaptainis reports.
Not all of them are in their 90s. David Ficherman, who was the commander of an armoured division in Riga when Germany capitulated, is 103.
This former captain is one of 43 veterans in the Montreal area of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians and many other former Soviet peoples refer to the conflict spoken of in English as the Second World War. Last year there were 48.
Every year, those who are able gather at the downtown consulate of the Russian Federation the day before May 9 — the German surrender of midnight May 8, 1945, Greenwich Mean Time came into effect at 5 a.m. in Moscow — to remember the dead, honour the survivors and affirm their dedication in perpetuity to the cause of defending their country and defeating the invaders.
The handful of veterans equal to the journey downtown are accompanied by people of middle age and younger who have grandparents or parents who suffered or served.
“You will hardly find a person today in Russia — in the territory of the former Soviet Union — who did not lose anyone during the war,” said Consul General Yury V. Bedzhanyan after the two-hour ceremony and reception this month. “I lost my grandfather and his two brothers. I lost my grandmother from the other side.”
“No family was spared,” concurred Valentina Rojinskaia, who is in charge of the Russian collection of the Jewish Public Library.
She was one of the co-ordinators of the Immortal Regiment march that brought hundreds of Russianborn Montrealers and their descendants to Cabot Square in the early evening of Victory Day itself, many wearing military caps and holding aloft photographs of the fallen.
The Immortal Regiment phenomenon is worldwide. Started by journalists in 2012 in the Siberian city of Tomsk, according to the Sputnik news agency, the marches have spread to dozens of countries and grown explosively in Russia itself. One million were reported to be on the streets of Moscow this year on May 9.
Vladimir Putin, holding a portrait of his serviceman father, was among them. Some commentators ask whether the presence of the Russian president in the annual event marks the politicization of what started as a grassroots movement. Perhaps a question better grounded in reality is how any Russian leader with an interest in public opinion could afford to be absent.
Like most expressions of patriotism, the Immortal Regiment events have controversial elements. Marches this year in Kyiv and Minsk, the capitals of Ukraine and Belarus, prompted counterdemonstrations and even arrests.
In May 2017 Ukraine banned the orange-and-black-striped Ribbon of St. George — St. George is the patron saint of Russia — as a separatist provocation. Most participants in the consulate ceremony and the Immortal Regiment march in Montreal wore this centuriesold symbol.
All nations honour their fallen in some official capacity and most citizens (not least Canadians) recognize the sacrifice of their forebears even while deploring the suffering and destruction caused by war. For Russians the exercise is “like religion,” according to Ludmila Anohina, a native of Voronezh who says her father was “just a soldier.”
“Christmas and Victory Day, these are the most important holidays,” she said at the consulate in Montreal. “Everything for God, for love.”
The strong feelings are linked — no emotional expression could be viewed as truly proportionate — to the vast number of casualties suffered by Soviet forces and civilians through combat, bombardment, migration, disease and starvation. Historians still debate how many died and from what causes. Some now argue that the official number of 26.6 million issued by the Russian Academy of Sciences in a 1993 report edited by the retired general Grigori Krivosheev is short of the real total.
Even the statistics on the low end are staggering. The three-week final capture of Berlin, according to the Krivosheev study, cost the Red Army 81,116 lives. Canada is estimated to have lost 44,090 during the entire course of the war.
As for the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, this was the deadliest blockade in history. Some estimates of casualties during the siege, which took place between Sept. 8, 1941, and Jan. 27, 1944, exceed one million. Survivors of this horror, devised by Adolf Hitler as an attempt to starve the populace, are counted as veterans.
The motto of the Immortal Regiment movement — “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten” — is the final line of a poem inscribed on the central monument of the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg.
The formidable array of honours pinned to Ficherman’s blue jacket include the medal of the 5th Guards Tank Army and two Orders of the Red Star for bravery and service. Yet he points to his two Orders of the Patriotic War, a medal shared by all surviving veterans, as those of which he is proudest.
Alexander Morozov, 92, also points first to this order. The Kazakhstan native volunteered for submarine service as a 17-year-old in naval school. He was one of 150 candidates for the position.
His brother served in the infantry and his father worked as a radio liaison officer. Both sustained injuries. But the Morozovs were lucky. Their neighbours lost four of five boys.
“The spirit of patriotism was outstanding at that time,” Morozov said, through an interpreter. “Those who could not join the army for health reasons went to the military plant to make ammunition or something for the country to win. And there were many children who falsified their documents by adding a year to join the army.”
Survival could even carry a stigma, according to a woman in Cabot Square who identified herself as Marina. She was holding a portrait of her grandfather, Mikhail Kolomitsev.
This colonel from Rostov-on-Don told his wife in 1941 that the war would last two or three months and that Russian victory was certain. He returned in 1945 after participating in the Battle of Berlin.
“I asked my grandmother, ‘ Were you happy?’ ” Marina recalled. “She said, yes, but it was a little bit difficult in a neighbourhood that lost everybody. She was a little ashamed that he was alive.”
Women were not excluded from service. Raisa Volfson, 95, a signalman in the Black Sea fleet, numbers among the Montreal veterans.
The devotion of Red Army soldiers to Mother Russia extended also to the figure who personified resistance to the Nazis, Josef Stalin.
“Personally, I never saw him,” Morozov said. “But on the radio and television, all the mass media reported about the leader.
“At the time, he was all the world for us. We believed in everything he told us. We believed it was possible to build communism.
“While I was studying in university and got more information about the reality, I understood that there were many lies.
“He cannot be forgiven for the hundreds of thousands of Soviet people who died because of him. But this was the same person who made the Soviet Union great and defeated fascism.”
Grigori Brytva, 96, a lieutenant whose wartime career began in Stalingrad and ended south of Berlin, and whose honours include medals for the rescue of more than 100 of his fellow soldiers, tells a similar story.
“At that time, there was a symbol of a great patriot, Stalin, and we loved him,” Brytva said at a commemorative gathering at the Jewish Russian Community Centre of Montreal. “Everybody heard what he did for the country. Nobody knew the negative side.”
Only later did Brytva understand the scope of the bloodshed caused by the patriot-in-chief and the revolting irony that by executing so many experienced officers and soldiers in the purges of the late 1930s, Stalin left the Red Army far less ready than it could have been when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.
Yet the Soviet dictator, for all his paranoia and indifference to human life, eventually understood that the war would be more effectively waged as a defence of Russia than a struggle in support of the abstract (not to say illusory) ideal of socialist revolution. Churches were reopened and Orthodox metropolitans and archbishops made a public pledge to “redouble our share of work in the nationwide struggle for the salvation of the motherland.”
Somehow official atheism coexisted with old-time religion and the progressive tenets of MarxismLeninism made room for patriotic appeals to pre-Revolutionary history that did not exclude references to the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812.
The Red Army, already compromised by its Pyrrhic victory against Finland in the Winter War of 1940, suffered huge losses in 1941. The Luftwaffe destroyed thousands of Soviet bombers on the ground and hundreds in aerial combat. Despite the setbacks, or possibly because of them, the mystical call to arms heightened fighting spirit on the front and productivity behind the lines.
Ethnic tensions eased. The American historian Roger Reese maintains in a 2014 paper in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies that Jewish veterans of the Red Army “did not have unique experiences of service during the war or a different motivation to serve from other, non-Jewish soldiers.”
This assertion might seem surprising given the virulence of Nazi ideology, which was well known even before the deportations and mass-murder operations of the Holocaust reached their height. Jews certainly had a reason to fight. But the point is that Soviet citizens were allied in their opposition to the Germans.
“We don’t have divisions of Jewish veterans, Russian veterans, Armenian veterans, Ukrainian veterans,” Bedzhanyan insisted. “We have veterans of the Soviet army. That means all of them.”
Mark Groysberg, president of the Montreal Organization of Russian-Speaking Veterans of the Second World War, says he has canvassed Jewish veterans widely in Canada and heard few reports of discrimination in the ranks.
“They are fighting together,” Groysberg said. “And they do not know what will happen tomorrow.”
Yet it is well known that opposition to Germany was not unanimous across the U.S.S.R. Andrey Vlasov, a Red Army general, defected to the German side and established an anti-Bolshevik “liberation” army. He was captured and executed for treason.
Interest in defending Russia was faint in the Baltic states, which were turned into constituent Soviet republics according the undisclosed terms of the German- Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939. Many Balts initially welcomed the Germans (who quickly swept through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 1941) as liberators. In fact they were another wave of invaders with no interest in their national aspirations.
The most complicated case is Ukraine, where bitter memories of collectivization and famine created fierce anti-Soviet feelings, especially in the west. While far more Ukrainians fought for the Red Army than opposed it, about 220,000, according to the late Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny, wore German uniforms.
When the Nazis reluctantly agreed, after their defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, to the creation of units staffed by Slavic Untermenschen, the 13,000-strong volunteer SS Galician Division was born. It is a sad fact that far-right elements in Ukraine now seek to memorialize the collaborators. Groysberg would rather lay stress on the thousands of non-Jewish Ukrainians who risked their lives to help Jews during the war.
The Immortal Regiment marchers are not necessarily united in all their political views. Irene Saharov is a Montreal writer and interpreter born to Russian parents who has taught Soviet studies at Vanier College. She cautions against equating participation in the Victory Day commemorations with support of Putin.
“The war is sacred,” Saharov said. “It has nothing to do with the government du jour.”
Brytva waved off a question about international tensions and the leadership of Russia today. “I don’t want to touch this,” he said. “Politics are mad.”
One of the Montreal marchers, Vladimir Akhromeev, a retired economist who followed his children to Canada in 1979, held photos of several departed relatives, including a grandmother who died of hunger in the Siege of Leningrad. The largest photo is of his uncle, Serge Akhromeev, who survived the siege and rose through the ranks to become chief of staff of the armed forces.
This heavily decorated marshal aided in the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 and committed suicide after its failure. “Proud and sad, both” is how Akhromeev characterizes his feelings about the losses his family sustained.
Ficherman, Morozov and Brytva all pursued successful careers in the Red Army after the war. Ficherman was a specialist in heavy tank technology and tactics; Morozov, a legal prosecutor; Brytva, a bandleader and music teacher.
Morozov and Brytva came to Canada after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed. Brytva, who first visited Canada in 1997, is thankful for the pension he receives as an Allied serviceman. This is one explanation for the presence of Russian veterans in Canada. Morozov, as proud as he is of his service, says of his home since 1995: “This is not just one of the best countries to live in, this is the best.”
Most Russians and their descendants recognize the Soviet Union as a failed state and the Russian Federation as a troubled one. The population of the Russian Federation continues to decline through immigration. The Immortal Regiment unites the diaspora by recalling a period of idealism and sacrifice.
If the observances in Canada make clear the pride Russians feel in their past, they can also be interpreted as a comment on their new country and the advantages it offers.
“They commemorate this day,” Saharov said. “They don’t have to. Nobody is forcing them.
“They are free to do this. They are living in the West.”
The spirit of patriotism was outstanding at that time. Those who could not join the army for health reasons went to the military plant to make ammunition.