The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.
But what happens to the memory of war in places where entire families were racked by nightmares through the years: returned soldiers, their wives, their kids, their parents, all jerking awake to overwhelming fears of an impending firebombing?
The feelings of scarcity and hunger, the memories of random cruelty and betrayal that become common among people in primal survival mode don’t just fade when a war ends. And in a society already as haunted by terror and instability as Stalin’s USSR was before the war, the trauma just compounded, wormed its way through our baby-boomer generation, and through their kids too. Pride in the victory over Hitler was of existential importance, a sort of central organizing factor for Russians’ sense of themselves—especially as the country they had fought to defend collapsed less than 50 years later.
