During the long decades of the Cold War, both the United States and
the Soviet Union downplayed the role of the other power in the defeat
of Nazi Germany. To be sure, the victorious wartime alliance became a
convenient reference point in the rhetoric accompanying the policies
of peaceful coexistence and detente in the 1960s and 1970s. But each
side's school curricula, press, and popular culture cannot be said to
have given historical life to the military successes of the other
ally, victories which, at the time, occasioned celebration and
congratulations on the home fronts. The reasons for this amnesia need
no elaboration in an abstract. The alliance was a marriage forced by
necessity; in Gleb Struve's striking formula, it was no more
than a co-belligerency
directed against the Third Reich, after
which the victors pursued their own geopolitical agendas. However, as
the United States and post-Soviet Russia now engage in a partnership
beset by thorny misunderstandings and unreal expectations, we should
look anew at the two European fronts in that epic struggle between
1941 and 1945, and artistic representation can be of significant help
in the task. This paper will analyze the depiction of World War II in
Vasilij Aksenov's
Aksenov focuses powerfully on the unique savagery of the fighting on the Eastern Front, due largely to the enemy's doctrine of Aryan supremacy over Slavs and the Jews living in the Soviet Union. At the same time, though, the author gives us the tragic story of how the Russians then victimized their Slavic neighbors to the West. Notwithstanding Aksenov's understandable preoccupation with the Eastern Front, the novel throbs with the sense that the world is at war, and it sympathetically—and, often, ironically—attends to the important military operations in North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and the Pacific.
Steven Spielberg's film