“There is a memory that protects the days // And a memory that is the leader of the age,” Arseny Tarkovsky wrote. That’s true: the national memory is our cultural code, which no one can crack or break. And it so happened that the memory of the war became the “leader of the age” for the Russian nation. And it is understandable: for Russia the twentieth century began with wars – first the Russo-Japanese War, then the First World War, which was popularly known as the “German War”, and next, no sooner had the country healed the wounds from the Civil War than the Great Patriotic War broke out (the most destructive war that humanity had ever seen).
The new issue of the Russian Mind magazine is dedicated to this most terrible of wars – more precisely, to its fourth year: the year of the liberation of the Soviet Union’s national territory, the year that paved the way for the Victory. By late 1944 the Soviet Army had cleared the country from the Nazi invaders and returned to its state borders. The liberation of Eastern Europe from the Nazis had begun: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia…
Hence the themes of our issue. These are the “Stalin’s ten blows”, the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad, the liberation of right-bank Ukraine and Operation Bagration, which completed the expulsion of the enemy from Belarus. Front-line prose and poetry are not forgotten either: Boris Vasiliev, Yuri Bondarev, Bulat Okudzhava… The work of front-line writers remains relevant today.
We will remember Mikhail Lermontov, whose 210th birth anniversary is celebrated this year, as well as Nicholas Roerich on his 150th birth anniversary, and the wonderful poet of the Yesenin era Nikolai Klyuev.
One of the articles in the history section of this issue is dedicated to the remarkable reformer of Russia Grigory Potemkin. We also include our permanent Orthodox Messenger rubric. Additionally, there are literary pages in the magazine: their authors are Alice Danshokh, Valery Povolyaev and Evgeny Chigrin.
However, the main subject of the new issue remains the events of the fiery year of 1944. These events developed rapidly and shaped the history of both the USSR and other countries for decades. And we can only agree with the academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Eugene Tarle, who wrote that dialectics requires us to look at history from the perspective of 1944.
By Kirill Privalov
