Land of Giants

Russia is home to some of the biggest war memorials in the world. What do they tell us about the nation that built them?

As a historian of the Second World War, I have always struggled with an important problem: how does one explain the sheer scale of that conflict to today's generations? It is tempting to rely on statistics. These certainly sound impressive: more than 100 million soldiers were mobilised during the war; more than 60 million people were killed; and the financial cost of the war was more than $1.6 trillion. But such numbers are meaningless to most people. Who on earth can imagine what $1.6 trillion actually means? Who can picture the reality of 100 million people?

To really understand how vast the war was – not just intellectually, but emotionally – one must turn to other methods. When I travelled to Volgograd in southern Russia recently, I discovered a different way to express the scale of the war: not through words, or statistics, but through art. Volgograd (or Stalingrad, as it was once called) is home to some of the most impressive war memorials I have ever seen. Their defining characteristic is that they are all huge. One cannot stand beside these enormous constructions of metal and stone without experiencing a physical reaction to them. This is not size as an abstract idea: it is size made solidly, touchably real.

The largest and most famous of Volgograd’s monuments stand on top of the city's tallest hill, the Mamayev Kurgan. I visited this place several times while I was there, and each time it felt like I was entering a realm of titans. At the foot of the hill stands a huge sculpture of a bare-chested man clutching a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. He seems to rise out of the very rock, torso rippling, as tall as a three-story building. Beyond him, on either side of the steps that lead to the summit, are relief sculptures of giant soldiers springing out of the ruined walls as if in the midst of battle. Further up the hill is the gigantic figure of a grieving mother, more than twice the size of my house. She is hunched over the body of her dead son, sobbing into a large pool of water, called the “Lake of Tears”.

The dozens of statues arranged in this park are all giants: not one of them is under 6 metres tall, and some of them depict heroes who are three or four times that size. And yet they are dwarfed by the single statue that rises above them all, on the summit of the hill. Here, overlooking the Volga River, stands a colossal representation of Mother Russia beckoning to her children to come and fight for her. Her mouth is open in battle-cry, her hair and dress fluttering in the wind; and in her right hand she holds a vast sword pointing up into the sky. From her feet to the tip of her sword she stands 85 metres high. She is nearly twice as tall, and forty times as heavy, as the Statue of Liberty in New York City. When she was first unveiled in 1967, she was the largest statue in the world.

This memorial, entitled “The Motherland Calls!”, is one of the most iconic statues in the whole of Russia. It was the creation of Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, who spent years designing and building it. It contains around 2,500 metric tonnes of metal, and 5,500 tonnes of concrete. The sword alone weighs 14 tonnes. So huge was this statue that Vuchetich was obliged to collaborate with a structural engineer, Nikolai Nikitin, to ensure that it did not collapse under its own weight. Holes had to be drilled into the sword to reduce the threat of the wind catching it and swaying the whole structure.

Were this monument in Italy or France it would appear absurdly grandiose, but here on the banks of the Volga it feels quietly appropriate. The battle that took place here in 1942 dwarfs anything that happened in China or in Western Europe. Soldiers fought from street to street, and even from room to room, in a landscape of shattered houses. Over the course of five months around two million men lost their lives, their health, or their liberty. The combined casualties of this one battle were greater than the casualties that Britain and America together suffered during the entire war.

As one stands on the summit of Mamayev Kurgan in the shadow of the gigantic statue of the Motherland, one can feel the weight of all this history. It is oppressive even for a foreigner. But for many Russians this place is sacred. The word “Kurgan” in Russian means a tumulus or burial mound. This hill is an ancient site dedicated to a 14th century warlord, but in the wake of the greatest battle of the greatest war in history, it now carries a new symbolism. This place became a graveyard in 1942, and an unknown number of soldiers and civilians are buried here. Even today, when walking on the hill, it is still possible to find fragments of metal and bone buried in the soil. The Motherland statue stands, both figuratively and literally, upon a mountain of corpses.

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But there is also something else going on here. The scale of the war in Russia is one reason why the monuments on Mamayev Kurgan are so huge, but it is not the only reason – in fact, it is not even the main reason. The statues of muscular heroes and weeping mothers might be huge, but it is the giantess on the summit of the hill that dominates them all. It is important to remember that this is a representation not of the war, but of the Motherland. Its message is simple: no matter how great the battle, and no matter how great the enemy, the Motherland is greater still. Her colossal size is supposed to be a comfort to all the struggling soldiers and weeping mothers, a reminder that for all their sacrifice, they are at least a part of something powerful and magnificent. This is the true meaning of Mamayev Kurgan.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the people of the Soviet Union did not have much to console them. Not only were they traumatised by loss, but they also faced an uncertain future. Russians did not benefit economically from the war as the Americans did: the violence had left their economy in ruins. Nor did Russians win any new freedoms. Josef Stalin was a cruel leader, and after the war he began to terrorise his own people once again. Life in Russia in the late 1940s was unremittingly hard.

The only consolation offered to Russian and other Soviet people was that their country had proven itself at last to be a truly great nation. In 1945, the USSR possessed the largest army the world has ever seen. It dominated not only the vast Eurasian landmass, but also the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Second World War had not only restored the country's borders, but extended them, both to the west and to the east. Before the war, the Soviet Union had been at best a second rate player on the world stage. After the war, it was a superpower.

The Motherland statue on Mamayev Kurgan was designed to be proof of all this. It was built in the 1960s, when the USSR was at the height of its strength. It stood as a warning to anyone who dared attack the Soviet Union, but also as a symbol of reassurance to the Soviet people. The giant, it declared, would always protect them.

For the Russian citizens who first stood on the summit of this hill with the Motherland statue at their backs, the vistas looked endless. Everything to the west of them for a thousand miles was Soviet territory. To the east they could travel through nine time zones without once leaving their country. Even the heavens seemed to belong to them: the first man in space was a Russian, and the first woman too.

Since those days, Russia has never stopped building war memorials. Many of them are on a similar scale to those in Volgograd. In 1974, for example, a 42-metre high statue of a Soviet soldier was erected in Murmansk, in memory of the men who died during the defence of Arctic Russia. In the early 1980s, when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, a second Motherland statue was erected in Kiev. (Like the statue on Mamayev Kurgan, it too was designed by Vuchetich. Including its plinth, it stands over 100 metres tall.) And in 1985, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, a 79-metre-high victory monument was erected in Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia.

All of these statues and monuments are meant to be symbols of power and confidence. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, they began to look more like hollow relics of past glories.

But this did not stop the Russian authorities from building them. Far from it: Russia has never stopped celebrating the glories of the Second World War. In 1995, for example, a brand new “Museum of the Great Patriotic War” was opened in Moscow. In front of it stands a monument that is even taller than the statue on Mamayev Kurgan: in fact, at 141.8 metres tall, it is the tallest Second World War memorial anywhere in the world.

Other monuments followed. In April 2007, Belgorod, Kursk and Oryol were declared “Cities of Military Glory” because of the role they had played during the war, and brand new obelisks were erected in each place. The following October, five more cities were given this title, and five more obelisks erected. Within just five years, more than forty cities across Russia were honoured in this way, with brand new monuments springing up from Vyborg to Vladivostok.

Why do the Russians continue to commemorate the war in this way? More than 70 years have passed since the end of the war – is it not time to lay it to rest?

I can think of two possible reasons why the Russians cannot let go of their seemingly limitless addiction to massive Second World War monuments. The first is that the trauma caused by the war was so great that Russians simply cannot forget it. They feel compelled to tell the stories of the war again and again, in the same way that individuals who have experienced trauma often have flashbacks. These new memorials, each one seemingly bigger than the last, are Russia's way of coming to terms with its past.

The second reason has as much to do with the present as with the past. Russia is not the country that it once was. It has lost an empire, and not yet found a new role for itself in the world. This, in its own way, has also been a trauma. Madeleine Albright, who was America's Secretary of State at the end of the 1990s, tells the story of meeting a Russian man who complained that “We used to be a superpower, but now we're Bangladesh with missiles.” For decades, national greatness was the only consolation for all the loss that men like him had suffered throughout the century. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, even this had been taken away from him.

For many Russians, the building of war memorials serves as a reminder of the status that their country once had, and perhaps also gives a sense of hope that, one day soon, Russia might rise again. The bigger the monument, the greater the sense of pride – and the greater the nostalgia.

This too can be felt at Mamayev Kurgan. If you climb the hill today, you will see people from all over Russia, who come to this place to pay their respects. Families bring children to teach them about the heroism of their great-grandfathers who fought in the war. Young women pose for photos in front of the Motherland statue, and carry flowers to lay at the feet of the monuments. Military men come in full dress uniform, their medals clanking as they climb the steps.

One way or another, all of these people are living in the shadow of the great statue that stands on top of the hill. The Motherland continues to beckon to them – to their pride, and their sorrow – just as she once beckoned to those who died for her during the Second World War.