I was born in the USSR, where the Great Patriotic War was part of the country’s terrifying history. But I don’t recall anyone back then trying to glorify it and shouting “We can do it again.” They did heroize it—yes—and films often added notes of humor, without which, perhaps, war is impossible to endure. Yet they didn’t bombard us with rah-rah patriotism. Apparently because in every family the memory of those times was still fresh. Parents or grandparents remembered that war; many families had lost loved ones.
Then it was also shown from very frightening angles, like the documentary Triumph Over Violence or Elem Klimov’s acclaimed and very heavy Come and See.
Only they didn’t bring to the fore the flip side of any war—that in war there are no absolutely good and absolutely bad. War is blood, brutality, and sheer meanness on both sides; only the degree varies. Yes, many knew about “trophies” taken out from occupied territories, but that wasn’t considered looting, and they certainly didn’t make films about it. In one way or another, war also harmed the civilian population—and by no means only the enemy’s; it’s enough to read the recollections of the partisan movement in Belarus (a few years ago, incidentally, eyewitnesses were still alive).
And then suddenly everything became permissible: the real participants in those events began to pass away with age, but the victory in that war became the main political linchpin. And torrents of “real” books and films poured out—about NKVD squadrons supposedly shooting everyone in the back en masse, about child saboteurs supposedly hurled as cannon fodder at the Germans—and in general, all sorts of nastiness suddenly became fair game to tell.
Of course, some facts existed, but they were blown up to unimaginable proportions. Or some fact would be tightened to an absurd extreme that real life no longer had anything to do with.
At the same time, it was far more valuable to hear war recollections from those who were actually there. Those who could truly tell not fairy tales, but the truth—including the kind it wasn’t customary to speak about out loud.
Leonid Rabichev’s book War Excuses Everything is a book in which an artist and poet tells about his youth, when he suddenly left his institute, finished training school, and went to the front as a communications lieutenant. And it is positioned precisely as the truth about the war—the kind it wasn’t customary to talk about. Because “war excuses everything.”
At the same time, this isn’t only about the war itself. The author also writes about his first creative successes within the Brik family circle and the aspiring writers they nurtured. About the complications of love and relationships. Yet the main theme is still the war and the people in it.
Rabichev doesn’t try to glorify the war; he talks about everyday life, where there was plenty of slapdash chaos in preparation and provisioning—when it wasn’t considered shameful to steal materials from neighboring units in order to carry out one’s own commander’s orders (years go by, and nothing seems to change, it seems). About relationships with women who suddenly found themselves surrounded by a great many men “starved for affection.”
About “field wives,” who were far from always asked whether they wanted to become wives. About the NKVD, where, as it turns out, there were also understanding people who could distinguish a scoundrel’s denunciation from a real danger (and not just mow everyone down on the spot with a machine gun). About an airdrop that was suddenly met with hostility by the recently “liberated brotherly Belarusians” in the western regions of present-day Belarus.
And most importantly—the reason everyone mentions this book—about the savage atrocities of Soviet soldiers, which are in no way better than the atrocities of the SS. He devotes considerable attention to the topic of the rape and brutal murder of German women, including adolescents and even children. He recounts numerous instances in which he witnessed such atrocities, and at times also made use of improvised “brothels” of German girls who sold their bodies for food.
It is precisely this fragment of the book that provokes the most heated debates among readers. On the one hand, I know that incidents of rape and even certain atrocities did take place. Unfortunately, this is war, which lets the basest impulses spill out, and the right kind of propaganda allows you to see in the enemy nation not people but something dehumanized (Philip Zimbardo writes very well about this in his book The Lucifer Effect; he’s the author of the Stanford Prison Experiment).
On the other hand, the author cites an awful lot of such instances, as if he even savors all the vileness he describes, pushing it to extremes I don’t want to believe. Because it’s terrifying if an army of liberators really allowed itself such things. He cites cases bordering on mass rapes and executions of women, their relatives, and children. I remember seeing that only in ghastly films about fascists or Teutons.
What’s interesting is that this part is criticized even by historians, who find inconsistencies in the author’s “recollections” with his actual combat path and with the facts and places he writes about in the book.
But the current war of Russia in Ukraine has also shown how low people can sink in war, to the basest abominations. And it’s terrifying if that’s exactly what some want to “repeat.”
Overall, the book is interesting as a memoir of youth and war, but I would still approach some of it with a bit of skepticism. It feels as though, closer to old age, the author decided to add a little “spice” on the topic of a fashionable trend. In any case, I very much want to believe that the liberator country I was told about in childhood did not descend to such things on a mass scale—and that if such incidents did occur, they were punished under wartime law, not encouraged by the command, as the book suggests.
My rating: 4/5
