4 - Fathers, Sons, and the Imperial Spirit: The Wartime Homo Sacer’s Competitive Victimhood

Summary

In this chapter we will return to the wartime sacrificial figures in post-Soviet nationalist literature, specifically in fiction, essays, journalism, and interviews with the popular contemporary writers Zakhar Prilepin, German Sadulaev, and Dmitry Cherkasov against the background of the military conflicts in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and, most recently, in Ukraine. While the figure of a captured partisan, which originated during World War II, continued to serve as a model for the representations of late-Soviet heroes like the flight attendants who were killed during hijackings, the return to military combat created favorable conditions for these authors to revisit one of the figures at the center of the sacrificial mechanism several decades later.

It is important to acknowledge some of the events that influenced post-Soviet nationalist literature that features wartime heroes. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of the satellite states, as well as the lawlessness of the 1990s and the defeat of state ideology that buttressed the people's sense of identity, certainly led to the mainstreaming of Russian and other ethnic nationalisms in the early 2000s. The loss of international prestige, which became especially apparent during the conflict in Yugoslavia, the spread of free market capitalism, which resulted in three defaults of the ruble in the space of a decade, and the acts of terror in Moscow and the provinces in the 1990s all paved the way for the popularity of Putin's tough image and a strongman's tactics as well as a general militarization of the official language and culture. However, it was the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s that provided a watershed moment for portraying the soldier in the official language, literature, and film.

What one observes in contemporary nationalist literature, particularly in the works of Prilepin, is a transformation of the soldier from the heroic captured partisan of World War II to a naive and beleaguered protagonist fighting in Chechnya; it reflects a turn toward a more individualized form of nationalism than that promoted by official Soviet culture.