War and Remembrance
When Arsenyev sends another young girl named Natasha back to 1941, it is decidedly not to fight in World War II. Certainly, her age and gender make her an unlikely combatant, but that is presumably not the only reason she isn’t sent to the front lines. Her purpose is to prevent war rather than wage it, and her journey depends on the efficiency of the “great man” school of history: all she need do is influence one key figure (in this case, Hitler), and Natasha’s mission is accomplished.
Natasha is far from the only hero(ine) whose travels through time bring her face-to-face with one of the key figures of World War II, as Lukyanenko’s Stalin informs the young pioneer in the story with which the present chapter opened. But such meetings are not the most common feature of a 1940s setting. On the whole, Time Crashers who end up in World War II are there to wage war rather than prevent it, whether as infantry on the front, as drivers of time-traveling tanks, or as fighter pilots defending the motherland. World War II is the site of action.
Given the human toll suffered by the Soviet Union, along with the justifiable pride in the defeat of the Nazi invaders, this should come as no surprise. It is also consistent with one of the functions of World War II in Soviet postwar mass culture: the “Great Patriotic War” was one of the few settings that justified the representation of action, violence, and bloodshed. As such, it was a rare outlet for narrative heroic fantasy, while also reinforcing the general militarization of adventure tales in Soviet times. In the absence of superhero or vigilante stories and the scarcity of espionage films and novels, the military played an outsize role in male-oriented entertainment. Moreover, service in the armed forces was technically mandatory for all adult Soviet men (even if many of the privileged found their ways around it), which mean that the military formed the basis of a kind of masculine lingua franca. Since the Soviet collapse, adventure stories, like other entertainments, have significantly diversified, but the role of the military remains pronounced.
So when men are sent back to the Great Patriotic War, they fight. And, for the most part, they fight well, which in itself is an important point. Dropping men from present-day Russia onto the battlefields of World War II could yield a variety of results, but it is worth thinking about what these stories are not doing. It would be no stretch to imagine a masculinist morality tale about out-of-shape, effete "office plankton" rediscovering their manhood while saving the motherland. The perennial anxieties about Soviet or Russian masculinity could easily express themselves through such a story, whether they be the Brezhnev-era "crisis of manhood" analyzed by Mark Dumancic in Men out of Focus or the 1990s compensatory masculinity I discuss in Overkill. By the twenty-first century, the discursive work of propping up Russian masculinity has been done. When twenty-first-century Russian men end up in World War II, they are quite capable of fighting. Instead, they have other lessons to learn.
Note:
Cartoon from Alexei Vyazovsky’s site here. Author unknown.