Upon exiting the station, the first thing you come across is a plaque. “The sun will not burn and the rain will not erase the memory of the deeds of the fallen heroes”. There are no dates, but the symbol of the hammer and sickle is impressed above the writing. Next to it are a plastic slide and a wooden walker. When the warm weather arrives, the children run around that marble slab.
By dint of being told that the Russians live as if they were inside a besieged citadel, «in a kind of permanent Smolensk», we went there. The thick walls that still partially surround this quiet provincial town have made it synonymous with a fortress. To understand how much war weighs on the spirit of deep Russia, this is the ideal destination. A short distance from the border with Belarus, four hundred kilometers from the Ukrainian front, Smolensk was the gateway to all the Western powers that had made up their minds to reach Moscow.Its strategic position on the main south-north and west-east routes has always been a curse. Napoleon’s troops besieged the inhabitants by burning houses and villages. Stalin decided to sacrifice half a million soldiers in two months of battle against the Wermacht to buy the time needed to fortify Moscow.
“If there’s a war going on around here, sooner or later it’s here.” The appointment with the two leaders of the opposition party Yabloko is at the Mayakovsky bar. In provincial Russian cities, the toponymy of the center is almost obligatory. Lenin Street, Marx Street, October Revolution Street. The highest in rank, with the qualification of regional secretary, is Sergey Revenko, a man in his 60s who has no qualms about confessing that he is “fucking afraid to speak”. His young colleague, the local contact person, is more relaxed, but no names. “When the columns of tanks and military trucks arrived, some of them even broke down in the middle of the city, we wondered what was going on. Then we understood. He was a few days away from the invasion of Ukraine.’
AN ENGINEER TRIED TO REBELL BY SHOWING A SIGN. THEN THE SILENCE: «NOW THEY TREATE HIM LIKE A CRAZY»
The exercise of dissent is almost impossible in the Russian metropolises which for better or worse still remain on the radar of the West. Imagine here in the province, where the ring surrounding the center is covered with a giant Z, on the wall of the Katrin warehouses, painted on the electrical switchboards, on the shop windows. “It’s practically impossible,” says a despondent Revenko. “My job is self-censorship. I have to protect myself and others.” Polls say that in proportion to its three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, Smolensk is one of the most favorable cities for Vladimir Putin and his wars. “You will never know the truth. A few years ago, I too was answering questions from operators. Now as soon as I hear “it’s for a survey…”, I close the communication. We know how it works, and what we risk. Many of us have also stopped watching television. Because it’s scary to see how our society is reduced». Revenko’s elderly parents watch her instead. “And they believe everything he says,” he adds in an increasingly disconsolate tone.
Smolensk also had its little rebellion. One person. Vitaly Tsitsurov is a 32-year-old electrical engineer. Until recently, it appeared every afternoon under the walls, in one of the busiest places in the city. In his hands he was holding a sign that said “No”, with ellipsis in the middle that made the word war indecipherable, of which only the last syllable was reported. For this ploy, he was acquitted in court, thus gaining some national notoriety. In the first weeks, the reactions of his fellow citizens were contemptuous. Someone denounced, someone else insulted him. “Then indifference took over,” the two leaders of Yabloko recount. “And it was even worse. He was alone. He had no following. They began to treat him like the village idiot, an isolated madman to be laughed at.’
The association of USSR nostalgics, which has its headquarters in viale Lenin, is responsible for collecting donations for Russian soldiers fighting in the Donbass. The bulletin board hanging in the window struggles to contain the list of donations. Everyone gives what he can. Soap, shaving cream, dried apples, packets of cigarettes, corned beef, beans and peas, heavy wool socks. “If you have nothing, write a letter to our boys, you’ll do something welcome.” A continuous celebration of war is going on in Smolensk. It looks like a city that lives only on this, that can only claim its war memory. Four different museums. On the Avenue of Heroes stands the huge statue of the tsarist eagle grabbing the arm of a rooster fighter, or rather French, in memory of the battle of 1812. Along the gardens, there are the faces and names of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War. An eternal flame burns beneath the walls in front of the grave of Sergeant Mikhail Yegorov, one of the two soldiers immortalized in the historic photo of the red flag hoisted over the Reichstag.
THE NEW RUSSIAN RELIGION IS THE PAST, THE ONLY CURRENCY THAT CAN BE EXPENDED IN A PLACE WHERE THE AVERAGE SALARY IS A THIRD OF THAT OF MOSCOW
The new Russian religion is the cult of the past imposed by Putin on his nation. In Smolensk, a well-known joke about the continuous celebration of the Great Patriotic War seems to be taking shape. Two friends meet and one asks the other: Volodia, what’s new, except that 78 years ago we won? As you turn, there is an invitation to battle, for the glory of the soldiers and the nation. “Remember! As long as memory lives, our people live” reads the pulpit of a statue in the center of one of the many places that celebrate the victory against the Nazis. The boys who slide from the snowdrifts with their inflatables are peremptorily asked by the policemen to avoid shouts and shouts. Silence suits sacred places, and in this city there is one on every corner.
“We have the country in our blood, it’s a genetic fact.” The woman who has just uttered this sentence is a kind-hearted person who truly believes what she says. Julia Ivantsova heads the most important local online publication. Readovka67 is a name that derives from a park in Smolensk and has become the brand name of a chain of Telegram channels specializing in regional information. “Let it be clear that we fully support the Special Military Operation.” According to some Ukrainian and Polish news sites, this is also testified by the fact that some former employees of Evgenij Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Brigade, have been hired by the publishing group of the same name.
After entering the editorial office, we were asked for our documents and we were made to sit in a bare room, furnished only by a map of Ukraine. Julia looked very flustered. From her corridor, came her excited voice of her asking someone for instructions on how to behave. Exam passed, apparently. The director came back and offered to be our guide. “We are a border region, we must be very careful” was the explanation of his initial behavior. His Smolensk is a city that is still struggling to recover from the collapse of the 90s. “We are isolated and quiet, but proud of our history.” The past seems to be the only expendable currency, in a place where the average monthly salary is 25,000 rubles, three times less than what is earned in Moscow. Putin is not to blame, who for her remains “the man who fixed this country”. Blame America, the Ukrainian Nazis, the outside world. Against which all that remains is to oppose the only wealth that one has been convinced to have. History.
THE DIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM: “WE ALWAYS FELT AT WAR, IT’S THE CONDITION OF LIFE IN WHICH WE WERE EDUCATED”
Walking, we arrived at the museum of the Great Patriotic War, where he has just opened an exhibition called Contrast, which the curators intend is a fair of the horrors of Ukraine. An initiative also sponsored by Readovka67, which Julia cares deeply about. At the inauguration she brought her two children, barely teenagers. “But it is a project aimed above all at those who have not yet understood the seriousness of the situation”. This is where they wanted to take us. The ground floor room is the final destination of our guided tour. “Let’s see how the Ukrainian Nazi criminals are regarded as heroes.” “Here we turn to the war booty obtained from the 144th division stationed in Smolensk. Weapons of American production have been stolen from Ukrainian soldiers. One wall has been renamed Avenue of the Angels of Donbass. There is an arch of flowers at the foot of which are placed about twenty teddy bears. «To remember the children killed by the Ukrainian Nazis during these years» .
Dmitry Tikhomirov is the curator of the entire museum, and speaks of it as an extension of his body. «Beginning with me, every employee who works here does it by personal history». On the showcases dedicated to the resistance of Smolensk during the Great Patriotic War there is a photo of the partisan grandmother, the soldier grandfather and another relative interned in a Nazi camp. When we pass the large period photo of the post office building in Smolensk over which the Soviet flag was re-hoisted in 1943, this mustachioed man with a military bearing and affable air smiles as if he had just scored a goal. “I hadn’t been born yet, but this moment has been told to me so many times that I feel like I’ve lived it.” It’s not the past, it’s his life today. He stops in front of the bulletin board where two human skin gloves are displayed, as the caption reads, brought back from a Nazi concentration camp. “Putin doesn’t want to let the spirit of Nazism out of the bottle. If Russia fails, the Ukrainian Nazis will start making gloves out of human skin again.”. We look at him, and he notices our skepticism.
In his reply are the seeds of difference between us and them. World War II for the West is relegated to textbooks. In Russia it has become an obsession induced by Kremlin propaganda. Those twenty-six million deaths that the Duma increases in number every year are the basis of Russia’s “gigantic moral right”, as Putin defines it, to defend one’s positions, even when they are indefensible. “These photos of soldiers are not abstract objects. They are people I met when they were still alive. You westerners don’t understand that we are different. For you, normality means peace. But for us it is the opposite. We always felt like we were at war. For us it is not a taboo, but a condition of life to which we have been educated”.
It is a home-made museum, built entirely of exhibits about Smolensk, its citizens or its soldiers. Still, something is missing. In the story of the glorious epic of the Great Patriotic War of the city and the region, one important chapter is missing. From the top of the walls, a hill can be seen in the distance. In the plain at its foot is the military airport where the Tupolev carrying the Polish president Lech Kaczynski crashed on 10 April 2010 and 87 members of his government. They all died. Even the hope of reconciliation between two countries that hate each other died under a pile of conspiracy theories about the incident.
The Polish delegation was to visit the memorial inaugurated ten years earlier in the village of Katyn, which is just twenty kilometers from Smolensk. In 1940, in the woods of that hill, twenty-two thousand Polish officers, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals were killed on orders from Stalin and the Politburo, after being taken prisoner following the Russian invasion of Poland, daughter of the Nazi-Soviet pact signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and USSR Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Katyn’s shame is over there, well hidden from sight and memory by a stand of trees. In Smolensk and its museums there isn’t a plaque or sign that reminds her.