Hongjun

The Red Army appears in the novel less as an active organization than as a historical presence woven into family photographs, remembered funerals, and changing public accounts of military history. These references connect Soviet-era institutions to Sergeyich’s private memories while showing how the past is repeatedly reinterpreted amid the current war.

Historical Background

An explanatory note places Defender of the Fatherland Day in a longer Soviet and Russian tradition: the holiday was formerly known as Red Army Day and Soviet Army and Navy Day, and its origins are traced to the Russian Civil War. The note also distinguishes the holiday’s continued celebration in Russia and several other former Soviet republics from its absence in Ukraine. This compressed history makes the Red Army part of a contested inheritance rather than a neutral backdrop.

A second note recalls Iona Yakir, a respected Red Army commander whose military reforms were recognized in the Soviet Union and abroad. Yakir was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1937 during the Great Purge. His fate places the army’s institutional history alongside the political repression that reached its own senior ranks: military distinction offered no protection from Stalin’s purges.

Family Memory and Everyday Life

Sergeyich’s family album carries the Red Army’s era into domestic memory without turning it into a formal history. Looking through photographs spanning his father’s postwar years and Sergeyich’s own life before the current war, he recalls that his father loved light machinery but earned his living operating heavy equipment. His father feared that the unwieldy Kamaz lorries might cause him to run someone over; the scooter with a sidecar, by contrast, made him happy. He sometimes rode it to the hospital to collect his wife after her work managing bed linens. The contrast between hazardous labor and the pleasure of the scooter gives the family past its own scale, distinct from official accounts of military power.

The photographs also preserve the parents’ working lives and the wear those jobs left on them. Sergeyich’s mother handled linens that returned from patients who had recovered or died, were cleaned and disinfected, and went back onto hospital beds. His father’s experience of heavy machinery and his mother’s hospital work are remembered as the circumstances of ordinary people who lived through the postwar period—not as a parade of military events. The narrator notes that the parents died before the current war and lie side by side behind the bombed-out church, a personal and local burial place that brings the album’s past into the violence of the present.

War, Commemoration, and Political Language

Sergeyich’s memory of a villager returned from the Afghan War offers a direct contrast between older funeral practice and a later roadside welcome for a fallen soldier. At the earlier funeral, the village gathered for cemetery speeches, wreaths, and rifle fire, but no one knelt. The dead man’s mother tried to fall onto the grave; relatives and friends kept her upright and led her away. Remembering that ceremony after the later act of kneeling, Sergeyich finds the two dead soldiers merging in his thoughts. The comparison makes commemoration itself a measure of historical change: the Red Army-era past is remembered through a village’s grief, while the present war alters how the living publicly respond to the dead.

The novel also places historical memory beside competing media accounts of the current conflict. In one domestic scene, Sergeyich and his hostess watch television commentators blame support from America and Europe for holding Ukraine together. On another channel, a report shows a green-faced politician claiming the right to her opinion; Sergeyich recognizes her as a local figure. Later, when a reporter asks why he came from Donbas, he begins by describing the war as a conflict between Ukrainians on one side and Russians on the other. A young crew member stops the interview and instructs him to repeat the answer without naming Russians; Sergeyich then refers instead to separatists from Karuselino. His account of his damaged car is also curtailed, and the crew chooses footage of the bees and the axe mark rather than a live interview. These scenes show how public explanations of war are edited and redirected, while the Red Army’s historical presence remains part of the larger contest over how military and political history is named.

Narrative Significance

The Red Army’s references are dispersed across explanatory notes, photographs, family recollection, and funeral memory rather than gathered into a single institutional portrait. That structure connects national history to the intimate evidence Sergeyich handles and remembers: an old family album, his father’s work and fears, and the village’s changing ways of mourning. The result is a layered legacy—military tradition, political repression, ordinary postwar life, and a past repeatedly brought to bear on the present.