World War II

World War II is not presented only as distant history: it is the catastrophe against which Eduard Limonov’s birth is dated, the inherited story through which his family explains its survival, and a measure of the soldierly ideals he absorbs as a child. The book calls the conflict the Great Patriotic War when describing Soviet memory, while also showing how individual experiences of the war could differ sharply from the heroic stories told about it.

Birth amid the Battle of Stalingrad

Raya Zybin’s pregnancy coincides almost exactly with the siege of Stalingrad. Eduard is conceived in May 1942, during a month of bitter Soviet defeats, and born on February 2, 1943. The German Sixth Army capitulates twenty days later, as the military balance begins to turn. The chronology gives his birth a public meaning: he is repeatedly told that he is a child of victory, one who would have entered a world of enslavement had the people of Russia not sacrificed their lives to prevent the city bearing Stalin’s name from falling.

That account binds a private beginning to the outcome of a battle. The child’s arrival becomes part of a national story in which the survival of the country and the defeat of Nazi Germany are inseparable. The book also records the later difficulty of holding this story alongside condemnation of Stalin’s tyranny and terror. For Eduard’s generation, Stalin could remain the leader associated with the country’s most tragic hour and with victory, even as his rule was denounced for its violence.

The story of Stalin’s son sharpens that contradiction. When German forces capture Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili and Soviet forces capture Field Marshal Paulus at Stalingrad, the German High Command proposes an exchange. Stalin refuses, saying that he will not exchange field marshals for ordinary lieutenants. Yakov later dies by throwing himself against the electrified barbed-wire fence of his prison camp. In the account passed down around Eduard’s birth, this episode makes the war’s sacrifice both national and familial: victory is honored, but its cost is embodied in a son’s death.

Childhood stories and the absent front

On Red Army Street, children are put to sleep with stories of the Great Patriotic War. Their imagined battlefields fill with collapsing trenches, dead horses, and comrades whose heads are torn away by shells. Eduard is thrilled by the tales, yet notices that his father, Venyamin Savenko, seems embarrassed when Raya tells them. The stories concern Raya’s brother, Eduard’s uncle, rather than Venyamin. The boy does not dare ask whether his father also fought.

He did not. Venyamin served during the war far from the front, while most men of his age had faced death directly. Raya rarely misses a chance to remind him of this difference. The contrast complicates the family’s martial atmosphere: Eduard admires his father’s uniform and weapon, watches him grease his service pistol, and carefully polishes his boots, but the war stories that animate his imagination belong to another man. His early ideal of the soldier therefore forms around both reverence and an unspoken absence.

The book later gives that absence a concise interpretation through Eduard’s writing: men who have looked death in the eye know, because they did not bend, that they are the real thing. Venyamin’s service does not meet that standard. The passage does not erase his wartime role; it shows how the household’s memories turn proximity to combat into a test of masculine worth, leaving a father ashamed and a son without the question he longs to ask.

Conflicting service and moral testimony

A different kind of war memory reaches Eduard through Porphyry, a Ukrainian who began in the Red Army and later joined the Vlasov Army, the White Russian force fighting alongside the Germans. He ended the war guarding a camp in Pomerania, which he describes as a small stalag rather than an extermination camp. He acknowledges having killed several people, without boasting about it. When Eduard admits uncertainty about whether he could do the same, Porphyry tells him that anyone with their back to the wall would act as others do.

The episode offers no simple heroic model. Porphyry’s changing allegiance and blunt account of killing place survival, choice, and violence in the same testimony. His reassurance answers Eduard’s anxiety not with a patriotic story but with the prospect of being forced into action. Against the carefully repeated childhood tales of comradeship and sacrifice, this conversation presents war as an experience that can leave its participants morally compromised and unsure of what they themselves might do.

The book also locates wartime violence in a place Eduard encounters much later. While teaching at the French Cultural Center in Surabaya, he lives and works in a Dutch manor that had served as the Japanese operations headquarters during the occupation. The building is reputed to be haunted by the horrors that occurred there; an exorcist visits twice a year, and caretakers are difficult to hire. The account makes the past persist in the architecture of an apparently beautiful setting, placing the war’s legacy beyond the Soviet front and beyond Eduard’s family history.

The war’s afterlife in historical memory

The narrative places these personal recollections beside the broader struggle over how Soviet history is remembered. It describes a society in which the suppression of memory could make crimes appear never to have happened, and later shows how public openness allowed suppressed accounts to circulate. This discussion is not limited to World War II, but it clarifies the conditions in which a generation could inherit a powerful victory narrative alongside silences, shame, and competing judgments about the state that claimed the victory.

That inheritance also matters to the book’s account of post-Soviet political feeling. Zakhar Prilepin recalls the Soviet childhood of provincial young people as a time when life made sense, and contrasts it with the poverty and humiliation their parents experienced after communism collapsed. This is a broader nostalgia for a lost social order, not a direct recollection of the war. Read alongside the repeated image of Eduard as a child of victory, however, it shows how memories of national endurance can persist within later yearnings for order and dignity.

World War II consequently supplies several measures that do not fit neatly together: national victory and individual death, the soldier’s prestige and the father’s distance from combat, stirring stories of comradeship and an ex-soldier’s matter-of-fact account of killing. The book does not resolve these tensions into a single verdict. Instead, the war returns as a family inheritance and a political memory whose emotional force survives even when the histories attached to it are contested.