Some 20 years ago, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the late Russian military historian Aleksandr Kavtaradze was invited to give a series of talks at a university in New England. The obligatory campus tour took him to the institution’s Memorial Quadrangle, a monument to the Great War. Flanked by a neoclassical dining hall inscribed with the names of such battles as Cambrai, Château Thierry, Ypres and Somme, it features a cenotaph dedicated to former students “who gave their lives that freedom might not perish from the earth.” Kavtaradze stopped and gazed in utter astonishment at the grandiose complex. “In my country we have no such monuments to the First World War,” he muttered sardonically.
Unlike Canada, whose collective memory is seared by the sanguinary confrontation a hundred years ago, in Russia it was “the forgotten war” until very recently. Soviet historians saw the...
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye is a professor of Russian history at Brock University. His most recent book is Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (Yale University Press, 2010). He is currently writing a diplomatic and cultural study of 19th-century tsarist expansion in Turkestan titled Russia’s Great Game: The Struggle for Mastery in Central Asia, and is one of the editors of Russia’s Great War and Revolution, a major international project to re-examine the First World War’s Eastern Front.
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