The 2024 Hubert Butler Essay Prize winner
Like Hubert Butler I spent some formative years in the Russia n Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. I was there some 50 years after Butler, so the company I kept was different to his. Whereas Butler had befriended the likes of socialist-realist writer Leonid Leonov, one of the founders of the Soviet Writers Union, and had witnessed at first hand the revolutionary fervour of the late 1920s , my own friends all those decades later were more likely to be understated dissident types.
Hubert Butler Essay Prize judges and winners, from left: Catriona Crowe, Roy Foster, runner-up Niamh Cullen, guest speaker Olivia O’Leary, winner Conor Daly and Nicky Grene. Photograph: John D Kelly I had not realised, until I heard him speak, that all the “good Germans” had ended up in the DDR and that the Hitlerites had all been given refuge by the capitalists. The East Berlin worker uprising of 1953, as it turned out, had been a capitalist plot and Walter Ulbricht had been right to crush it. The student was enjoying his studies in Moscow – a wonderful city, wonderful people - and I would enjoy mine too. The engineer and his wife said nothing.
Grossman’s novel presents Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s resistance as a struggle between two brutal dictatorships – a totalitarian Nazi Germany and an equally totalitarian Soviet Union – in which all humanity is the victim. Grossman lays bare the servility of Soviet timeservers and names the holocaust as an event of particularly Jewish suffering, which appears to negate the promises of Christianity.
The “patriotic” strand, by contrast, effectively seeks to rehabilitate and lionise the roles of Stalin and the “Russian” people in defeating Nazism during the Great Fatherland War, against all the odds, and thus effectively saving humanity from fascism.
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