After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, the Soviet troops did little but retreat until reaching Moscow. They were prepared for attack but not for a retreat, so the losses were massive. Stalin ordered his secret police divisions to stand behind the regular troops and shoot anybody who took a step back. But it wasn’t helping much. Soviet soldiers were still running away.
At the height of the panic and the terror the retreat was creating, a story appeared in a popular newspaper about 28 heroic Soviet soldiers who entered into battle with a vastly superior German battalion and chose to die, all 28 of them, but not take a single step backwards. The story went what today we’d call viral. Everybody reprinted it. The Soviet people were weeping over the touching last words of the 28 fallen heroes. It didn’t occur to anybody to ask – or at least not publicly – how the journalists could have known the last words of the 28 soldiers if nobody had survived.
A cultish following of the 28 heroes sprang up. They were posthumously awarded the highest Soviet military honor: the title of the Heroes of the Soviet Union. City streets were named after them. Schoolchildren memorized their names and swore to be just like them.
And then the dead heroes started surfacing very much alive and decidedly not heroic. The very first one to be found had actually defected to the Nazis and become a Polizei, which was hands-down the worst thing a Soviet person could be at that time. The second fallen hero had become a POW, which was the second worst thing to be in the USSR. All of the magically revived men were aware of their enormous Facebook following, or I mean, their heroic status and kept a copy of the book that had been written about their feat.
An investigation was conducted in 1948, and the journalist who originally published the story confessed that he had invented the whole thing. But the cult of the heroic 28 did not abate. It flourished and expanded until in 1988 another investigation was conducted. It confirmed that the story has indeed been 100% fabricated.
But the hero worship did not abate. Last week, Russia’s Minister of Culture declared anybody who doubted a single word of the original story about the 28 heroes was a traitor to Russia and a Nazi. The long-debunked story from 1942 is still alive and well.
So please let’s abandon the narcissistic myth that we are such special snowflakes who have invented a preference for pleasing stories over reality. Remember Cervantes’s Don Quixote? Two parts, 1200 pages, the first European novel, an international bestseller at the time of publication in 1605 and 1615? The power of fiction and the way people choose stories over reality is what the whole thing is about.
And remember the Bible and the Koran? Those works of literature took off like no YouTube channel ever will. For thousands of years people trust these texts over anything else in the world. That’s real power. And in the meanwhile, we are going on and on about some dumb Facebook stories like their authors have just invented the concept of the power of the word. As if thousands of years ago people didn’t already know that
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
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