The Diamond Eye

While the conflict most Western audiences know as World War II began in September 1939 with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the events of The Diamond Eye demonstrate that the Soviet war experience had its own turning points. In August 1939, the foreign ministers of the USSR and Germany, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed a nonaggression pact with secret protocols ceding Polish territory to the Soviet Union and recognizing Soviet rights to the Baltic states. Most historians agree that Stalin intended the pact as a measure of temporary security, as he had also considered an alliance with France and Britain. The pact ran counter to the animosity between the two nations during the 1930s, and territorial disputes and other issues occurred prior to Hitler’s decision to invade in the summer of 1941.

Stalin and his advisors were stunned by the invasion; likewise, in the novel, Mila and her friends are preparing for vacation rather than hostilities. The beginning of Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler called his invasion, marked the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against fascism.

The phrase evokes the “Patriotic” or “Fatherland” war of the 1810s, when Napoleon’s empire was tsarist Russia’s adversary. This explains Quinn’s artistic choice to have Kostia carry a copy of War and Peace. The conflict was a full-scale national mobilization and a struggle for national survival, and the war years prompted a waning of Stalin’s personality cult and a focus on heroism and the nation. This included a rapprochement between the secular Soviet state and the Orthodox church, which allowed religion to function as a symbol of national unity and the war itself as a sacred undertaking.

Mila’s life story and war record, which Quinn takes from the real Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s memoir, reflect the difficulty and uncertainty in the first two years of the war, when the United States was just emerging from years of relative isolationism. Much of the novel is taken from history, including Vartanov, Maria, and Mila’s romance with Lyonya Kitsenko, as well as the success of her international tour. Mila’s obsession with the outcome of Stalingrad reflects that the German surrender there would make a critical turning point in the war, signaling that the Allies would likely prevail against Hitler’s war machine.

Quinn positions Mila as relatively liberal—open to Kostia’s desire to defect and focused on her home rather than on support for Stalin or communism. Quinn also stresses that she is convinced of the overall authenticity of Pavlichenko’s memoir and of its author’s fundamental humanity even as she produced the memoir under censorship constraints. Public veneration of the war and its veterans began in earnest in the Brezhnev era and has continued under Putin. Laudatory articles about Mila can be found in Russian mass media as recently as 2021.

As Quinn notes in the Afterword, Pavlichenko’s historical memoir takes on new weight in light of the 2022 invasion. It would not be unusual for a Russophone person from Kyiv, especially the child of an NKVD (the Soviet Union’s interior ministry) officer, as Mila was, to profess a Russian cultural and political allegiance rather than a Ukrainian one. Ukrainian culture and overt nationalism were increasingly delicate political topics in the 1930s Soviet Union, with significant struggles over language and literary politics and repression of some artists and writers. Future historians will likely note that Pavlichenko has been claimed by both countries, with historical contestation renewed and complicated by early 21st-century conflicts.