COLUMN ONE : Feeling Like Victims, Not Victors : The city that endured the siege of Stalingrad is a sad symbol of how Russia’s war triumph led not to glory and growth but to dictatorship and decay.

In this city once called Stalingrad, where colossal feats of architecture celebrate Russia’s triumph in World War II, monuments more befitting the vanquished now dominate the landscape.

They are the slipshod, five-story apartment houses dubbed “Khrushchoby”--Nikita Khrushchev’s slums--flat-roofed cubes of crooked bricks and crumbling mortar thrown up artlessly in pursuit of Communist notions of progress in the postwar era.

Silent memorials to the slow death of craftsmanship during seven decades of Soviet power, Khrushchoby and dilapidated factories line potholed roads crowded with grime-caked trucks and buses, a vista of failure overriding the proud tributes to victory in this riverfront city.

The awesome “Motherland” statue towering 30 stories above the bleak horizon beckons survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad to remember the grit and determination that propelled them through one of modern history’s most devastating sieges.

But for many in this city synonymous with ruin, recollections of bygone valor do little to blot out the pervasive reminders that today’s Volgograd, like the rest of morose and impoverished Russia, is more a place of victims than of victors.

“We’ve waited all our lives for conditions to get better,” Antonina T. Terasova, a veteran of the siege and a retired doctor, says with resignation. “We were proud of our victory because it was some solace for having lost five years of our lives and so many friends and family.” Today, the 73-year-old ekes out an existence on a pension worth less than $16 a month.

“We no longer feel like winners,” the old woman says sadly, tightening her kerchief against the penetrating wind off the Volga River. “We’ve been cheated. Here at the end of our lives, after years of hard work, we find ourselves in such disgrace. My grown daughter has to come to me for money to buy bread. It’s a shame on all of us that we let this victory become a memory instead of a reward.”

As Russians prepare to mark on May 9 the 50th anniversary of victory--arguably, the greatest achievement during 74 years of Communist rule--some have come to regard it as Pyrrhic.

Sociologists and historians believe that Russia’s development has been stunted by a nationwide superiority complex fostered by a victory that brought Russians no lasting glory because it served to validate Josef Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

When Russia and its Western allies defeated German fascism and Japanese militarism in 1945, their peoples emerged with a sense that not just their armies had won, but also their values, their ideology and their way of life.

While vanquished Germans and Japanese were forced into self-examination as well as a struggle for national survival, vindicated Russians saw no cause for a course correction and plodded on determinedly with dictatorship and decay.

“Before the war and in its earliest stages, Stalin was forced to contemplate his mistakes,” says Col. Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a military adviser to President Boris N. Yeltsin and Russia’s foremost biographer of Stalin.

Among them was the infamous nonaggression pact Stalin entered into with Adolf Hitler, which allowed the Nazi leader to romp over a portion of Poland without hindrance in exchange for Soviet annexation of the rest and of the three Baltic states. Hitler broke the agreement, however, catching Stalin off guard with a massive invasion on June 22, 1941.

“After the victory,” Volkogonov says of Stalin, “he came to a different conclusion, that all the methods he had employed since coming to power (in 1924) were correct--the terror, repression, collectivization, the lies.”

Communism’s misguided quest for absolute control broke down individual initiative, the retired general says, creating an economy in which workers were motivated solely by fear. But even when the terror subsided after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union’s short-lived reform bouts provided no incentive for real labor but plenty “to pretend to work.”

In the late 1980s, as he researched military archives for a 10-volume history of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, Volkogonov was the first figure of authority to accuse Stalin of turning the military victory into moral defeat.

He discovered and disclosed evidence found in long-secret intelligence files documenting Stalin’s 30-year regime of repression in which at least 21 million Soviet citizens were killed in peacetime, in addition to the 27 million who died in the war.

Among the victims of Stalin’s paranoia and desire for totalitarian power were millions of Soviet soldiers who returned from the European war theater or, after Allied liberation, from German war prisons only to be sentenced to execution or Siberian exile.

“Five million who returned immediately vanished to die in the camps,” says historian Roy A. Medvedev, a war veteran and Soviet-era dissident who lives in Moscow. “The losses were staggering. Among the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s there are almost no men left. Think of all the talented scientists and artists and writers who never lived to fulfill their potential.”

Despite the approach of the vaunted anniversary, Medvedev says, “I don’t feel victorious, because as a historian I see the criminal errors that were committed after this war.”

A prominent social commentator, Moskovsky Komsomolets columnist Alexander V. Minkin, believes the war victory also inflated an innate sense of superiority embedded deep in the Russian psyche by virtue of people here being the inhabitants of a vast, powerful and resource-rich land.

The proliferation of gigantic war memorials across the breadth of Russia, lavishly endowed by every city, town and village, testifies to both justified pride and exaggerated self-satisfaction, he says.

“We have suffered from the ‘victor’s syndrome.’ We felt we had won the war, that we didn’t need to listen to anyone,” Minkin says of Russia’s postwar outlook. “We could beat the world. We would fly to space. We had oil, gas, gold and diamonds. We had this victor’s sense of superiority, an attitude of ‘why should we, the winners, work like slaves?’ ”

That expectation of prosperity as a reward for victory--rather than as the fruit of hard labor--nurtured Russia’s transition from Stalinist terror to Brezhnevian sloth, delivering a morally damaged and economically bankrupt society to today’s reformers.

While Stalin and Russian hubris are most often blamed for the poor postwar recovery, Volgograd University history academics note that the staggering damage inflicted by the Nazi invasion that reached about 700 miles into the Soviet heartland and the billions spent in the Cold War arms race exacerbated the fundamental causes of Russia missing out on the spoils of victory.

“History is not always just to those who make it,” observes Vladimir A. Kitaev, a professor of history in this city renamed in 1961 during Khrushchev’s purge of Stalin tributes.

Kitaev describes as “one of history’s many paradoxes” that today’s struggling Russians watch with envy as the nations they defeated prosper. “Ours can be said to have been a Pyrrhic victory, because what did the people get for this?” the professor wonders aloud. “That the government took advantage of the victory to enhance its own power goes without saying.”

Alexander I. Kubyshkin, dean of the university’s history department, accuses Stalin of deliberately destroying the pride and spirit of veterans out of fear they would give rise to a form of independence that would erode his absolute control.

“Stalin was terrified of people who showed themselves to be strong and capable, people who had managed to overcome incredible hardships,” Kubyshkin says, recalling the returning soldiers who were branded as traitors and banished to die in labor camps.

The war victory, Kubyshkin argues, contributed to the superiority complex that has long shackled Russia. “We are this great country with enormous resources that we have no idea how to make use of,” he lamented. “All the wealth and accomplishments benefit those in power, not the people.”

Sergei Cheshko, a senior researcher at Moscow’s Institute for Social Anthropology, believes Russians suffer from undulating feelings of superiority and failure.

“There is always a rushing back and forth between extremes as the failure to realize this great potential leads to bouts of inferior feelings,” Cheshko says. “This tendency to extremes is obvious in our politics. We embrace a new ideology with vigor, then later denounce it and reject even the elements of worth.”

Older Russians tend to be more defensive of the postwar era and the accomplishments of Soviet power. Especially among veterans, nostalgia runs deep for the days of Stalinist order.

“If it hadn’t been for Stalin, there would have been no victory,” insists retired Col. Teodor R. Pekarski, director of the Motherland memorial park and a veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad. “After the war, he oversaw the reconstruction, he built up a nuclear state, he created a country that put the first man in space. He made mistakes, but people today are too quick to forget what good he did for this country.”

With jobs disappearing in the transition to a market economy and millions of families living in poverty, many fear that fertile ground has been created for the political pendulum to swing back toward hard-line Stalinism. And defenders of orthodox communism wait in the wings for the people’s call.

“In the 1950s, under Stalin, we were not buying wheat from the West, we were selling it on the international market,” says retired Gen. Valentin I. Varennikov, another Stalingrad siege veteran, a former commander of Red Army ground forces and one of the 12 Communist hard-liners who tried to overthrow Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then the Soviet leader, in 1991. “We didn’t go around the world asking for humanitarian aid and loans, we were granting them. Here lies the paradox.”

Denouncing reformers and war historian Volkogonov’s accusations against Stalin as “unworthy of comment,” Varennikov holds fast to his conviction that what Russia needs to gain stability is a ruler with an iron hand.

“There are people who have the ability to reintroduce order in this country,” says the retired general who was tried for treason and stubbornly refused an offer of amnesty, eventually earning acquittal from a military tribunal in 1994.

He accuses Yeltsin of denigrating the victory celebrations by toning down military displays in a bow to President Clinton, who hesitated before accepting a summit invitation to Moscow out of concern over Russia’s war against separatists in the republic of Chechnya.

“Soviet people see the visit of Clinton as mockery of his former allies,” says Varennikov, who speaks for many in the dwindling war generation who see current reform efforts as the cause of Russia’s decline.

Volkogonov hails Clinton’s decision to visit as “tremendous moral support” for the champions of reform when they most need it.

“With his presence, Clinton will show that despite the mistakes of the democratic forces--and I consider the war against Chechnya the gravest mistake of the democratic regime--that the West understands no other forces can lead Russia toward a democratic future,” he says.

With German Chancellor Helmut Kohl planning to attend the Victory Day events along with Clinton and heads of state and government from around the world, Russia’s veterans will be reminded of the recovery their allies and even those they defeated have made while they have remained entangled in the squalid aftermath of communism.

“We defeated the fascists at the front, but we were the losers of the Cold War,” says Grigory Y. Baklanov, a veteran and one of Russia’s best-known writers of novels set in the glory days of the Great Patriotic War.

With its official grandeur and disturbing reminders of victory’s fruits that were never savored, May 9, Baklanov acknowledges, will be for many Russians “a holiday with tears in our eyes.”

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Battle of Stalingrad

Culminating a withering seven-month siege, the Soviet army’s costly victory in Stalingrad in February, 1943, proved the turning point in World War II and led to the Allied forces’ eventual triumph. As many as 1 million Soviet soldiers and citizens were killed in the fierce bombardment that reduced the industrial city on the Volga River to rubble. Russian historians claim that German casualties were even higher. Thirty German divisions were deployed in a quest to push through strategic Stalingrad and secure a route to the Caucasus oil fields and the Caspian Sea. But defiant resistance among the outnumbered Red Army troops and their vow to prevent Germans from crossing the Volga wore down the attackers, allowing the Soviets to begin what would be a two-year campaign to drive the enemy out of their territory and into unconditional surrender in May, 1945.