When we first arrived in Ulan-Ude, one of the first things I noticed as we drove through town was a healthy display of Victory Day banners and billboards. I was a little surprised, to be honest – it didn’t occur to me that the Great Patriotic War could have possibly affected small-town Siberia.
Indeed, the battles of World War II never reached Buryatia – the Pacific Front, as it concerned the Soviet Union, consisted of a few land grabs. On Russia’s Western Front, the Nazis came within miles of Moscow, sieged Leningrad, and fought a horrific battle at Stalingrad, but Buryatia remained safe several time zones away.
Siberia became a safe haven for the Soviet Union during that time. Entire factories were picked up and transported eastwards across the rail lines to keep them out of Nazi hands. Wounded soldiers, too, found themselves in the safe embrace of the steppe. With this influx of new arrivals, even regular citizens were brought face to face with the war effort. In Ulan-Ude, for example, every school was converted to a temporary hospital. Imagine how startling and strange it would be as a young student to see your school overwhelmed by injured soldiers from far-flung places.

This memorial, which we saw on our first day in town, commemorates the Great Patriotic War. Each pillar symbolizes a different year in the conflict. The first year, 1941, was marked by extreme difficulty, such as the near-capture of Moscow and the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad. As a testiment to the great hardships of this year, its pillar is leaning heavily, seemingly about to collapse. 1942 was also a very trying time, so it, too, tips sideways. But the tide began to turn as the war went on. The Nazis were eventually pushed back, and this is reflected in the straight, steadfast pillars that represent 1943 and 1944.
We encountered World War II again on our last evening in Ulan-Ude, when we found ourselves in the Philharmonie, a Soviet-era theater on the city’s main square. The building was beautiful inside, decorated with mouldings of hammers and sickles, bundles of grain, and other communist motifs.

We came to view a (new) play, presented by local actors and featuring performers from around the area. The production told the story of a group of nurses at a Buryat military hospital during the war and showed how intimately the far-off battles affected these women’s lives. One struggles with the distance separating her from her lover on the front lines. Others meet and fall in love with wounded soldiers from far corners of the Soviet Union, people they would never otherwise have met.

Seeing the war from the perspective of these nurses, it was much easier to understand the extreme scale of World War II and the Soviet Union. In this small city more than 2500 miles from Moscow, people of different races, cultures, and traditions were thrown together by the same war, as citizens of the same nation. It’s easy to see the differences between eastern and western Russia, but seeing the role of Ulan-Ude in the war was a good reminder of the strong ties that keep the people of Russia connected.
Other sources: Rada, our amazing Buryatia tour guide