our city, our hearths, our families: local loyalties and ... · during world war 11, ... older...

Our City Our Hearths Our Families Local Loyalties and Private Life in SovietWorld War II Propaganda

Lisa A Kirschenbaum

Slavic Review Vol 59 No 4 (Winter 2000) pp 825-847

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Our City Our Hearths Our Families Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War I1 Propaganda

Lisa A Kirschenbaum

During World War 11 images of mothers constituted one of the most striking-and lasting-additions to Soviet propaganda The appearance of Mother Russia has been understood as a manifestation of the Soviet states wartime renunciation of appeals to Marxism-Leninism and its em- brace of nationa1isml Yet Mother Russia (rodina-mat more literally the motherland mother) was an ambiguous national figure The word rodina from the verb rodit to give birth can mean birthplace both in the narrow sense of hometown and in the broad sense of motherland and it suggests the centrality of the private and the local in wartime conceptions of public duty2 Mothers functioned in Soviet propaganda both as national symbols and as the constantly reworked and reimagined nexus between home and nation between love for the family and devotion to the state From this point of view the new prominence of mothers in wartime propaganda can be understood as part of what Jeffrey Brooks has identified as the counter-narrative of individual initiative and private motives as opposed to party discipline that dominated the centrally controlled presss coverage of the first years of the war3

Grants from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian St~tdies and from West Chester University supported the research and writing of this article Earlier versions were presented at the Hagley Fellows conference in 1999 and the Delaware Valley Seminar of Rus- sian Historians My thanks go to the participants in these sessions as well as to the hvo anonymous referees at Slavic Reviezu for their helpful suggestions

1 Victoria E Bonnell argues that early Soviet resistance to representations of Mother Russia stemmed from the partys emphatically internationalist perspective Bonnell The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art Russian Reviezu 50 (1991) 275 On Soviet wartime propagandas immediate appeal to patriotism see John Barber The Image of Stalin in Soviet Propaganda and Public Opinion during World War 2 in John Garrard and Carol Garrard eds World War 2 and the Soviet People (New York 1993) 38

2 For definitions of motherland see Vladimir Dal Tolltovyi slovar zhivogo veliko- russkogo iazyka (1882 reprint Mosco~v 1955) 4 11 S I Ozhegov Slovar russkogo iazyka 5th ed (Moscow 1963) 673 Ozhegovs first definition is fatherland (otechestvo)a word that does not appear in Da1s entry The second definition is birthplace

3 Jeffrey Brooks Pravda Goes to War in Richard Stites ed Culture and Entwtain- ment in Wartime Russia (Bloornington 1995) 14 The first years of the war have been characterized as a period of spontaneous de-Stalinization in which life and literature were freer than they had been before the war or would be after 1943 Nina Tumarkin The Liv- ing altd the Dead The Rise and Fall ofthe Cult of World War I1 ilt Russia (New York 1994) 64- 66 Lazar Lazarev Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth in Garrard and Garrard eds World War 2 and the Soviet People 29 Deming Brown World War I1 in Soviet Literature in Susan Linz ed The Impact of bVorld Tiar IIoolt the Soviet Union (Totowa NJ 1985) 243-44 On the centralized control of the Soviet press see Angus Roxburgh Pravda Inside the Soviet Nerus Maclzine (New York 1987) 37-38 Mark Hopkins Mass Media in the Soviet Union (New York 1970)

Slavic Revieru 59 no 4 (Winter 2000)

826 Slavic Review

Historians have largely concurred with contemporary observers who noted that after the victory at Stalingrad in 1943 that marked the beginning of the end of the most difficult period of the war for the Soviet Union the press resurrected the prewar convention of attributing successes to the party bureaucracy and to Iosif Stalin per~onally~ An investigation of the role of mothers in Soviet wartime propaganda complicates this notion of a clear break in Soviet reporting of the war Whatever returns to older rhetorical forms occurred in the last two years of the war whatever the fate of the counter-narrative the diverse female embodiments of the motherland along with images of mothers in general crossed the 1943 divide Stalin and the language of the party reappeared in 1943 but Mother Russia and representations of the good life centered on home -

and hearth remained5 Deploying stereotypical and sentimental images of home and family

as a means of generating hatred of the invader Soviet propaganda often resembled that of other belligerent nations There are clear parallels between the Soviet insistence on both the vulnerability and self-reliance of women and American and German portrayals of female war workers that simultaneously urged the acceptance of women in male jobs and pre- served their feminine identitiesn6 Still such homologies should not be

4 Brooks Pravda Goes to War 21-24 Barber argues that Stalingrad marked the decisive turning point in the wartime cult of Stalin as Stalins image especially in the role of military leader appeared more frequently Barber Image of Stalin 43 See also Mi- khail Heller and Aleksandr M Nekrich Utopia in Pozuer Tlze Historjl ofthe Soviet Uniolt from 1917 to the Present (1986 reprint New York 1992) 413 Katharine Hodgson notes a post- Stalingrad trend in Soviet war poetry much of which was published in the press to~vards a broader view of the war as a national and historical triumph that often included refer- ences to Stalin as the inspiration behind the armys success Hodgson Witten ruith the Bay- onet Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Truo (Liverpool 1996) 86 A similar dynamic seems to have been at work within the party Richardl Brody attributes the disintegration of intra-party ideological training activities to the closure of courses in the summer of 1941 and to the reluctance of party cadres to continue their studies In the second half of the war the courses reopened but attendance remained a problem Brody Ideology and Political lMobilization The Soviet HomeFroltt during World War 11 (Pittsburgh 1994) 24 26 Contemporary observers noted a clear shift in soviet propaganda following the victory at Stalingrad See National amp-chives and Records Administration (NARA) Office of Strate- gic Services (OSS) Research and Analysis Branch (R amp A) Record Group 226 M1221 (microfiche) The Nature of Soviet National Feeling (since June 1941) June 1944 R amp A 2185 The Main Lines of Soviet Wartime Propaganda September 1945 R amp A 3131 Control of the Press and Publishing in the Soviet Union December 1945 R amp A 2949 Alexander Werth reported that after Stalingrad Soviet propaganda began to emphasize Stalins military genius Werth Russia at War 1941-1 945 (New York 1964) 588-98 The third part of Vasilii Grossmans epic novel provides a vivid picture of the return of the political commissar Grossman L ~ f eand Fate trans Robert Chandler (London 1995)

5 My study is based on a riading of at minimum one issue per week of Komsornolkkaia pravda (hereafter KP) from June 1941 to June 1945 and a sample (following Brookss method) of six issues of Pravda per year Brooks Pravda Goes to War 25

6 Maureen Honey Creating Rosie the Riveter Class Gender and Propagaltda duriltg mr ld WarII (Amherst Mass 1984) 4 The quotation is Honeys characterization of Leila Rupps argument in lMobilizing Womeltfor War German and Ammicult Propagaltda 1939-1 945 (Princeton 1978) 132 Published collections of World War I1 posters offer clear illus- trations of the contradictory female images that populated wartime propaganda Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace Persuasive Images Posters of War altd Revolution from tlze Hoover Institution Archives (Princeton 1992) contains reproductions of wartime

Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War 11Propaganda 827

taken too far Unlike their counterparts in the west Soviet images of war coupled a new emphasis on motherhood with a tradition of efforts to fash- ion representations of women as workers

The unique experience of war in the Soviet Union helped to produce differences between Soviet and western propaganda but the extremes of Soviet wartime images-fecund mothers and daring partisans-cannot be understood apart from the process of adapting earlier strategies of representation to the wartime emergency To a degree unmatched elsewhere Soviet wartime propaganda reflected and envisioned a catastrophic rup- ture in the normal world While Rosie the Riveter challenged traditional conceptions of the idyllic family hearth in the United States the Soviet war required not only Russian Rosies but also female snipers pilots and partisans and it produced heartbreaking numbers of war orphans In the first year of war the Soviet state mobilized eleven to twelve million young people into the armed forces (roughly one million women served) Women quickly became the majority of the civilian workforce Moreover the German invasion turned villages and entire cities into battlefields Newspapers and posters called on civilians to transform every home into an impenetrable for t res~ ~ But if the realities of invasion and total war suggested the utility of linking public sacrifice with a profound yearning for a stable and inviolable family sphere the legacy of Soviet propaganda worked against such domestic imagery

The wartime sanctification of hearth and home as the primary sources of identity and citizenship reworked and eventually helped to remake an official language that had long blurred the line between public and private often by submerging the private in the public world of revolution and work During the civil war the press had pictured exemplary communists as often neglecting even abandoning family relationships while simultaneously calling on women to become the mothers of the new revolutionary ordern the 1930s the state encouraged workers to seek

posters frorn the Soviet Union Germany England and the United States See also William Bird Designfor Victory cIrrld War IIPostws on the American HomeFront (New York 1998) The NARA website probldes access to digital images of over 2500 United States posters (l~ttp~vwwnaragovnaranailpreviouspre7dightml)last consulted 31 July 2000

7 Women constituted 41 percent of industrial employees in early 1940 and 53 percent in October 1942 Their share of the agricultural ~vorkforce rose frorn 52 percent in 1939 to 71 percent in early 1943 Mark Harrison Soviet Planningin Peace and War 1938-1945 (Cambridge Eng 1985) 137-39 On womens involvement in the armed forces and partisan groups see KJean Cottam Soviet Women in Combat in World War 11 The Rear Services Resistance behind Enemy Lines and Military Political Workers InternationalJour-llal of Wornells Studies 5 (September-October 1982) 363-78 Cottam Soviet Women in Combat in World War 11 The Ground Forces and the Navy InternatiollalJournal of Womens Studies 3 (July-August 1980) 345-57 John Erickson Soviet Women in World War 11 in Garrard and Garrard eds m r l d War 2 and the Soviet People 50-76 Avaluable collection of womens reminiscences of war may be found in S Alexiyevich Wars Unzuomanly Face (Mos-cow 1988)

8 f l 15 October 1941 Posters with this civil defense theme include Smelo beri zazhigatelnuiu bombu i vybrasyvai na mostovuiu Library of Congress Lot 4862 BO-454 Prevratirn kolkhozy v nepristupnuiu krepost dlia vraga NARA Smolensk Archive Microfilm T-87 Roll 52 WKP-480

9 Jeffrey Brooks Revolutionary Lives Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s

828 Slavic Review

individual (and uneven) rewards while the press pictured dedicated communists as responding to the dictates of the bureaucracy and of Stalin himself1deg When they described their lives outside work workers in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s denied that life could be divided into separate spheres all was public and public meant the factoryll By contrast during the war all or at least a great deal became private as native place (rodina) home and family emerged as key constituents of Soviet patriotism

The Private Goes Public

The Soviet wartime press often used personal letters to tell the story of the national emergency The choice of genre is perhaps not so surprising given the fears and desires attached to letters in wartime12 Still the Soviet press which a US intelligence officer succinctly described in 1945 as dry unimaginative austere and according to non-Soviet standards boring had undoubtedly published very few love letters before the war13 Soviet newspapers had a tradition of featuring letters to the editor from activists and worker correspondents who had learned the arcane acronym-laden vocabulary of the party14 In the wartime press official language gave way to more personal and colloquial though still centrally controlled rhetoric Kornsornolskaia pravda the organ of the Young Communist League printed letters-many ostensibly never intended for publication-between soldiers or nurses at the front and their mothers spouses and sweethearts Typical of the genre was a letter published in November 1941 that began

My beloved Now during the long nights and evenings I sit for a long while near

the cradle with our little one and think of you Where are you now One thousand kilometers away is the city about which the whole world is thinking And you must be there with your artillery men Probably youre sleeping very little now And sharing markhorka [an inferior sort of to- bacco] with your friends and remembering us-me your little boy your ChTZ [Cheliabinsk Tractor Works] 15

in Stephen White ed New Directious ill Soviet History (Cambridge Eng 1992) 34 Vera Dunham I n Stalius Time iMiddleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge Eng 1976) 18 Elizabeth A Wood The Baba a ~ d the Comrade Gell(1er and Politics ill Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington 1997) 47 See also Elizabeth Waters The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography 1917-32 in Barbara Evans Clements et al ed Russias Wornell Accommo(1a- tion Resistance T-ausformation (Berkeley 1991) 235-37

10 Brooks Pravda Goes to War 10 11 Stephen Kotkin Magnetic Mountain Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley 1995) 218 12 Margaretta Jolly Dear Laughing Motorbyke Gender and Genre in Womens

Letters from the Second World War in Julia Swindells ed Tlze Uses ofAutobiography (Lon-don 1995) 45

13 NARA Record Group 226 R amp A 2949 21-22 14 Jeffrey Brooks Public and Private Values in the Soviet Press 1921-1928 Slavic

Review 48 no 1 (Spring 1989) 21-27 Kotkin MagneticlLfountain 218-21 15 KF 23 November 1941

Local Loyalties and Private L f e in Soviet World War 11Propaganda 829

The letter employed local and personal images of war-a group of friends sharing a quiet moment on the approach to Moscow a soldiers wife caring for their infant Soviet acronyms did not disappear but they now came attached to evocations of the disrupted family hearth

The themes of love loss and revenge that found expression in letters also dominated the staff writers stories of heroism inspired by ties to family or hometown as well as by commitment to the party and the nation Upon receiving her Komsomol card one young woman reportedly asked the party secretary to help her obtain training as a sniper because she wanted to avenge my native [rodnuiu]Ukrainian land and to revenge the torture of my familylG During the war it was possible to overhear as Lidiia Ginzburg did in besieged Leningrad a real grandmother talking like a granny in the articles and stories Thats never happened before Only in talk of the war does the language of the people merge with that of the newspapers l7 Whether because the creators of state propaganda made a conscious effort to supplement party rhetoric with emotional appeals or because the concerns and fears of the government and the people momentarily and uniquely overlapped the gap between official language and the language of grandmothers could be heard to narrow

Maurice Hindus an acute foreign observer of Soviet life noted the emotional power of the press early in the war In 1942 he looked up a friend who had been evacuated with her two children from Moscow to Kuibyshev He learned that her husband had been killed on the Leningrad front Explaining how in the face of personal and national tragedy she remained hopeful Natalia Grigorevna showed the reporter a couple of newspaper items marked in red pencil One told the story of marines on the Sevastopol front who almost out of ammunition had shoved their remaining grenades into their belts and had hurled themselves under the advancing German tanks What moved Hinduss infor- mant was the vision of these martyrs acting as individuals Slowly devoutly as if reciting a prayer she read the names of the five marines Nikolai Fil- shenko Vasily Tsibulko Yuri Pashin Ivan Krasnoselsky Daniel Odin18 In the fact that dear soldiers freely gave their own lives Natalia found a guarantee of eventual Soviet victory

In 1941 and 1942 accounts of individual sacrifices appeared almost daily in the Soviet press Headlines often featured the names of exemplary citizens Editors put the entire newspaper-reading public on a first-name basis with the most celebrated of Soviet martyrs Articles and editorials im- mortalized Zoia Kosmodemianskaia a young partisan executed behind German lines as Zoia or Tania her nom de guerrelg Among the most

16 KF 1 June 1943 17 Lidiia Ginzburg Blocltade Diary trans Alan Myers (London 1995) 56 18 Maurice Hindus MotherRussia (Garden City NY 1943) 3-4 19 KF 22 January 1942 18 February 1942 22 May 194223 May 1942 Recently the

Zoia myth has been debunked as largely a creation of the press See E S Seniavskaia Geroicheskie sirnvoly Realnost i mifologiia voiny Otechestvennaia istoriia 1995 no 5 38-39 translated as Heroic Symbols The Reality and Mythology of War Russiau Studies in History 37 (Summer 1998) 61-87 See also Rosalinde Sartorti On the Making of He-

830 Slavic Review

moving stories were those that included excerpts from letters sent by men and women at the front to their parents Such letters may have been especially evocative for the large number of readers waiting for news from someone in danger perhaps presumed dead

In the fall of 1941 Komsomolskaia pravda presented a series of letters written by a frontline nurse and never intended for publication that the editors described as a remarkable patriotic document The letters themselves suggested a young woman at least as devoted to her mother as to the motherland In a letter sent soon after she arrived at the front Irina Lev- chenko recounted her battle baptism and her horrified reaction an in- excusable weakness upon seeing her first head wound The experience produced a desire to see her mother and Irina asked her to send a photograph After some unspecified time at the front Irina wrote that she had become so accustomed to the constant shelling that she scarcely noticed it She warned her own [rodnaia]beloved mamochka that while I of course dont intend to die anything was possible at the front Whatever happened Irina wanted her mother to know that her daughter had done everything within her power and that she loves her mother very much20

Whether such letters were written at the front or in the offices of Kom-somolskaiaprauda is an open question21 The war may have made possible perhaps essential a new kind of rhetoric but the space in which this personal emotional language appeared remained under the control of the state Even a letter actually written at the front was likely to pass through a large number of filters before reaching the pages of the press Eschew- ing the official language of the past the letters seem no less formulaic Many of the modest Soviet patriots on the pages of the wartime press repeated the pledge to make their mothers proud and in Zoias words to return a hero or to die a hero Such formulas coupled with details that could not be substantiated (say the look in the eyes of a partisan as she underwent interrogation) lent newspaper reports an air of implausibility if not of fiction Indeed the published letters have little in common with the letters from the homefront seized and translated by German intelligence in 1944Excerpts from letters in the files of the German high command emphasized the availability or scarcity of goods While the Ger- mans looked for and found discussions of the price of potatoes in letters from all corners of the Soviet Union such mundane concerns remained totally invisible in letters published in the Soviet press

roes Heroines and Saints in Stites ed Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia 176- 93 Nina Tumarkin links the veneration of saints and martyrs to a strong pull toward the reverence of exemplary individuals nurtured by Russian Orthodox traditions and the cults of Lenin and Stalin Tumarkin Living and the Dead 76-77

20 KF 24 October 1941 21 Roxburgh Pravda 38 The memoirs of a Pravdajournalist contends that the edi-

torial staff composed postwar letters to Stalin 22 NARA Records of H a German Army High Command Microfilm T-78 Roll 477

Frames 6460650-0719 and Roll 488 Frames 6473546-3980 Erickson characterizes these letters as offering a tale of hardship and tribulation of shortages privation and the struggle to exist Erickson Soviet Women in World War 11 59 Zoias words can be found in her mothers reminiscences KF 23 May 1942

Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War 11Propaganda

Whatever their provenance the appearance of personal letters in the paper suggests an effort to represent the war in an emotionally au- thentic if not factually accurate way and to emphasize the degree to which the war could and should be understood by means of individuals responses to it During the most disastrous phase of the war for the Soviet Union the practice of telling the war in the form of letters allowed the press to conflate the tragedies and interests of families and of the nation The same strategy is visible in other forms of propaganda and wartime popular culture23 Newspapers reproduced posters and ran reviews of books and movies that linked family hometown and nation The personal letters published in the press offered a particularly powerful form in which to emphasize the personal dimensions of the war

While the ubiquitous slogan everything for the front suggested that Soviet citizens ought to set aside personal affairs published letters underscored the ways in which private concerns could make public service more urgent and more meaningful It is hardly surprising that many of the individuals featured in Komsomolskaia bravda were members of the Komso- mol whom the paper often pictured as fighting in the name of the party At the same time the young people portrayed in the press worried a great deal about protecting their families and hoped to make their parents proud Judging from the published letters young people wrote home whenever they had a spare moment A mother apologizing to the editors of Komsomolskaia pravda for asking them to devote precious column inches to a letter to her son explained the logic of publishing such personal matters her letter reflected the thoughts of all mothers The letter itself expressed the mothers profound desire to be beside my own [rodnoi] son my own Valia from whom she had not heard in eight months and her hope that he would retain his self-possession even under inhuman torture 24

The pages of Komsomolskaia pravda represented themselves as offering a way to carry on private conversations amid the disruption of war One young woman decided to send a letter to her husband to a big newspaper because she was unsure of his address and because she had learned from a wounded soldier that at the front the most valuable thing is a good letter And makh~rka ~ Her letter detailed the efforts of the women and old people left on the collective farm to increase its produc- tivity and her own decision to join the Komsomol Combining news about the family with a detailed description of the harvest the personal letter with a mass circulation infused public discussion with private emotion Another woman decided to go public in the newspaper in order to get a message to her beloved An aviator he had received none of her letters

23 Richard Stites notes awartime reemergence in Russian public culture of personal life intimate feelings a deep emotional authenticity and even quasi-religiosity Stites Russian Popular Culture Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge Eng 1992) 100

24 KF 30 April 1942 See also KF 21 March 194216 October 19436 October 1944 8 March 1945

25 KF 23 November 1941

832 Slavic Review

and had reached the conclusion that she was not capable of waiting for him In print she assured him that she was ready to take his name and that even if he did not return she would not forsake him She asked only that he free our mothers fathers and sisters and deliver them from vile outrages26

That the face of the regime remained behind such popular out- pourings did not necessarily rule out the sort of emotional response described by Hindus Among the clearest statements of the sense of freedom-moral emotional and linguistic-that accompanied the war is Boris Pasternaks well-known contention that when the war broke out its real horrors its real dangers its menace of a real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter27 Ludmilla Alexeyeva who was fifteen in 1941 remembers the war as providing a similar sense of the possibility of taking real action The German invasion persuaded her that I had to act I had to act as an individual All of us had to Our leaders were wrong They needed us They needed the public By realiz- ing that we became citizens2s The conviction that our leaders were wrong did not necessarily limit the effectiveness of the official press On the contrary Alexeyeva credits Komsomolskaia pravdas account of Parti- san Tanya tortured to death by the German fascists in the village of Pe- trishchevo with providing a deeply influential model of individual action and c i t izen~hip ~~

Mobilizing for the Motherland

The maternal figure of the motherland stood at the heart of the presss effort to represent the war in personal and emotionally compelling terms A letter from the front published in late 1941 modeled the feelings of the ideal soldier Under the headline Mother Sergeant S Zolotovskii gushed How much tenderness nobility and love is contained in that simple and powerful word-mother He also made explicit the connec- tion between actual mothers and the motherland affirming that Im writing about a mother-person [mat1-chelovek] But at the same time Im thinking about the mother-Motherland [mat1-Rodina] Identifying the soldiers own mother with the motherland permitted an emotional call to arms that played on local and personal loyalties

And today our mother is in danger She is stained with blood The viper branded with a swastika is crawling hissing and winding spitting

26 KF 3 September 1942 27 Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago trans Max Hayward and Manya Harari (New

York 1958) 507 28 Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg The Thaw Generation Coming of Age in the

Post-Stalin Era (Boston 1990) 19 29 Ibid 20-21 She also recounts the emotional impact of Konstantin Simonovs

poem Wait for Me which her father cut out of the newspaper and included in a letter from the front ibid 24 On the remarkable popularity of Wait for Me see Stites Rus-sian Popular Culture 101-2

833Local Loyalties and Private Lqe in Soviet World War 11Propaganda

venom to the maternal heart-to Moscow Not for nothing is this compared in its loathsomeness to a monster attempting to destroy our mother

Can we are we able sons of our mother to allow even a thought that such a monstrous crime should come to pass No no and no For the sake of the happiness of our mothers for the sake of the happiness of our wives fathers brothers and sisters we will spare nothing-neither strength nor life itself30

Particularly for sons the filial duty to both the nation and the family was clear

As portrayed in the Soviet wartime press the clear masculine ideal was the frontline warrior risking his own life to protect the family hearth While Soviet propaganda routinely equated work in the war industry with active service it was at the front that men especially young men demonstrated their commitment to defend mothers and the motherland The press represented a greater variety of daughterly duties that could include not only active service at the front but also a whole range of other tasks geared toward supporting the efforts of husbands and brothers Appeals to enlist focused on duty to the family Stories letters and visual material in the press dramatized womens disdain for husbands and sons who failed to take on the responsibilities of men as well as outlining womens responsibility to substitute for family members at the front

That mothers wives and daughters might be engaged in all sorts of unwomanly work hardly affected the construction of masculine images or the equation of loyalty to mothers and to the m ~ t h e r l a n d ~ ~ Whether defenseless or self-reliant women in Soviet propaganda challenged men to meet their obligations as husbands fathers and sons During the civil war Soviet propaganda had also encouraged women to shame their men into taking up arms Women were instructed to tell men If you want to be my relative to be close to me take up your rifle in your hands Go defend Soviet power and the r e v ~ l u t i o n ~ ~ During World War 11 graphic accounts of Nazi atrocities and images of mothers fleeing with children in arms served a similar purpose but highlighted less the defense of Soviet power than the need for men to protect their famiIie~~Wothers could also strike more demanding poses In one of the best-known of Soviet war posters a peasant woman holding an enlistment oath summons her children to serve their families and their homeland The caption reads simply Rodina-mat zovet (The motherland calls) Better the widow of

30 KF 16November 1941 31 Early in the war the press characterized women in the war industry as substitut-

ing for men at the front By 1945 womens war work became unwomanly (delo ved ne zkenslzoe)KF 30 April 1945

32 Quoted in Wood Baba and the Comrade 60 See also her discussion of the moral force of women in the family of workers ibid 65-67

33 KF 11 October 1941 19 April 1942 26 June 1942 8 July 1942 Victoria E Bonnell Iconograpl~y of Power Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley 1997) 261 See also Soviet wartime posters at the Hoover Archive Stanford University (hereafter designated by prefix RUSU) RUSU 22687R 19222 2105 2204 2359 192110 2130 2131 2132 2164 231725R 23621 23622 2153

Slavic Review

a hero Soviet women affirmed in the press than the wife of a coward94 Perhaps nothing called male adequacy into question more powerfully than the presss accounts of female partisans who succeeded-or like Zoia Kosmodemianskaia became martyrs-on territory already marked by the failure of the regular (male) army3ile images of women were quite fluid (a point discussed below) their relationships with men were envisioned as stable predictable and essentially private

From the beginning of the war the Soviet press represented the soldiers departure for the front as a private if not explicitly domestic drama Four days after the German invasion the front page of Komsomolkkaia pravda featured a photograph of a young nurse sewing the finishing touches on the uniform of an almost boyish soldier in a cap who holds his bayonet at his shoulder The photo captures a quiet intimate under- stated farewell Combining a new wartime occupation with old-fashioned skills the woman sending the soldier to war seems both to inspire and de- mand male heroism A poster reproduced on the front page less than two weeks later made the message explicit A matronly woman gazes at a soldier presumably her husband with a look that combines concern and pride The caption expresses her silent command to be a herog7

Especially in the first desperate phase of the war the Soviet press described womens war work as a personal duty to men at the front While heroic Red Army soldiers fearlessly battle the perfidious and treacherous enemy women and girls take the place of brothers husbands and fathers gone off to the army Womens new occupations grew in large

34 Bonnell Iconogra$hy 256 265 (Iraklii Toidzes poster Rodina-mat zovet also RUSU 2136) rn 8 March 1942 For similar appeals to children see KF 24 June 1941 30 April 194214 November 19427 July 1943 The press also carried broader appeals from young women workers to young men KF 3 October 1941 8 March 1942 11 September 1942 An analysis of whether Soviet citizens went to war for these reasons lies beyond the scope of this article Reminiscences suggest that propaganda especially when it centered on the motherland did help to motivate enlistment A female aircraft mechanic remembered that I for one was greatly affected by the posters that are now housed in museums The Motherland Calls You What Did You Do for the Front Alexiyevich W a A Unwom- anly Face 26 On the other hand stories abound of actual mothers opposing their chil- drens decision to enlist one mother going so far as to tie her daughter to a cart bound for the rear ibid 105 see also 23-24 26 58

35 Fran~oise Navailh argues that in wartime films the figure of a ruthless woman underscores the failure of men Navailh The Emancipated $roman Stalinist Propa- ganda in Soviet Feature Film 1930-1950 HistoricalJournal ofFilm Radio and Television 12 (1992) 209 See for example KF 30 December 1941 1 July 1942 14 April 194315 Sep- tember 1944 8 March 1945 Actual male responses to women at the front appear to have been quite varied and included shame guilt distrust admiration and an impulse to protect Alexiyevich Wars Unwomanb Face 62 157 160 162 185 240 245 There were also cases of sexual harassment Vera Ivanovna Malakhova Four Years as a Frontline Physi- cian in Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck eds A Revolution of Their Own Voices of Women i n Soviet History (Boulder Colo 1998) 187 On the other side picturing Adolf Hitler or Nazi soldiers in elegant if tattered womens clothing constituted a means of impugning the enemys manliness along with its class origins See KF 19 De- cember 194119 September 1944

36 KF 26 June 1941 37 5 July 1941

835 Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda

measure out of their status as mothers daughters and sistersgs In a series of short letters exhorting women to take up male occupations young women emphasized both the possibility of mastering any profession and the necessity of doing so when so many of our brothers have gone to the front The letter writers emphasized their daughterly duty to the motherland and to our fathers brothers and husbands at the frontgg The wives of frontline soldiers affirmed their special duty to serve in the war industry40 In a story about women learning new trades one woman attributed her desire to go to work to her love of the motherland and hatred of the fascists She understood these broad concerns in personal terms My husband is now in the ranks of the Red Army I cant lag behind my husband41 Komsomolkknin prnvda editorialized Girls are burning with the desire to substitute for their relatives [rodnykh] and comrades who with a gun in their hands have gone to defend our holy land If a brother or husband has been mobilized his sister or wife has now taken his shift42

Temporarily filling in for their husbands and brothers the women depicted in the press demonstrated both their strength and the fundamental importance of their private relationships with men Illustrating a re- current theme a poster reproduced in Komsomolkknia prauda depicted a soldiers farewell to the girl who would substitute for him behind the wheel of the tractor43 The notion of substitution carried the implica- tion visible in other Allied propaganda as well that women would take on male jobs for the duration only At the same time the broad call to take up whatever work had engaged their fathers or husbands suggested that women could quickly master any task that men left behind Articles and letters testified that young women were able to learn new skills rapidly sometimes in a matter of weeks44

Ayoung man leaving for the front might be identified both as a metalworker-the quintessential class-conscious worker in the Bolshevik sym- bolic universe-and as the last of four brothers to be called for active duty45 The two identities added poignancy to the departure but neither determined his wartime experience Like the majority of young men on the pages of Soviet newspapers he was destined to be a soldier By contrast calls for women to support their men at the front could lead them to almost any sort of occupation Especially in the first years of the war

38 KF 26 June 1941 Calls for women to substitute for brothers husbands and fathers were common See for example KF 24 June 1941 9 January 1942 11 September 194220 December 1942

39 KF 20 November 1941 40 rn 14 April 1943 41 KF 25 June 1941 42 KF 26 June 1941 43 KF 28 June 1941 Such calls appeared almost daily into the fall of 1941 See also

KF 3 July 194122 July 1942 30 October 194220 December 1942l May 19434 Novem- ber 1944 In a poster by 0 Eiges a woman at the factory bench replaces the name card of a male worker with her own RUSU 19227

44 KF 25 June 194114 November 19417 July 1942 45 KF 26 June 1941

836 Slavic Review

Komsomolkkaia pravda regularly featured simple Soviet girls (prostie sovet- skie devushki) taking up male jobs in heavy industry and androgy- nous women sporting bandoliers alongside more stereotypically feminine nurses teachers and mothers The sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko the girl who killed 300 fascists was held up as an example for patriotic young women Female partisans figured among the most celebrated of the girls in greatcoats But even the dedicated young woman who evacuated her pigs just ahead of the advancing Germans might merit a profile in the press46 As a direct service to their men women could enter factories drive tractors collect scrap metal care for orphans nurse wounded soldiers learn to handle a rifle or operate as partisans deep behind enemy lines

Figuring patriotism in terms of personal often sentimental ties allowed the press to depict the war as a defense not only of home and family but also of the rodina in its narrow sense of hometown native village and-recalling prewar conventions-native factory On the terrain of the city it became possible to link the markers of party loyalty to hometown nostalgia The threatened native place closely linked to family life became a key focus of emotional rhetoric To take one prominent example Leningrad often appeared in the press as inspiring its children to sacrifice on its behalf A Komsomolkkaia pravda reporter described one young mans decision to join the Leningrad home guard (opolchenie) as a powerful mixture of place party upbringing and family

He is all of twenty-one He grew up beyond the Narva Gate [a working-class district of Leningrad] He ran along these streets in a Pioneers scarf That was his childhood Here at a three-times decorated factoiy he became a metalworker and a Komsomol This was his youth And now just tens of kilometers from the city he has become a warrior This is his maturity his manhood

His mother and wife Nadia live near the gate itself His wife is ex- pecting a child and Potapov shows a short note from his beloved Nadia writes I will give our son your name I will always tell him about you about how you defended his birth and his f~lture

Seemingly sharing his wifes premonition that he might not return Potapov told the reporter Guys from the Narva Gate will die but the enemy will not enter the city47

Even when they enjoined defense of the revolution appeals to take up arms focused on local and intimate anxieties-the protection of family children and hometown The German advance on Leningrad in the sum-

46 KF 19 September 1941 17 October 1941 (partisan with bandolier) 16 January 1942 31 March 1942 25 June 1942 (pig tender) 7 July 1942 14 April 1943 On Pavlichenko see KF 2 June 1942 Stories about girls driving tractors and girls to the bench appeared almost daily in the first months of the war See also Sartorti On the Making of Heroes 176-93

47 KF 26 September 1941 For other examples of the mix of emotional and political ties to Leningrad see KF 22 November 1941 l l July 194220 January 1943l l December 1943 The press represented other native places in similar terms See for example KF 3 October 1941 13 November 1941 (Moscow)


mer of 1941 elicited evocations of the revolutionary working classs defense of the city the cradle of revolution during the civil war along with pleas to protect our children our hearths48 Underscoring the connec- tion between the civil war and the war against the Nazis Komsomolkkaia pravda published a 1919 poster showing men of every stripe bearing arms in the defense of the city (then Petrograd) and an updated 1941 variant of the same poster4g Airplanes over the city in the World War I1 version constituted the most noticeable visual change It was the captions that accompanied the two posters that illustrated a fundamental shift in out- look Under the 1919 poster the editors of Komsomolkkaia pravda printed Vladimir Lenins contemporary praise for the workers revolutionary en- thusiasm and self-sacrifice By contrast in the quotation under the 1941 poster Leningrads party bosses warned that cowards panic-mongers and deserters threatened our city our hearths our families our honor and our freedom While the image conjured up the revolutionary prece- dent the words downplayed the workers revolutionary impulses and emphasized the legitimacy of Leningraders most personal concerns

In the wartime press the model communists of the 1920s and 1930s who sacrificed personal concerns to the cause gave way to model parents whose acts harmonized personal motivations and the public good On one hand a mothers letter in the press could enjoin sons going off to the front not to forget for a minute that the Bolshevik party and dear Comrade Stalin have guaranteed Soviet youth a happy life50 At the same time the heroes of the civil war appeared in the wartime press not only as dedicated revolutionaries but as exemplary fathers A letter to the young from an old worker published in Komsomolskaiapravda in the fall of 1942 began by explaining that I address myself to you as to my children Our conversation will be serious pure and simple because a father talks to his children from the heart Speaking throughout the letter as a father the old worker also spoke as an old communist He reminded the young that their elders fought on the barricades in 1917 I participated in the taking of the Kremlin and in the civil war I was shell-shocked Since the civil war up to today I have worked in the Hammer and Sickle factory The state has awarded me the labor order of the Red Flag It seems to me that I deserve the right to talk frankly with you The letter suggests that the revolutionary work undertaken on behalf of their children gave fathers the moral authority to command the young generation to fight to the last [stoite nasmert] 51 An ostensibly more personal letter from a father who had returned from the factory too late to see his son off to the front likewise reminded the young man that we [the older generation] expelled the interventionist hordes from our country in order that you our children would be able to grow up peacefully to work and to live52 The sons loyalty to Soviet power was in turn represented as a very per-

48 KF 21 August 1941 49 KF 22 August 1941 50 KF 24June 1941 51 KF 14November 1942 52 KF 26 June 1941

838 Slavic Review

sonal obligation to their fathers A letter from the front located the source of a fallen comrades heroism in a vow made at age five to be worthy of the father killed in the civil war53

Of course such self-sacrifice also served the needs of the state at war Whatever the emotional authenticity of published letters they also propagated the official vision of the correct wartime conflation of public and personal interests Journalist Maurice Hinduss account of a collective farm chairmans efforts to persuade a less-than-enthusiastic woman to become like a mother to two wounded soldiers suggests that the appeal to private feeling became a standard means of compelling public service54 The woman refused to cook and heat the bathhouse for two men she re- garded as an imposition While the sentimentalized universalized love of a mother for her sons and of sons for their mother failed to materi- alize in this case the chairman insisted on the naturalness and importance of the constructed (and finally coerced) mother-son relationship Downplaying commitments to the revolution or to the leader and picturing heroes as motivated by and yearning for family ties the Soviet press found a new and personal means of enforcing duties defined by the state

Images of the Family and Private Life in Wartime

Rather than submerging private concerns in public duty wartime propaganda emphasized their overlap and interdependence In the 1920s So- viet propaganda had represented the party the Red Army and other official organizations as a big family that completely superseded the personal sphere of life55 During World War 11 the family metaphor remained a fundamental means of imagining Soviet society but its meaning shifted Stories of comradeship at the front depicted the close ties that de- veloped under fire but far from replacing the small family the big family (bolshnia semin) depended upon the biological family While the press presented the endangered family as an inspiration to serve the peaceful world of women and children emerged as a vital source of Soviet identity and as a microcosm of Soviet society In wartime the private world of emotion associated with women gained new public status

In its accounts of the front the press described soldiers as forming a big family but even at an emotional and spatial distance from their small families soldiers were often represented as defined by them Sol- diers at the front remained fathers concerned about the children and families they left behind The press regularly reassured men at the front

53 KF 11 October 1942 The press also mentioned womens civil war service KF 7 August 194116 November 1941 Visual propaganda also portrayed civil war heroes as father Examples include the posters ~ o r z h u ~ synom Ian older man in a suit with Izwestiia visible in the pocket embracing a younger man in a Red Army uniform over- flowing with medals and insignia) and Bei vraga kak ego bili otsy i starshie bratia-matrosy oktiabria (young Soviet sailor attacking with rifle and bayonet a faded figure of an older sailor stands behind the young one encouraging him) RUSU 2251 192119

54 Hindus llothmRussia 215-16 55 Brooks Revolutionary Lives 34

839Local Loyalties and Private Lye in Soviet World War TI Propaganda

that their children were receiving the best of care in Soviet institution^^ Moreover biological ties often stood at the core of frontline family Ac- counts of brothers who fought side by side or who enlisted to avenge one another filled the wartime press Another favorite theme was fathers and sons or less frequently fathers and daughters or mothers and sons who served t ~ g e t h e r ~

The small family sacrificing itself at the front offered a powerful means of depicting the public importance of personal ties the tragedy of war and the necessity of revenge Under the headline Mother Komso-molskaia pravda published a letter signed partisan Semen that told the story of a mother and son who gave their lives to get critical intelligence to the guerrillas From footprints in the snow the correspondent pieced together the story When the wounded son arrived in his mothers village she had tried to lead him to the partisan camp But Andrei sank heavily into the snow His mother sat down alongside him Most likely she tended to her son reassuring him But Andrei remembered the value of the information he had collected Here in the snow with a weak hand he wrote his report and gave it to his mother It was surely difficult for her to leave her dying son But she understood just as Andrei did that in our camp we were waiting for the results of his reconnaissance The mother left but did not reach the partisans who found her dead in the snow still clutch- ing the life-saving information to her bosom The partisans buried the two on the banks of the Dnieper where the bright rays of the sun were reflected in the snowflakes and it seemed that everything was covered in silver in which millions of diamonds were set58 Swearing to avenge mother and son the partisans used the information gathered by Andrei to surround and destroy the Germans

Images of Soviet mothers had been scarce in prewar propaganda even as Soviet policy increasingly encouraged m ~ t h e r h o o d ~ During the civil war propaganda had pictured womens uniquely feminine talents- their sharp eyes and tender heartsn-as fitting them for revolutionary work beyond the family The state enjoined women to become the mothers of the new revolutionary order and the housewives of the nation60 By the mid-1920s the state had moved decisively away from a policy of

56 KF 21 August 194117 December 194115 Februaly 194415 July 1944 57 See for example 27 February 1942 (father and son) 2June 1944l November

19443 January 1945 (brothers) 26 August 19424 October 1944 (father and daughter) 58 21 March 1943 59 On the rarity of mothers in early Soviet political art see Mraters Female Form

235-36 On the resurrection of the family see b7endy Z Goldman Women the State and Revolutio~ Soviet Family Poliq and Social Lve 191 7-1936 (Cambridge Eng 1993) 296- 336 Richard Stites The Womens Libmation Movement in Russia Feminism Nihilism and Bol- shevism 1860-2930 (Princeton 1978) 376-91 Barbara Evans Clements The Effects of the Civil War on b70men and Family Relations in Diane P Koenker William G Rosen-berg and Ronald Grigor Suny eds Party State and Society in the Russian Civil War Explo- rations i~2 Social History (Bloomington 1989) 105-20 Elizabeth Waters The Bolsheviks and the Family Contemporary European History 4 (1993) 275-91 Susan E Reid All Stalins b70men Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s Slavic Review 57 no 1 (Spring 1998) 136

60 Wood Baba and the Comrade 6747 100

840 Slavic Review

promoting the withering away of the family and toward an emphasis on parental especially maternal responsibility for children Pro-natal pro- family policies culminated in 1936 legislation that restricted divorce and outlawed abortion By the mid-1930s the female collective farm worker (kolkhoznitsa) who had earlier been depicted as a young and vigorous worker but seldom a mother began to appear somewhat more frequently with her children Not until World War 11 however did images and rhetoric catch up with and help to intensify policies that made motherhood the essence of Soviet womanhood

The wartime press drew on magnified and ultimately remade the double view of woman-as an active economic and political agent of society and as a mother that the party had propagated since the 1930~ ~ The woman worker had been part of the Soviet visual lexicon long before the war drew women into previously male-dominated profession^^^ Indeed there had been virtually no women in the smelting shops in the 1920s when the heroic female worker (rabotnitsa) in the form of a black- smiths helper first appeared in Soviet political art The young woman driving a tractor-the archetypal female war worker in Soviet propaganda-resembled down to her red kerchief the female collective farm worker (kolkhoznitsa)of the 1 9 3 0 ~ ~ ~ The types were familiar but their con- text and meanings shifted when large numbers of women actually entered heavy industry and drove tractors The kolkhoznitsa who had constituted both a threat to tradition and a vision of the future in the 1930s became a symbol of wartime sacrifice in defense of the present While women workers in the 1930s were sometimes identified as housewives assisting their husbands the wartime press represented female tractor drivers metalworkers and coal miners as moving into such male occupations primarily because of their status as the mothers sisters and daughters of men at the front The blending of womens emancipation with their concern for family also animated the Soviet presss characterization of the Nazi threat Appeals to women contrasted Nazi misogyny with the Soviet states commitment to guaranteeing equal access to education and employment and to honoring motherhood rather than mere animal procreat i~n~

Whatever their occupations the women on the pages of Soviet newspapers possessed in varying combinations the key elements of a Soviet femininity that was austere nurturing and unfailingly chaste Largely es- chewing the glamour girls and femmes fatales that populated western propaganda Soviet propaganda featured two general types of women the

61 Bonnell The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s American Historical Revieru 98 (February 1993) 63 75

62 Stites Wbmens Liberation 385 63 Bonnell Representation of MTomen 278-79 286-87 Almost no women

worked at the IGrov Morks (the former Putilov Works) in Leningrad before the war by 1943 69 percent of the workforce was female Werth Russia at War 344 On the notion of a visual lexicon see Bonnell Iconography 10

64 Bonnell Peasant Woman 55-82 65 Reid All Stalins Women 141 66 KF 10 October 194118 April 1942l June 1943

Local Loyalties and Private Lqe in Soviet World War TI Propaganda 841

pure-hearted and high-minded girl capable of meeting any challenge and rodina-mat who stoically sent her children to war but lived for letters from the frontj7 Often depicted as surrogate mothers bringing a whiff of home to the battlefield nurses exemplified the characteristics shared by the mothers and the girls in greatcoats A letter from a military hospital identified it as a true [rodnaia]Soviet family and emphasized that the nurses cared for their patients just as a mother cares for her family On the eve of his return to the front one soldier told his nurse I do not have a mother You took her place at the most difficult moment of my life and this gives me the right to consider you my m~ther ~nother letter from a hospital told the story of a young womans devotion to her fianc6e despite the amputation of his arm and leg and his fears that she would aban- don him The correspondent who emphasized that she had witnessed the events described asked the editors of Komsomolskaia pravda to publish her letter as evidence of the Soviet girls real love strong and true70 Where young women at the front undertook the same missions as the men the press underscored both the distinctively feminine element in their char- acters and their ability to meet challenges like men One account of a guerrilla unit described the men as workers and athletes and the women as loving theater music and especially Swan Lake But none of the young women broke under Nazi i n t e r r ~ g a t i o n ~ ~

Emphasizing the persistence of femininity in wartime the press represented women both as central to the war effort and as inextricably tied to the private emotional world of the family Published letters between men at the front and their sweethearts and mothers envisioned Soviet women as vulnerable and resilient and as the repositories of the domestic values for which soldiers sacrificed their lives In a letter to the editor that ran under the headline Dont Cry Marianna a soldier included his lieutenants last unfinished letter to a student nurse he had met in the hospital six months before along with a description of how his friend had died with Mariannas photograph in his hand The soldier ended with a general reminder to all our girls that letters from home sustained men fighting to protect their loved ones Three weeks later the paper published Mariannas reply-a pledge to turn her sorrow into vengeance by

67 Susan Gubar provides many examples of the eroticizing ofwomens image (240) in Allied and Axis propaganda This Is My Rifle This Is My Gun World War I1 and the Blitz on b70men in Margaret Higonnet et al eds Behind the Lines Gender and the T ~ U O World Wars (New Haven 1987) 227-59 The widely publicized photograph of a dead bare- breasted partisan identified as Zoia Kosmodemianskaia stands as an important exception to the Soviet rule Sartorti On the Making of Heroes 184-85 Hindus Mother Rzcssia 236287-88

68 KF 12 February 19423 September 194214April1943 On nurses during the civil war see Wood Baba and the Comrade 57-58

69 KF 12 February 1942 70 KF 3 September 1942 71 KF 1 February 1942 Women as well as men could achieve the distinction of pos-

sessing muzhestvo (steadfastness courage from the word muzh man) 72 Katharine Hodgson draws a similar conclusion in her study of wartime poetry

The Other Veterans Soviet Womens Poetry of World War 2 in Garrard and Garrard eds World War 2 and the Soviet People 77 84

Slavic Review

saving the lives of Soviet soldier^^ With her capacity to inspire sacrifice to comfort and to heal Marianna embodied the public power of private relationships In published letters men worried that their wives and girl- friends would not wait for them and women answered in print with as- surances that Soviet women who had proved themselves capable of fly-ing planes and of handling weapons could manage the apparently equally taxing and important work of waiting74 In the wartime press womens steadfast devotion to their families and the men they loved spurred their wartime work and became a key marker of citizenship and patriotic duty

The Return of Father Stalin

The symbolically and militarily critical victory at Stalingrad marked the beginning of a shift in the form as well as the content of Soviet press coverage that facilitated a reassertion of the power of Stalin and the party hierarchy to shape public policy and private lives In the first months of 1943 published letters to and from Stalin eclipsed letters between citizens Formulaic greetings to Stalin that accompanied local contributions to defense funds along with Stalins brief replies dominated the newspaper At roughly the same time the press began to feature lists of citizens who had been awarded military orders The long lists of individuals honored by the state made the front page and replaced many of the human interest stories and personal letters that had filled the middle section of the four-page wartime dailies A year later the press instituted the practice of publishing the names of women who had won newly established glory to motherhood awards for prodigious reproduction the honored mothers had a minimum of seven childrenVncreasingly narratives of military operations emphasized the power of a word from Stalin to inspire heroic feats This Stalinist narrative tended to downplay both personal motives and individual men who often became mere cogs in the wheel Heroes became the exemplars of the Stalin generation (stalinskoe pokole- nie) and Stalin appeared more frequently as the father of the Soviet family77

The shift in the presss coverage of the war can be understood not only as the partys effort to promote state over private interests but also as

73 KF 13 September 1942 and 4 October 1942 Hindus provides translations of both letters as well as a number of unpublished letters given to him by a longtime acquaintance Hindus Mother Russia 250- 60

74 KI 3 September 1942 75 Stites Womens Liberation 389 76 Brooks Pravda Goes to War 13 77 KF 16 October 1943s January 194415 August 19448 April 1945 In a collection

of heroes lives published in 1945 one-third of those profiled had lost at least one parent at a young age even the non-orphans viewed the whole country as our kith and kin Men ofthe Stalin Breed True Stories ofthe Soviet Youth i n the Great Patriotic War (Moscow 1945) 37 Hans Gunther argues that postwar films about Stalin are infused with this atmosphere of immediate-family intimacy [Stalin] even engages in matchmaking Gunther Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko eds Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham 1997) 187

Local Loyalties and Private Lye in Soviet World War 11Propaganda 843

an attempt to co-opt the emotions attached to private relationships Both the lists of names and the letters to Stalin our father Iosif Vissariono- vich respected the importance of family ties and of individuals while attempting to recast intimate relationships and personal impulses as an essential part of the public world shaped by the party The newspaper published more individual names than ever but their very density dimin- ished the significance of each one Most of the names appeared in fine print organized into categories defined and assigned by order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR The format spotlighted public recognition rather than individual accomplishment Particularly in the case of the motherhood awards that also included cash payments the emphasis on public reward made it possible to represent personal choices as an extension of state policy

The letter remained a central means of emphasizing the personal res- onance of the Soviet cause While newspapers published fewer personal letters many continued to appear especially as short fragments within re- porters accounts of the war In an article bemoaning the lack of inspira- tional literary heroes of our time Komsomolkkaia pravdas reviewer concluded that the letters published in the newspaper provided the truest picture of the war and of the gold heart of the Soviet person in a soldiers greatcoat Novelists the reviewer argued had failed to create a contemporary Pave1 Korchagin-the hero of the socialist realist classic of the 1930sHow the Steel Was Tempered By contrast ordinary young people at the front like the daring sniper Natasha Kovshovaia managed to tell stories acceptable to the party conveying in their letters both hatred of the enemy and gentle profound love for family and m ~ t h e r l a n d ~ ~

The presss return to the language of state planning coincided not with the rejection of private experience as petit bourgeois nonsense but with an effort to incorporate personal language into the Stalinist narrative of service to the party The press continued to represent soldiers as having personal emotional reasons for fighting and to associate the personal and the emotional with women In a letter from the front published in early 1945 a sailor located the source of his will to fight in a vow made to an un- known nineteen-year-old woman killed in a German attack in the summer of 1942 She had implored him to keep her ring as a remembrance and if you can avenge me7ince that time the sailor had worn the ring despite his comrades mockery of his petit bourgeois (meshchanskii) af-fectation and he had met the enemy with thoughts of the dying young woman with the black tender eyes Fighting as a 1945 headline in Pravda expressed it for the motherland in the name of Stalin the soldiers profiled in the Soviet press continued to merge public and private mot iva t i~ns ~~

78 rn 13 May 1944 See also Kt 1 October 1944 Interestingly Nikolai Ostrovskiis novel could be found in the backpacks of many soldiers at the front L Rozova and E OstrovskaiaN Ostrouskii v shkole (Moscow 1949) 14-15 133-62

79 rn 23 February 1945 80 Prauda 20 August 1945

844 Slavic Review

With the victory at Stalingrad paeans to Stalin and the party multi- plied but the war remained close to home While early and enthusiastic enrollment in the Komsomol and other party organizations became a more prominent feature of biographies of Soviet heroes families continued to receive a share of the credit for raising a generation of heroes81 In the summer of 1943 the press called on children to remember their mothers command-beat the Germans Mentioning the great party of Lenin-Stalin only once the article echoed calls to enlist from the first months of the war that had represented defense of mothers as the most compelling reason to fight

Mother She gives us life she nurtures us and raises us How much strength this costs her Every mother holds her son and daughter infinitely dear Remember your mothers care for you remember every line of her letters think about how much is not expressed in those letters Read the letters about mothers today in our newspaper and you will understand this great maternal love Not without reason do we call our great Motherland mother

No one understands or feels better than our mothers the meaning of Motherland [Rodina] Here on the native [r-odnjm]earth they bore and raised us their children They see and in a maternal way highly value the wide road that the Motherland has opened for their children They are the ones most strongly tied to the native home to the native place to which they connect not only their own life but also each of their chil- drens stepsx2

While valuing the wide road implicitly opened by the Soviet state mothers continued to function as a means of linking the war to the most local sorts of loyalties to home family and native region

In accounts from the front liberation became a sometimes painful homecoming as soldiers and refugees returned to their native villages In a story on people returning to their villages in Belorussia and Latvia the Komsomolkkaia pravda reporter described the euphoric disbelief of an old man returning home and emphasized the overwhelming joy of seeing people from ones native ~i l lage ~Wther letters focused on the sacrifices that made victory possible or on the scenes of destruction that awaited those returning home Guards lance-corporal Nikolai Vasilov wrote to Komsomolskaia pravda about his emotional return to his destroyed vil- lages4 I walked through my native village along that street where on a hill stood my parents house In its place I saw a wasteland My heart froze The neighbors embraced the returning soldier and went to fetch his mother Unable to calm his crying mother Vasilov learned that his father had died in a concentration camp and that the Germans had taken his sister to Germany Now I am going to Germany the letter concluded

81 KI 27 July 19436 October 194415 November 19448 April 1945 82 KI 7 July 1943 83 KI 4 August 1944 See also KF 18 October 1941 22 November 1941 2 February

194312 May 1943l l December 1943l February 19446 October 19442 February 1945 4 April 1945

84 KI 15 November 1944 See also KI 6 October 1944 3 January 1945


I will take revenge on the Germans To the end of the war the press emphasized the local dimensions of Soviet patriotism

The press represented the defeat of Germany as both a national and a personal victory-the fulfillment of the promise to return to the simple pleasures of domestic life On 10 May 1945 the day after Victory Day Komsomolskaia pravda ran a photo of the reunion of Captain Oleg Razu- mov and Marina Gromova under the headline at six in the evening after the war As the accompanying story noted the headline was also the title of a film whose heroes met on the Stone Bridge in Moscow at precisely six in the evening after the war Just as in the movie Gromova met Razumov who had been in Berlin only two days before So dreams have come true The paper reminded its readers that the smiling couple on the bridge was only the beginning How many more such meetings lie ahead The mostjoyful the most ~nforget table ~~

Behind such images of victory stood a vigorous campaign to encourage women of all ages to take up the domestic work of repopulating and healing the nation As the extent of Soviet losses became clearer Komso-molskaia pravda which throughout the war had featured a large number of mothers on its pages began to focus more on young mothers and on efforts to reconstruct family ties that had been severed by war Stories and photographs that promoted motherhood as a womans highest aspiration never entirely replaced accounts of young women who flew airplanes or drove tractors With the regular publication of long lists of award-winning mothers that began in 1944 however mothering became womens most systematically publicized work

As early as 1942 the slogan there will be no orphans among us ( u nas ne budet sirot) became a regular headline Finding homes for war orphans can be understood as a necessary response to the massive disruption of family life caused by the German invasion especially given the memory of the intractable problem of homelessness among children (besprizornost) that had followed World War I and the revolution In 1944 the state instituted a tax on unmarried men and women and childless couples as a means both of paying for state childcare institutions and of inducing more people to become parents perhaps through adoption86 The glorification of adoption also required a fundamental shift in the Soviet valuation of the family No longer a necessary evil adoption gained the status of an act of patriotism and of love87 The propaganda that accompanied the drive to encourage adoption relied on peaceful images of mothers caring for young orphans (as if no teenagers had lost parents in the war) and on heartwarming stories of children nursed back to mental and physical

85 KF 10 May 1945 The story echoes a story from the early months of the war that pictured the line of couples waiting to register their marriages as a hopeful sign that Mos- cow lives KF 30 October 1941

86 Michael A Newcity Zizxation in the Soviet Union (New York 1986) 106-12 Hindus Mother Russia 203 Stites Womens Liberation 388-89 N A Voznesenskii Soviet Economy during the Second World War ( [New York] 1949) 93

87 Laurie Bernstein The Evolution of Soviet Adoption Law Journal ofFamily His- tory 22 (April 1997) 213

Slavic Review

health by adoptive families or by devoted teachers whom they addressed as mamas8 The press pictured the powerful impulse to preserve families that early in the war had led women and men into the factory and into battle as moving women to become the true mothers of the wars youngest and most innocentvictims

Women who had lost their sons at the front reconstructed their families by adopting soldiers in need of mothers In letters to the editor soldiers recounted how they consoled both themselves and the mothers of friends killed in battle by becoming the womens true (rodnye) sons Af-ter her sons death one mother wrote to his unit to ask if one of his comrades would substitute for her dead son The soldiers proposed that one of their number Aleksandr Ivanovich Efimov whose own mother had died when he was an infant become her surrogate son Sasha wrote I do not know if you would like to consider me your son but from now on when I go into battle I will think of you Several months later came the reply From today on you have a true [rodnaia] mother a sister Zina a brother Bor i~ ~

If as historian Jeffrey Brooks has argued the wartime presss expression of humanistic values had an almost insurrectionary meaningg0 its images of women help to explain how such meanings could be contained In the first years of the war the emphasis on the power of personal relationships to motivate self-sacrifice represented a dramatic shift in So- viet propaganda and became a central feature of what Brooks identifies as the wartime presss potentially subversive counternarrative of individuals operating outside the purview of the party When the press reasserted the Stalinist narrative after 1943 feminized representations of the nation offered a means of transforming humanistic values into a tool of public policy Calling her children to war rodina-mat stood on the blurred bor- der between spontaneous defense of home and family and obedient service to the Stalinist state The figures of Mother Russia and of mothers in Russia complemented the renewed emphasis on Father Stalin

The wartime rhetoric of motherhood and family love and sacrifice loss and revenge may also be understood as a key element in what Vera Dunham has termed the largely semantic postwar embourgeoisement of the entire system Moreover such rhetoric suggests the importance of feminized images of public service to this process of embourgeoisement By representing efforts to raise birthrates and to encourage adoption as rooted both in the desire to recreate families and to serve the nation the press glorified family life while attempting to infuse state policy with the warm glow of motherhood A similar impulse can be seen in the establishment in 1944 of awards for mothers of seven or more children In the same year the state reinstated single-sex schools and made cooking and child-rearing courses a nonnegotiable component of girls educa-

88 rn 2 July 194214 March 19438 March 1944 For stories about orphans see KI 10 October 194212 May 19439 July 194425 January 1945

89 rn 7 July 1943 For similar stories see Kt 27 February 1942 15 November 1944 90 Brooks PravdaGoes to War 19 91 Dunham In Stalink Time 18

847 Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War 11Propaganda

tion The press represented the new curriculum as an effort to prepare all Soviet women for the emotional satisfactions of family life Such policies may in fact have resonated with people yearning to reestablish family bonds in the wake of war They also indicated a transformation of the Bol- shevik lexicon Casting the state as the protector of the family hearth official language attempted to dress itself in private values and to sound like private talk

92 KF 3 September 1943 On the need to reassert parental authority in the family see KF 27 July 1943

Our City Our Hearths Our Families Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War I1 Propaganda

Lisa A Kirschenbaum

During World War 11 images of mothers constituted one of the most striking-and lasting-additions to Soviet propaganda The appearance of Mother Russia has been understood as a manifestation of the Soviet states wartime renunciation of appeals to Marxism-Leninism and its em- brace of nationa1isml Yet Mother Russia (rodina-mat more literally the motherland mother) was an ambiguous national figure The word rodina from the verb rodit to give birth can mean birthplace both in the narrow sense of hometown and in the broad sense of motherland and it suggests the centrality of the private and the local in wartime conceptions of public duty2 Mothers functioned in Soviet propaganda both as national symbols and as the constantly reworked and reimagined nexus between home and nation between love for the family and devotion to the state From this point of view the new prominence of mothers in wartime propaganda can be understood as part of what Jeffrey Brooks has identified as the counter-narrative of individual initiative and private motives as opposed to party discipline that dominated the centrally controlled presss coverage of the first years of the war3

Grants from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian St~tdies and from West Chester University supported the research and writing of this article Earlier versions were presented at the Hagley Fellows conference in 1999 and the Delaware Valley Seminar of Rus- sian Historians My thanks go to the participants in these sessions as well as to the hvo anonymous referees at Slavic Reviezu for their helpful suggestions

1 Victoria E Bonnell argues that early Soviet resistance to representations of Mother Russia stemmed from the partys emphatically internationalist perspective Bonnell The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art Russian Reviezu 50 (1991) 275 On Soviet wartime propagandas immediate appeal to patriotism see John Barber The Image of Stalin in Soviet Propaganda and Public Opinion during World War 2 in John Garrard and Carol Garrard eds World War 2 and the Soviet People (New York 1993) 38

2 For definitions of motherland see Vladimir Dal Tolltovyi slovar zhivogo veliko- russkogo iazyka (1882 reprint Mosco~v 1955) 4 11 S I Ozhegov Slovar russkogo iazyka 5th ed (Moscow 1963) 673 Ozhegovs first definition is fatherland (otechestvo)a word that does not appear in Da1s entry The second definition is birthplace

3 Jeffrey Brooks Pravda Goes to War in Richard Stites ed Culture and Entwtain- ment in Wartime Russia (Bloornington 1995) 14 The first years of the war have been characterized as a period of spontaneous de-Stalinization in which life and literature were freer than they had been before the war or would be after 1943 Nina Tumarkin The Liv- ing altd the Dead The Rise and Fall ofthe Cult of World War I1 ilt Russia (New York 1994) 64- 66 Lazar Lazarev Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth in Garrard and Garrard eds World War 2 and the Soviet People 29 Deming Brown World War I1 in Soviet Literature in Susan Linz ed The Impact of bVorld Tiar IIoolt the Soviet Union (Totowa NJ 1985) 243-44 On the centralized control of the Soviet press see Angus Roxburgh Pravda Inside the Soviet Nerus Maclzine (New York 1987) 37-38 Mark Hopkins Mass Media in the Soviet Union (New York 1970)

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our city, our hearths, our families: local loyalties and ... · during world war 11, ... older...

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