"Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families": Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet
World 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
state's wartime renunciation of appeals to Marxism-Leninism and its embrace of nationa1ism.l 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 duty.2 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 press's coverage of the first years of the war.3
Grants from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian St~tdiesand 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 Russian 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 party's emphatically internationalist perspective."
Bonnell, "The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art," Russian Reviezu 50
(1991):275. On Soviet wartime propaganda's "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 velikorusskogo iazyka (1882; reprint, Mosco~v,1955), 4 : 11; S. I. Ozhegov, Slovar' russkogo iazyka,
5th ed. (Moscow, 1963), 673. Ozhegov's first definition is "fatherland" (otechestvo),a word
that does not appear in Da1"s entry. The second definition is birthplace.
3. Jeffrey Brooks, "Pravda Goes to War," in Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entwtainment 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 Living altd the Dead: The Rise and Fall ofthe Cult of World War I1 ilt Russia (New York, 1994),6466; 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 T'i'arIIoolt the Soviet Union (Totowa, N.J.,
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 remained.5
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 preserved their feminine identitiesn6Still, 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 Stalin's image, especially in the role
of military leader, appeared more frequently. Barber, "Image of Stalin," 43. See also Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Pozuer: Tlze Historjl ofthe Soviet Uniolt from
191 7 to the Present (1986; reprint, New York, 1992),413. Katharine Hodgson notes a "postStalingrad 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 "references to Stalin as the inspiration behind the army's success." Hodgson, Witten ruith the Bayonet: 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 &-chives and Records Administration (NARA), Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Research and Analysis Branch (R & A), Record Group 226, M1221
(microfiche): "The Nature of Soviet National Feeling (since June 1941),"June 1944, R &
A 2185; "The Main Lines of Soviet Wartime Propaganda," September 1945, R & A 3131;
"Control of the Press and Publishing in the Soviet Union," December 1945, R & A 2949.
Alexander Werth reported that after Stalingrad, Soviet propaganda began to emphasize
Stalin's "military genius." Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1 945 (New York, 1964), 588-98. The
third part of Vasilii Grossman's 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 Brooks's
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
m r l d WarII (Amherst, Mass., 1984), 4. The quotation is Honey's characterization of Leila
Rupp's argument in lMobilizing Womeltfor War: German and Ammicult Propagaltda, 1939-1 945
(Princeton, 1978), 132. Published collections of World War I1 posters offer clear illustrations 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 fashion 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 rupture 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 f o r t r e s ~ . "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 order.""n 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: 'cIr,rld War IIPostws on the American HomeFront (New York, 1998).The
NARA website probldes access to digital images of over 2,500 United States posters
(l~ttp:/~vww.nara.gov/nara/nail/previous/pre7dig.html);
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 ~vorkforcerose frorn 52 percent
in 1939 to 71 percent in early 1943. Mark Harrison, Soviet Planningin Peace and War, 19381945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 137-39. On women's involvement in the armed forces and
partisan groups, see K. Jean Cottam, "Soviet Women in Combat in World War 11: The Rear
Services,Resistance behind Enemy Lines and Military Political Workers," InternationalJourllal of Wornell's Studies 5 (September-October 1982): 363-78; Cottam, "Soviet Women in
Combat in World War 11: The Ground Forces and the Navy," InternatiollalJournal of Women's
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
women's reminiscences of war may be found in S. Alexiyevich, War's Unzuomanly Face (Moscow, 1988).
8. f l 15 October 1941. Posters with this civil defense theme include "Smelo beri
zazhigatel'nuiu 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 himself.1° 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 factory."ll 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 wartime.12Still, the Soviet
press, which a U.S. 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 war.13 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 party.14In the wartime press, official language gave way
to more personal and colloquial, though still centrally controlled, rhetoric. Kornsornol'skaia 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 you're
sleeping very little now. And sharing markhorka [an inferior sort of tobacco] 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 Staliu's Time: iMiddleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976), 18;
Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba a ~ the
d 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., Russia's Wornell: Accommo(1ation, 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 Women's
Letters from the Second World War," in Julia Swindells, ed., Tlze Uses ofAutobiography (London, 1995), 45.
13. NARA, Record Group 226, R & 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 soldier's 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 family."lGDuring 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. That's 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, Natal'ia Grigor'evna 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 Hindus's informant 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 Filshenko, Vasily Tsibulko, Yuri Pashin, Ivan Krasnoselsky, Daniel Odin.'"18
In the fact that "dear" soldiers freely gave their own lives, Natal'ia 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 immortalized Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, a young partisan executed behind
German lines, as "Zoia" or "Tania," her nom de guerre.lg 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, N.Y., 1943), 3-4.
19. KF: 22 January 1942, 18 February 1942, 22 May 1942,23 May 1942. Recently, the
Zoia myth has been debunked as largely a creation of the press. See E. S. Seniavskaia,
"Geroicheskie sirnvoly: Real'nost' 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, Komsomol'skaia 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 Levchenko recounted her "battle baptism" and her horrified reaction, "an inexcusable 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, don't 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 much."20
Whether such letters were written at the front or in the offices of Komsomol'skaiaprauda is an open question.21The 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. Eschewing 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 Zoia's 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 1944.**Excerpts from letters in the files of the German high
command emphasized the availability or scarcity of goods. While the Germans 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, 17693. 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 editorial 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. Zoia's words can be found
in her mother's 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 authentic, 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 culture.23 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 Komsomol'skaia ;bravda were members of the Komsomol, 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 Komsomol'skaia 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 mother's 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 Komsomol'skaia 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 m a k h ~ r k a . " *Her
~ letter detailed the efforts of the
women and old people left on the collective farm to increase its productivity, 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 1942,16 October 1943,6 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
outrages." 26
That the face of the regime remained behind such "popular" outpourings 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 Pasternak's 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 letter."27Ludmilla 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 realizing that, we became citizens."2s The conviction that "our leaders were
wrong" did not necessarily limit the effectiveness of the official press. On
the contrary, Alexeyeva credits Komsomol'skaia pravda's account of "Partisan Tanya tortured to death by the German fascists in the village of Petrishchevo" with providing a deeply influential model of individual action
and c i t i z e n ~ h i p . ~ ~
Mobilizing for the Motherland
The maternal figure of the motherland stood at the heart of the press's 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 connection between actual mothers and the motherland, affirming that "I'm
writing about a mother-person [mat1-chelovek].But at the same time
I'm thinking about the mother-Motherland [mat1-Rodina]." Identifying
the soldier's 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 i n the
Post-Stalin Era (Boston, 1990), 19.
29. Ibid., 20-21. She also recounts the emotional impact of Konstantin Simonov's
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, Russian Popular Culture, 101-2.
Local Loyalties and Private Lqe i n Soviet World War 11Propaganda
833
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 itself.30
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 women's disdain for husbands and sons who failed
to take on the responsibilities of men, as well as outlining women's 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: 16 November 1941.
31. Early in the war, the press characterized women in the war industry as "substituting" for men at the front. By 1945 women's 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~yof 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 RU/SU) RU/SU 2268.7R, 1922.2, 2105, 2204, 2359, 1921.10, 2130,
2131, 2132, 2164, 2317.25R, 2362.1, 2362.2, 2153.
Slavic Review
a hero," Soviet women affirmed in the press, "than the wife of a coward."94
Perhaps nothing called male adequacy into question more powerfully
than the press's accounts of female partisans, who succeeded-or, like
Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, became martyrs-on territory already marked
by the failure of the regular (male) army.3%ile 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 soldier's 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, understated farewell. Combining a new wartime occupation with old-fashioned
skills, the woman sending the soldier to war seems both to inspire and demand 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 hero."g7
Especially in the first, desperate phase of the war, the Soviet press described women's 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." Women's new occupations grew in large
34. Bonnell, Iconogra$hy, 256, 265 (Iraklii Toidze's poster "Rodina-mat' zovet!" also
8 March 1942. For similar appeals to children, see KF: 24 June 1941,
RU/SU 2136);
30 April 1942,14November 1942,7July 1943. The press also carried broader appeals from
young women workers to young men, KF: 3 October 1941, 8 March 1942, 11 September
1942. An analysis of whether Soviet citizens went to war for these reasons lies beyond the
scope of this article. Reminiscences suggest that propaganda, especially when it centered
on the motherland, did help to motivate enlistment. A female aircraft mechanic remembered that "I, for one, was greatly affected by the posters that are now housed in museums:
'The Motherland Calls You,' 'What Did You Do for the Front?'" Alexiyevich, W a A Unwomanly Face, 26. On the other hand, stories abound of actual mothers opposing their children's decision to enlist, one mother going so far as to tie her daughter t o a cart bound for
the rear, ibid., 105, see also 23-24, 26, 58.
35. Fran~oiseNavailh argues that in wartime films, the "figure of a ruthless woman
underscores the failure of men." Navailh, "The Emancipated %$roman:Stalinist Propaganda 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 1943,15 September 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, War's Unwomanb Face, 62, 157, 160, 162, 185, 240, 245. There were also
cases of sexual harassment. Vera Ivanovna Malakhova, "Four Years as a Frontline Physician," 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, women's clothing constituted
a means of impugning the enemy's manliness, along with its class origins. See KF: 19 December 1941,19 September 1944.
36. KF: 26 June 1941.
37.
5 July 1941.
rn
Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda
835
measure out of their status as mothers, daughters, and sisters.gsIn 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 front."gg
The wives of frontline soldiers affirmed their special duty to serve in the
war industry.40In 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 can't lag behind
my husband."41 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 shift."42
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 recurrent theme, a poster reproduced in Komsomolkknia prauda depicted a
soldier's farewell to the girl who would "substitute" for him behind the
wheel of the tractor.43The notion of "substitution" carried the implication, 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 weeks.44
Ayoung man leaving for the front might be identified both as a metalworker-the quintessential class-conscious worker in the Bolshevik symbolic universe-and as the last of four brothers to be called for active
duty.45The 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
1942,20 December 1942.
39. KF: 20 November 1941.
14 April 1943.
40.
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 1941,22July 1942, 30 October 1942,20 December 1942,l May 1943,4 November 1944. In a poster by 0 . Eiges, a woman at the factory bench replaces the name card of
a male worker with her own, RU/SU 1922.7.
44. KF: 25 June 1941,14 November 1941,7July 1942.
45. KF: 26 June 1941.
rn
836
Slavic Review
Komsomolkkaia pravda regularly featured "simple Soviet girls" (prostie sovetskie devushki) taking up "male" jobs in heavy industry and androgynous 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
press.46 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. O n 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 man's 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 Pioneer's
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 expecting 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 wife's premonition that he might not return,
Potapov told the reporter, "Guys from the Narva Gate will die, but the enemy will not enter the city."47
Even when they enjoined defense of the revolution, appeals to take u p
arms focused on local and intimate anxieties-the protection of family,
children, and hometown. The German advance on Leningrad in the sum46. 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 1 9 4 1 , l lJuly 1942,20January 1943,ll December
1943. The press represented other native places in similar terms. See, for example, KF:
3 October 1941, 13 November 1941 (Moscow).
Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War 1
1Propaganda
837
mer of 1941 elicited evocations of the revolutionary working class's defense of the city, "the cradle of revolution," during the civil war, along with
pleas to protect "our children, our hearths."48Underscoring the connection 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 poster.4gAirplanes 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 outlook. Under the 1919 poster, the editors of Komsomolkkaia pravda printed
Vladimir Lenin's contemporary praise for the workers' "revolutionary enthusiasm and self-sacrifice." By contrast, in the quotation under the 1941
poster, Leningrad's 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 precedent, 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 mother's 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 life."50At 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 Komsomol'skaiapravda 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 u p 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'] ."51An 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 live."52
The sons' loyalty to Soviet power was in turn represented as a very per48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
KF: 21 August 1941.
KF: 22 August 1941.
KF: 24 June 1941.
KF: 14November 1942
KF: 26 June 1941.
838
Slavic Review
sonal obligation to their fathers. A letter from the front located the source
of a fallen comrade's heroism in a vow, made at age five, to be worthy of
the father killed in the civil war.53
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 Hindus's account of a collective
farm chairman's 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 service.54
The woman refused to cook and heat the bathhouse for two men she regarded as an imposition. While the sentimentalized, universalized love of
a mother for her "sons," and of sons for their "mother," failed to materialize 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, Soviet propaganda had represented the party, the Red Army, and other
official organizations as a "big family" that "completely superseded the
personal sphere of life."55During 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 developed under fire, but far from replacing the small family, the "big family" (bol'shnia sem'in) 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. Soldiers 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 women's civil war service. KF:
7 August 1941,16November 1941.Visual propaganda also portrayed civil war heroes as father;. Examples include the posters " ~ o r z h usynom!"
~
Ian older man in a suit, with
Izwestiia visible in the pocket, embracing a younger man in a Red Army uniform overflowing with medals and insignia) and "Bei vraga kak ego bili otsy i starshie brat'ia-matrosy
oktiabria!" (young Soviet sailor attacking with rifle and bayonet; a faded figure of an older
sailor stands behind the young one, encouraging him), RU/SU 2251, 1921.19.
54. Hindus, l\/lothmRussia, 215-16.
55. Brooks, "Revolutionary Lives," 34.
Local Loyalties and Private Lye in Soviet World War TI Propaganda
839
that their children were receiving the best of care in Soviet institution^.^"
Moreover, biological ties often stood at the core of frontline family. Accounts 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," Komsomol'skaia 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 mother's 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 clutching 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 set."58 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 women's uniquely feminine talentstheir "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 nation."60
By the mid-1920s, the state had moved decisively away from a policy of
56. KF: 21 August 1941,17 December 1941,15 Februaly 1944,15July 1944.
27 February 1942 (father and son) ; 2 June 1944,l November
57. See, for example,
1944,3January 1945 (brothers); 26 August 1942,4 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 b7endyZ. Goldman, Women, the State, and
Revolutio?~:Soviet Family Poliq and Social Lve, 191 7-1936 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 296336; Richard Stites, The Women's Libmation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 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. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations i~2Social History (Bloomington, 1989), 105-20; Elizabeth Waters, "The Bolsheviks
and the Family," Contemporary European History 4 (1993): 275-91; Susan E. Reid, "All
Stalin's b70men: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s," Slavic Review 57, no. 1
(Spring 1998): 136.
60. Wood, Baba and the Comrade, 67,47, 100.
840
Slavic Review
promoting the "withering away" of the family and toward an emphasis on
parental, especially maternal, responsibility for children. Pro-natal, profamily 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 u p 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 1 9 3 0 ~ . ~ '
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 n o women in the smelting shops in the
1920s, when the heroic female worker (rabotnitsa) in the form of a blacksmith's 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 context 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 women's "emancipation" with their
concern for family also animated the Soviet press's characterization of
the Nazi threat. Appeals to women contrasted Nazi misogyny with the
Soviet state's commitment to guaranteeing equal access to education
and employment and to honoring motherhood, rather than mere animal
procreati~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 eschewing 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, Wbmen's Liberation, 385.
63. Bonnell, "Representation of MTomen," 278-79, 286-87. Almost no women
worked at the IGrov M'orks (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 Stalin's Women," 141.
66. KF: 10 October 1941,18 April 1942,l June 1943.
Local Loyalties and Private Lqe i n 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 front.'j7 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." O n
the eve of his return to the front, one soldier told his nurse, "I d o 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 ~ t h e r . " ~ % n o t h eletter
r
from
a hospital told the story of a young woman's devotion to her fianc6e despite the amputation of his arm and leg, and his fears that she would abandon him. The correspondent, who emphasized that she had witnessed the
events described, asked the editors of Komsomol'skaia pravda to publish her
letter as evidence of the "Soviet girl's real love, strong and true."70Where
young women at the front undertook the same missions as the men, the
press underscored both the distinctively feminine element in their characters 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, "Don't Cry Marianna," a soldier included his
lieutenant's 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 Marianna's 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 Marianna's reply-a pledge to turn her sorrow into vengeance by
67. Susan Gubar provides many examples of the "eroticizing ofwomen's 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, barebreasted partisan identified as Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia stands as an important exception
to the Soviet rule. Sartorti, "On the Making of Heroes," 184-85. Hindus, Mother Rzcssia,
236,287-88.
68. KF: 12 February 1942,3 September 1942,14April1943.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 possessing 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 Women's 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^."'^ W,ith 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 girlfriends would not wait for them, and women answered in print with assurances that Soviet women who had proved themselves capable of flying planes and of handling weapons could manage the apparently equally
taxing and important work of waiting.74In the wartime press, women's
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 Stalin's 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 children.'Vncreasingly, 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" (stalinskoepokolenie), and Stalin appeared more frequently as the "father" of the Soviet
family.77
The shift in the press's coverage of the war can be understood, not
only as the party's 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, Women's Liberation, 389.
76. Brooks, "Pravda Goes to War," 13.
77. KF: 16 October 1943,sJanuary 1944,15August 1944,8April 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 Vissarionovich," 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 diminished 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 resonance of the Soviet cause. While newspapers published fewer personal
letters, many continued to appear, especially as short fragments within reporters' accounts of the war. In an article bemoaning the lack of inspirational "literary heroes of our time," Komsomolkkaia pravda's 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 soldier's
greatcoat." Novelists, the reviewer argued, had failed to create a contemporary Pave1 Korchagin-the hero of the socialist realist classic of the
1930s,How 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 press's 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 unknown 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 me."7"ince that time, the sailor had worn the ring,
despite his comrades' mockery of his "petit bourgeois" (meshchanskii) affectation, 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
motivati~ns.~~
rn
78.
13 May 1944. See also, Kt: 1 October 1944. Interestingly, Nikolai Ostrovskii's
novel could be found in the backpacks of many soldiers at the front. L. Rozova and
E. Ostrovskaia, N. Ostrouskii v shkole (Moscow, 1949), 14-15, 133-62.
79.
23 February 1945.
80. Prauda, 20 August 1945.
rn
844
Slavic Review
With the victory at Stalingrad, paeans to Stalin and the party multiplied, 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 heroes.81In
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 mother's 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 children's steps.x2
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 one's native ~ i l l a g e . ~ W t h letters
focused on the sacrifices
er
that made victory possible or on the scenes of destruction that awaited
those returning home. Guards lance-corporal Nikolai Vasilov wrote to
Komsomol'skaia pravda about his emotional return to his destroyed village.s4 "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 1943,6 October 1944,15 November 1944,8 April 1945.
82. KI: 7 July 1943.
83. KI: 4 August 1944. See also KF: 18 October 1941, 22 November 1941, 2 February
1943,12 May 1943,ll December 1943,l February 1944,6 October 1944,2 February 1945,
4 April 1945.
84. KI: 15 November 1944. See also KI: 6 October 1944, 3 January 1945.
Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War 11Propaganda
845
"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,
Komsomol'skaia pravda ran a photo of the reunion of Captain Oleg Razumov 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 ~ n f o r g e t t a b l e . " ~ ~
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, Komsomol'skaia 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 woman's 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 women's 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 adoption.86The 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 love.87The 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 "Moscow lives." KF: 30 October 1941.
86. Michael A. Newcity, Zizxation in the Soviet Union (New York, 1986), 106-12;
Hindus, Mother Russia, 203; Stites, Women's 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 History 22 (April 1997): 213.
Slavic Review
health by adoptive families or by devoted teachers, whom they addressed
as "mama."s8The 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 war's
youngest and most innocent'victims.
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 women's "true" (rodnye) sons. After her son's 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 B o r i ~ . " ~ "
If, as historian Jeffrey Brooks has argued, the wartime press's "expression of humanistic values . . . had an almost insurrectionary meaning,"g0
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 Soviet propaganda and became a central feature of what Brooks identifies as
the wartime press's 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 border 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-
rn
rn
88.
2 July 1942,14 March 1943,8 March 1944. For stories about orphans, see KI:
10 October 1942,12 May 1943,9July 1944,25January 1945.
89.
'7 July 1943. For similar stories, see Kt: 27 February 1942, 15 November 1944.
90. Brooks, "Pravda Goes to War," 19.
91. Dunham, In Stalink Time, 18.
Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War 11Propaganda
847
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 Bolshevik 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.