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“Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families“: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
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During World War II, 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 nationalism. 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. 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.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 4 , Winter 2000 , pp. 825 - 847
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

Grants from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies 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 Russian Historians. My thanks go to the participants in these sessions, as well as to the two anonymous referees at Slavic Review 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 Review 50 (1991): 275. On Soviet wartime propaganda's “immediate appeal to patriotism,” see Barber, John, ‘The Image of Stalin in Soviet Propaganda and Public Opinion during World War 2,” in Garrard, John and Garrard, Carol, eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People (New York, 1993), 38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. For definitions of “motherland,” see Dal', Vladimir, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (1882; reprint, Moscow, 1955), 4:11 Google Scholar; Ozhegov, S. I., Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1963), 673 Google Scholar. Ozhegov's first definition is “fatherland” (otechestvo), a word that does not appear in Dal“s entry. The second definition is birthplace.

3. Brooks, Jeffrey, “ Pravda Goes to War,” in Stites, Richard, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, 1995), 14 Google Scholar. 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. Tumarkin, Nina, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cull of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994), 64–66 Google Scholar; Lazarev, Lazar, “Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth,” in Garrard, and Garrard, , eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People, 29 Google Scholar; Brown, Deming, “World War II in Soviet Literature,” in Linz, Susan, ed., The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totowa, N.J., 1985), 243-44Google Scholar. On the centralized control of the Soviet press, see Roxburgh, Angus, Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine (New York, 1987), 37–38 Google Scholar; Hopkins, Mark, Mass Media in the Soviet Union (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

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 Heller, Mikhail and Nekrich, Aleksandr M., Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (1986; reprint, New York, 1992), 413 Google Scholar. Katharine Hodgson notes a “post- Stalingrad trend” in Soviet war poetry, much of which was published in the press, “towards 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, Written with the Bayonet: Soviet Russian Poetry of World War Two (Liverpool, 1996), 86. A similar dynamic seems to have been at work within the party. Richard J. 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 die war,” the courses reopened, but attendance remained a problem. Brody, , Ideology and Political Mobilization: The Soviet Home Front during World War II (Pittsburgh, 1994), 24, 26Google Scholar. Contemporary observers noted a clear shift in Soviet propaganda following the victory at Stalingrad. See National Archives 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, 1941-1945 (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, , Life and Fate, trans. Chandler, Robert (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

5. My study is based on a reading of at minimum one issue per week of Komsomol'skaia 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. Honey, Maureen, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (Amherst, Mass., 1984), 4 Google Scholar. The quotation is Honey's characterization of Leila Rupp's argument in Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton, 1978), 132. Published collections of World War II 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 and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives (Princeton, 1992) contains reproductions of wartime posters from the Soviet Union, Germany, England, and the United States. See also Bird, William, Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. The NARA website provides access to digital images of over 2,500 United States posters (http://www.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 workforce rose from 52 percent in 1939 to 71 percent in early 1943. Harrison, Mark, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938- 1945 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 137-39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On women's involvement in the armed forces and partisan groups, see Cottam, K. Jean, “Soviet Women in Combat in World War II: The Rear Services, Resistance behind Enemy Lines and Military Political Workers,” International Journal of Women's Studies 5 (September-October 1982): 363-78Google Scholar; Cottam, “Soviet Women in Combat in World War II: The Ground Forces and the Navy,” InternationalJournal of Women's Studies 3 (July-August 1980): 345-57; Erickson, John, “Soviet Women in World War II,” in Garrard, and Garrard, , eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People, 50–76 Google Scholar. A valuable collection of women's reminiscences of war may be found in S. Alexiyevich, War's Unwomanly Face (Moscow, 1988).

8. KP, 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; “Prevratim kolkhozy v nepristupnuiu krepost’ dlia vraga,” NARA, Smolensk Archive, Microfilm T-87, Roll 52, WKP-480.

9. Brooks, Jeffrey, “Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s,“ in White, Stephen, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 34 Google Scholar; Dunham, Vera, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976), 18 Google Scholar; Wood, Elizabeth A., The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997), 47 Google Scholar. See also Waters, Elizabeth, ‘The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917-32,” in Barbara Evans Clements et al., ed., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, 1991), 235-37Google Scholar.

10. Brooks, “Pravda Goes to War,” 10.

11. Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinismas Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 218 Google Scholar.

12. Jolly, Margaretta, “'Dear Laughing Motorbyke': Gender and Genre in Women's Letters from the Second World War,” in Swindells, Julia, ed., The Uses of Autobiography (London, 1995), 45 Google Scholar.

13. NARA, Record Group 226, R & A 2949, 21-22.

14. Brooks, Jeffrey, “Public and Private Values in the Soviet Press, 1921-1928,” Slavic Review, 4 no. 1 (Spring 1989): 21–27 Google Scholar; Kotkin, , Magnetic Mountain, 218-21Google Scholar.

15. KP, 23 November 1941.

16. KP, 1 June 1943.

17. Ginzburg, Lidiia, Blockade Diary, trans. Myers, Alan (London, 1995), 56 Google Scholar.

18. Hindus, Maurice, Mother Russia (Garden City, N.Y., 1943), 3–4 Google Scholar.

19. KP, 22 January 1942, 18 February 1942, 22 May 1942, 23 May 1942. Recendy, the Zoia myth has been debunked as largely a creation of the press. See Seniavskaia, E. S., “Geroicheskie simvoly: Real'nost’ i mifologiia voiny,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1995, no. 5: 38–39 Google Scholar; translated as “Heroic Symbols: The Reality and Mythology of War,” Russian Studies in History 37 (Summer 1998): 61-87. See also Sartorti, Rosalinde, “On the Making of He roes, Heroines, and Saints,” in Stites, , ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, 176-93Google Scholar. 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, , Livingand the Dead, 76–77 Google Scholar.

20. KP, 24 October 1941.

21. Roxburgh, Pravda, 38. The memoirs of a Pravda journalist contends that the editorial staff composed postwar letters to Stalin.

22. NARA, Records of HQ, 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 II,” 59. Zoia's words can be found in her mother's reminiscences. KP, 23 May 1942.

23. Richard Stites notes a wartime “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. KP, 30 April 1942. See also KP, 21 March 1942, 16 October 1943, 6 October 1944, 8 March 1945.

25. KP, 23 November 1941.

26. KP, 3 September 1942.

27. Pasternak, Boris, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Hayward, Max and Harari, Manya (New York, 1958), 507 Google Scholar.

28. Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Goldberg, Paul, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston, 1990), 19 Google Scholar.

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.

30. KP, 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 zhenskoe), KP, 30 April 1945.

32. Quoted in Wood, , Baba and the Comrade, 60 Google Scholar. See also her discussion of the moral force of women in the “family” of workers, ibid., 65-67.

33. KP, 11 October 1941, 19 April 1942, 26 June 1942, 8 July 1942. Bonnell, Victoria E., Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 261 Google Scholar. 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.

34. Bonnell, Iconography, 256, 265 (Iraklii Toidze's poster “Rodina-mat’ zovet!” also RU/SU 2136); KP, 8 March 1942. For similar appeals to children, see KP, 24 June 1941, 30 April 1942,14 November 1942, 7July 1943. The press also carried broader appeals from young women workers to young men, KP, 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, War's 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 to a cart bound for the rear, ibid., 105, see also 23-24, 26, 58.

35. Francoise Navailh argues that in wartime films, the “figure of a ruthless woman underscores the failure of men.” Navailh, “The Emancipated Woman: Stalinist Propaganda in Soviet Feature Film, 1930-1950,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 12 (1992): 209. See, for example, KP, 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 Unwomanly 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 in 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 KP, 19 December 1941, 19 September 1944.

36. KP, 26 June 1941.

37. KP, 5 July 1941.

38. KP, 26 June 1941. Calls for women to “substitute” for brothers, husbands, and fathers were common. See, for example, KP, 24 June 1941, 9 January 1942, 11 September 1942, 20 December 1942.

39. KP, 20 November 1941.

40. KP, 14 April 1943.

41. KP, 25 June 1941.

42. KP, 26 June 1941.

43. KP, 28 June 1941. Such calls appeared almost daily into the fall of 1941. See also KP, 3July 1941, 22July 1942, 30 October 1942, 20 December 1942, 1 May 1943, 4 November 1944. In a poster by O. Eiges, a woman at the factory bench replaces the name card of a male worker with her own, RU/SU 1922.7.

44. KP, 25June 1941, 14 November 1941, 7July 1942.

45. KP, 26June 1941.

46. KP, 19 September 1941, 17 October 1941 (partisan with bandolier), 16January 1942, 31 March 1942, 25 June 1942 (pig tender), 7 July 1942, 14 April 1943. On Pavlichenko, see KP, 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. KP, 26 September 1941. For other examples of the mix of emotional and political ties to Leningrad, see KP, 22 November 1941, 11 July 1942, 20 January 1943, 11 December 1943. The press represented other native places in similar terms. See, for example, KP, 3 October 1941, 13 November 1941 (Moscow).

48. KP, 21 August 1941.

49. KP, 22 August 1941.

50. KP, 24 June 1941.

51. KP, 14 November 1942.

52. KP, 26 June 1941.

53. KP, 11 October 1942. The press also mentioned women's civil war service. KP, 7 August 1941,16 November 1941. Visual propaganda also portrayed civil war heroes as fathers. Examples include the posters “Gorzhus’ synom!” (an older man in a suit, with hvestiia 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, , Mother Russia, 215-16Google Scholar.

55. Brooks, , “Revolutionary Lives,” 34 Google Scholar.

56. KP, 21 August 1941, 17 December 1941, 15 February 1944, 15July 1944.

57. See, for example, KP, 27 February 1942 (father and son); 2June 1944,1 November 1944, 3January 1945 (brothers); 26 August 1942, 4 October 1944 (father and daughter).

58. KP, 21 March 1943.

59. On the rarity of mothers in early Soviet political art, see Waters, “Female Form,“ 235-36. On the “resurrection” of the family, see Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 296–336 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton, 1978), 376-91Google Scholar; Barbara Evans Clements, “The Effects of the Civil War on Women and Family Relations,” in Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Party, Slate, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, 1989), 105-20; Waters, Elizabeth, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Family,” Contemporary European History 4 (1993): 275-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, Susan E., “All Stalin's Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s,” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Wood, , Baba and the Comrade, 67, 47, 100Google Scholar.

61. Bonnell, , “The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s,” American Historical Review 98 (February 1993): 63, 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Stites, , Women's Liberation, 385 Google Scholar.

63. Bonnell, , “Representation of Women,” 278-79, 286-87Google Scholar. Almost no women worked at the Kirov Works (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 Google Scholar.

64. Bonnell, , “Peasant Woman,” 55–82 Google Scholar.

65. Reid, “All Stalin's Women,” 141.

66. KP, 10 October 1941, 18 April 1942, 1 June 1943.

67. Susan Gubar provides many examples of the “eroticizing of women's image” (240) in Allied and Axis propaganda, “'This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun': World War II and the Blitz on Women,” in Higonnet, Margaret et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, 1987), 227-59Google Scholar. 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 Russia, 236, 287-88Google Scholar.

68. KP, 12 February 1942, 3 September 1942,14 April 1943. On nurses during the civil war, see Wood, , Baba and the Comrade, 57–58 Google Scholar.

69. KP, 12 February 1942.

70. KP, 3 September 1942.

71. KP, 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.

73. KP, 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, 250-60Google Scholar.

74. KP, 3 September 1942.

75. Sdtes, , Women's Liberation, 389 Google Scholar.

76. Brooks, “Pravda Goes to War,” 13.

77. KP, 16 October 1943, 8January 1944,15 August 1944, 8 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 of the Stalin Breed: True Stories of the Soviet Youth in 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 Lahusen, Thomas and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds., Socialist Realism zvithout Shores (Durham, 1997), 187 Google Scholar.

78. KP, 13 May 1944. See also, KP, 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. Ostrovskii v shkole (Moscow, 1949), 14-15, 133-62.

79. KP, 23 February 1945.

80. Pravda, 20 August 1945.

81. KP, 27 July 1943, 6 October 1944, 15 November 1944, 8 April 1945.

82. KP, 7July 1943.

83. KP, 4 August 1944. See also KP, 18 October 1941, 22 November 1941, 2 February 1943,12 May 1943, 11 December 1943,1 February 1944, 6 October 1944, 2 February 1945, 4 April 1945.

84. KP, 15 November 1944. See also KP, 6 October 1944, 3 January 1945.

85. KP, 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.” KP, 30 October 1941.

86. Newcity, Michael A., Taxation in the Soviet Union (New York, 1986), 106-12Google Scholar; Hindus, , Mother Russia, 203 Google Scholar; Stites, , Women's Liberation, 388-89Google Scholar; Voznesenskii, N. A., Soviet Economy during the Second World War ([New York], 1949), 93 Google Scholar.

87. Bernstein, Laurie, ‘The Evolution of Soviet Adoption Law ,” Journal of Family History 22 (April 1997): 213 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. KP, 2July 1942, 14 March 1943, 8 March 1944. For stories about orphans, see KP, 10 October 1942, 12 May 1943, 9July 1944, 25January 1945.

89. KP, 7July 1943. For similar stories, see KP, 27 February 1942, 15 November 1944.

90. Brooks, , “Pravda Goes to War,” 19 Google Scholar.

91. Dunham, , In Stalin's Time, 18 Google Scholar.

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