Suchergebnisse

Focusing on the Soviet exile of the Spanish communist and orator Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum brings into dialogue two topics often treated in isolation: Soviet subjectivities and the selfunderstandings of international communists. During the Spanish civil war, the Soviet media popularized Ibárruri's performance of fierce communist motherhood. The article traces Ibárruri's efforts in exile to maintain and adapt this public identity by analyzing sources in two distinct registers, both of which blurred the boundaries between public and private selves: Ibárruri's "official" correspondence and her interventions in party meetings. Reading such sources as sites of self-fashioning, Kirschenbaum argues that Ibárruri was at once empowered and constrained by her self-presentation as the mother of the Spanish exiles. Ibárruri's case both internationalizes understandings of Stalinist culture and suggests the possibility of a history of international communism structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists.

Remembering and Rebuilding: Leningrad after the Siege from a Comparative Perspective The paper takes as its starting point the recognition that when compared with other post-catastrophic cities, Leningrad appears to be an outlier that offers little insight into more «typical» cases. Blockaded for almost nine-hundred days, Leningrad suffered less damage to its physical plant than the iconic destroyed cities of World War II. At the same time, the city's relatively intact cityscape barely hinted at the vast human losses–perhaps one million Leningraders died of starvation–that also defy comparison. The uniqueness of the Leningrad case underscores the utility of comparisons grounded in local subjectivities. I propose a comparative analysis structured around examining the key questions – what was destroyed, what was rebuilt, how was the story told – from the perspective of people who lived in the city before, during and after the catastrophe.

AbstractThis essay introduces the five articles that comprise the special issue of Soviet and Post-Soviet Review on "World War II in Soviet and Post-Soviet Memory." It highlights the variety of means employed by the contributors to explain and assess the construction, reconfi guration, and uncanny persistence of the Great Patriotic War in individual, local, and national narratives. The essay also suggests pathways for future research.

In Russia, the memory of the Second World War has been at once deeply personal and profoundly political. Largely erased from official memory until Stalin's death, the story of the war became, in the 1960s, a key means of legitimizing the Soviet state. The mythic "20 million"—more recent estimates are closer to 30 million war dead—became the heart of a lasting and state-sanctioned collective memory of shared suffering, patriotism, and redemption. As historian Nina Tumarkin has argued, the official "cult" of the war began to crumble in the mid-1980s, and what she calls "raw human memory," personal stories untainted by the myth created from above, began to emerge. Tumarkin contends that the "winds of glasnost' and perestroika" effectively "ravaged" both the state-sanctioned "myth" and the "shared memory" of the Great Patriotic War. Personal tragedies began to replace the official tale of national triumph.

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 wordrodina,from the verbrodit',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.