Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (51 page)

^{152
Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 24, d. 786, ll. 9, 11.}

^{153
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 38158, l. 7.}

^{154
Proc. Ibid., d. 26657, l. 4.}

^{155
Let. RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 875, ll. 88–120.}

^{156
Let. Ibid., d. 877, l. 31.}

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
159

these public campaigns into platforms for the expression of their pre-
existing anxieties.

Reappropriation: the Peace Campaigns as sites of mourning

Participants in the ‘Struggle for Peace’ also reappropriated the Peace
Campaigns as a medium through which to articulate their grief from the last war. The official heroic narrative of the Great Patriotic War left little space for personal tragedy, loss, and mourning.
^{157
The official rhetoric}
of the ‘Struggle for Peace’ also sometimes referred back to the experience of the last war but in depersonalized and confident terms. However the records of the signature campaign meetings, and letters sent by Soviet citizens, reveal a powerful outpouring of personal emotion connected to the past war. Local meetings were often dominated by those who had lost loved ones during the war, and spoke in passionate terms about their personal tragedy.
^{158
Speakers regularly described the ‘horrors’}
( y;fcs) of the last war or the ‘terrible grief’ (cnhfiyjt ujht) they had endured as a result of it.
^{159
Letter writers to newspapers and public}
figures also told their tales of woe, whilst declaring their support for the ‘Struggle for Peace’. A. Solomatina wrote to
Pravda
from ‘before my portrait of my dead son’, saying she had wanted to go to the Peace Congress to ‘pour out a cry from the suffering mothers’ hearts’.
¹⁶⁰

Injured veterans also played a prominent role in these local events.
However, their narratives were not always the official heroic story of overcoming disability.
^{161
A number of veterans spoke of the ‘burden’}
they suffered because of their invalidity or how they had ‘lost their health’ at the front.
^{162
M. I. Ponomareva emotionally described her}
frustrations at being unable to perform her duties as a mother without

^{157
C. Merridale,}
Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia
(London, 2000); N. Tumarkin,
The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in
Russia (New York, 1994).

^{158
For a similar process in post-Vietnam America, see J. Bodnar,}
Remaking America:

Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton, 1992)
,
3–9.

^{159
Inf. GAOPDiFAO f. 8627, op. 1, d. 55, ll. 1, 52; d. 131, ll. 46, 49.}

^{160
Let. RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 117, l. 33.}

^{161
B. Fieseler, ‘The Bitter Legacy of the “Great Patriotic War”: Red Army Disabled}
Soldiers under Late Stalinism,’ in Fu¨rst,
Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruc-
tion and Reinvention (London, 2006), 47–60.

^{162
Inf. GAOPDiFAO f. 8627, op. 1, d. 55, l. 58; d. 26, l. 3.}

160
Being Soviet

her lost arm in a letter to
Pravda
.
^{163
The July 1950 meeting in the}
Semzhinskii rural Soviet in Menzenskii
raion,
Arkhangel’sk
oblast’
, was typical of the Peace Campaign gatherings on a local level. The first speech was offered by a mother of several children who described in emotional terms the dangers of war, followed by a party worker, a war
invalid, the chairman of the village Soviet, and then a woman who lost her husband in the last war.
^{164
Veterans, invalids, and mothers jostled}
for space alongside those who normally dominated public political meetings. Their speeches were rarely the heroic tales of victorious
frontoviki
, but rather the emotional narratives of those who had lost most in the previous war and so strongly supported a campaign to avert a fresh conflict. Yekelchyk argues that the Peace Campaigns were a failure because they failed to produce enough emotion. On a local level, the ‘tactic’ of reappropriation often meant that they generated too much emotion rather than too little.
^{165
A public campaign for}
production, might, and self-adulation was often transformed into a space for mourning.

SOVIET MENTALIT E´ DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR: THE OUTSIDE WORLD

^{AS A THREATENING PLACE}

It is hardly surprising that speculative rumouring was widespread in the
first post-war months: Soviet society was still undergoing an enormous amount of social strain. Reconstruction was slow and difficult. Living conditions in the cities were unsanitary and working hours long.
^166
The
Party Soviets in Odessa, Yaroslavl, Tambov, and Kursk were so over- whelmed with complaint letters that they simply stopped answering them in 1945.
^{167
Urban crime and petty theft became major problems}
after 1945, and in the countryside life was even more difficult.
^168
The
rural labour force had become increasingly aged and female during the

^{163
Sv. RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 117, l. 40.}

^{164
Inf. GAOPDiFAO f 8627, op. 1, d. 486, l. 20.}

^{165
Yekelchyk, ‘Civic Duty to Hate’. The emotion he discusses is hate rather than}
mourning.

^166
Filtzer,
Soviet Workers and Late-Stalinism
:
Labour and the Restoration of the
Stalinist System After World War II (Cambridge, 2002).

^{167
RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 111, ll. 74, 80; d. 112, l. 18.}

^{168
See: RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 118, l. 45.}

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
161

war and all heavy machinery production had been redirected to the
front.
^{169
The struggle of reconstruction was compounded by region-}
alized famines in 1946–7.
^{170
Wartime conditions, and the social stress}
that went with them, persisted into the middle of 1947 at least.

These social pressures were at their most amplified in the western
borderlands. These regions had experienced the attempts of the Wehr- macht, Red Army, and nationalist partisans to resculpt society along their chosen lines.
^{171
In 1945–7 they were, once again, on the potential}
front line. The transfer of information within inter-personal networks, would have reinforced social cohesion in these traumatized commu- nities in the post-war era. They also found other mechanisms for preserving unity, such as treating those who had worked in Germany or girls who had slept with German soldiers with disdain. Stories of returnees arriving with suitcases full of foreign goods also operated as an outlet for frustration and resentment.
¹⁷²

The official propaganda machine was also struggling to get its mes-
sage out throughout the USSR between 1945 and 1947. Reports from these years bemoan the shortage of qualified political agitators. Even the navy struggled to acquire trained report readers.
^{173
Official agitation}
failed, in particular, to satisfy the widespread popular hunger for infor- mation about the outside world.
^{174
The Arkhangel’sk}
oblast
’ lecture Buro read only 16.5 per cent of their reports on political themes in this period; 44 per cent were on agriculture or medicine.
^{175
Information}
hunger became so severe during the elections in early 1946 that cam- paign leaflets were being sold on the black market.
^{176
The scarcity of}

^{169
A. Nove, ‘Soviet Peasantry in World War II’, in, Linz,}
The Impact of World War II
on the Soviet Union (Totowa, 1985), 77–90; GAOPDiFAO, f. 296, op. 2, d. 398, l. 27.

^{170
V. F. Zima,}
Golod v SSSR 1946–1947 Godov: Proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia

(Moscow, 1999); Ganson,
The Soviet Famine in Global and Historical Perspective

(Basingstoke, 2009).

^{171
T. Snyder,}
The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,
1569–1999 (New Haven, 2003), 154–78; Weiner, ‘Something to Die for, A Lot to Kill for: The Soviet System and the Barbarisation of Warfare, 1939–1945’, in G. Kassimeris, ed.,
The Barbarisation of Warfare
(London, 2006); W. Lotnik,
Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict
in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands (London, 1999).

^{172
Inf. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1478, ll. 2–29; d. 1479, l. 8; RGASPI f. 82, op. 2,}

d. 148, ll. 68–70.

^{173
RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 405, l. 30.}

^{174
Zubkova, trans. H. Ragsdale,}
Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Dis-
appointments,
1945–1957
(Armonk, NY, 1998), 87.

^{175
GAAO f. 5790, op. 3, d. 30, l. 5.}

^{176
Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1424, ll. 21b–22.}

162
Being Soviet

officially mediated information made it all the more likely that when
news did arrive it would be seized upon, fused with other ideas within the word-of-mouth network, potentially misinterpreted, and acted on. The official mass media was also suffering from the deepening credibility crisis that had engulfed it in after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939–41. The failure of official newspapers to predict the outbreak of war or report defeats at the front in 1941–2 had further undermined the authority of the Soviet press. A large number of those who were prosecuted for anti-Soviet speech during the war were alleged to have stated that the Sovinformburo reports were not trustworthy.
^177
This
process only deepened in the post-war era. More and more Soviet citizens had also visited the outside world and were able to supplement