All Stalin's Men? Soldierly Masculinities in the Soviet
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository ALL STALIN’S MEN? SOLDIERLY MASCULINITIES IN THE SOVIET WAR EFFORT, 1938-1945 BY STEVEN GEORGE JUG DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Diane Koenker, Chair Professor Mark Steinberg Associate Professor Mark Micale Associate Professor John Randolph ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the different but interconnected ways Soviet leaders and citizen-soldiers interpreted the Soviet war effort as a masculine endeavor. At the front, the entry of women into the ranks of combatants challenged not only men’s preeminence, but also official and popular narratives of a masculine ethic of national defense that stretched back to the Russian Revolution. The chapters of this dissertation explore the ways in which masculine values and priorities from the 1930s persisted in the Red Army despite the distinguished service of female combatants and divisions among male soldiers, commanders, and propagandists. Motives and actions such as hating and killing, comradeship and revenge, or serving Stalin and using skill, appeared as exclusively masculine in frontline culture, in contrast to depictions of vulnerable women as non-combatants and passive victims in the civilian realm. Analyzing Russian archival materials, military newspapers, and soldiers’ letters and memoirs, this study investigates the interaction and evolution of official and popular notions of soldiers and heroes as masculine subjects. This dissertation argues that divergent official and soldierly masculinities retained a common set of values that emphasized women’s non-military nature and non-combatant roles as a way to preserve the gendered motivations established at the outset of the war. In order to challenge scholarship that presents catch-all sets of motives that operated throughout the war, this study focuses on civilian men’s creative synthesis of influences from front life, soldier- specific propaganda, and small group combat dynamics into a soldierly identity. Made up of battle-tested fighters, the combat collective emerged as source of masculine affiliation separate from the national collective or soldiers’ families. An examination of rank-and-file narratives, not just propaganda, reveals how ordinary soldiers participated in the creation of Red Army practices and values in wartime. ii To Mother and Father iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the victorious outcome of a decade of study that benefitted from the support of many colleagues and friends. While an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Tracy McDonald and Lynne Viola furthered my interest in Russian history and guided me toward graduate school. I am grateful for their advice, encouragement, and affirmation of an educational trajectory that did not culminate in law school. At Illinois, my advisor, Diane Koenker, provided an unmatched critical eye and extraordinarily detailed feedback. I wish to thank her for reading so much of my work that was usually more rough than draft. She showed great patience with a student who often seemed to do things the hard way. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my committee members. Thanks to Mark Steinberg for his unfailing optimism about the project’s potential, and for his willingness to push me to develop themes that I had left in the background. I appreciate Mark Micale’s advice and guidance on the gender components of the dissertation, which ranged from supplying reading lists to having informal chats over iced tea. Thanks to John Randolph for contributing breathtakingly insightful questions that helped focus my thinking about the larger stakes of the project. I also had the good fortune to work with John Lynn, who I thank for sharing his indispensible expertise on military history. My wife endured the entire writing process with me, and I am grateful for her enthusiasm and willingness to proofread sections, drafts, and chapters along the way. Finally, I thank my parents, aunt, and grandparents for their faith in me. They always offered love and support from near and far. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: FIGHTING MEN, SOVIET CULTURE, AND TOTAL WAR..………….. 1 CHAPTER 1: SERVING AND WAITING: MEN’S CONFLICTED DUTIES ON THE EVE OF WAR, 1938-1941……..…………………………………………………...…27 CHAPTER 2: SACRIFICING AND SURVIVING: DIVERGENT REACTIONS TO THE INVASION CRISIS OF 1941……………………………….…………………...61 CHAPTER 3: HATING AND KILLING: DEFINING ONESELF AGAINST ENEMY AND NON-COMBATANT AMIDST DEFEAT, 1942…………………..…...……….98 CHAPTER 4: AVENGING AND MOURNING: HIERARCHIES AND COMMUNITIES AFTER STALINGRAD, 1943-1944……….…………………………………..142 CHAPTER 5: LOVING AND LUSTING: THE PERILS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF CONQUEST, 1944-1945……………………………………………………….179 CONCLUSION: DEFENDING MASCULINE DUTY….......……………….…………..……249 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………....…………………………………........258 v INTRODUCTION: FIGHTING MEN, SOVIET CULTURE, AND TOTAL WAR On the eve of the Second World War, Red Army leaders feared that young men in the ranks were insufficiently masculine. In the middle of the war, they struggled with how successfully women combatants fought alongside Red Army men. In the war’s final months, those same leaders worried that their men were too masculine as they rampaged through Germany. Gender shaped the not only the Soviet government’s approaches to mobilization, motivation, and morale, but also Red Army soldiers’ subjectivities and sense of duty to comrades, family, and country. This dissertation argues that official and soldierly masculinities evolved in relation to one another while retaining a core exclusivity that denied equal status to women combatants. Propaganda directed specifically as soldiers consistently revised narratives of masculine heroism that ignored the existence of civilian men altogether. Fighting men expressed masculine subjectivities centered on the elite nature of their combat performance as an expression of exceptional skill, dedication, and toughness. While official and soldiers’ sets of values rarely shared a common notion of sacrifice, duty, or even heroism, their mutual emphasis on the masculine nature of frontline service persisted as a commonality throughout the war. Frontline propaganda appeared responsive to the changing strategic situation, but never managed to anticipate major shifts in soldiers’ motives for fighting. Instead, Red Army fighters, usually through indiscipline, contributed to shifts in policy and propaganda during the early, middle, and late stages of the war. A sense of masculine duty to family or bonds with comrades also contributed to why Red Army men fought. However, such loyalties to a local, rather than national, collective, also fueled discharge petitions and insubordinate acts. To support these claims, I analyze troops’ letters, petitions, recollections, memoirs, and diaries, as well as official 1 rhetoric and policy that targeted soldiers in newspapers, leaders’ speeches, propaganda directives, and military orders. The Red Army and total war This study begins in July of 1938, rather than at the start of the German invasion in June of 1941. Examining the Red Army and related civilian training efforts during peacetime and small scale conflicts provides an essential frame of reference for understanding wartime changes. This border war period provides evidence of not only Soviet expectations and preparations for war, but actual reactions and reforms in response to fighting in different borderlands and on widely varying scales. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops saw battle in these conflicts, and Soviet political and military leaders faced real enemies and real problems that demanded difficult decisions in order to deal with a mixed operational record. Their choices, and soldiers’ and young people’s responses to limited war and mobilization, provide critical insights into the transition to war in Stalinist society and culture. July of 1938 marks the outbreak of a month of fighting between the Red Army and Japanese forces in the Soviet Far East. Several military-organizational milestones also took place in 1938. The Red Army abolished national units and drafted its first fully multi-ethnic conscript cohort. Officer schools doubled in size and course duration was cut to prepare for army expansion. The remnants of the military purge or Ezhovshchina ended, and Lev Mekhlis, Stalin’s hand-picked candidate, took charge of the political administration of the Red Army, or PUR.1 Taken together, the events of 1938 provide a key starting point for studying the Soviet 1 On ethnic units, see Susan L. Curran and Dmitry Ponomareff, “Managing the Ethnic Factor in the Russian and Soviet Armed Forces: A Historical Overview,” in Ethnic Minorities in the Red Army: Asset or Liability? ed. Alexander R. Alexiev et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988). On officer training school numbers and course duration and quality, see Roger Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 91. For an explanation of how military purges shifted from the Red Army leadership to middle-ranking officers and then ended entirely, see Roger Reese, Red Commanders (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 121-131. On the 2 Union’s final pre-invasion preparations. The bulk of the dissertation deals with the war