Government Issue: The Material Culture of the Red Army 1941-1945 by Brandon Michael Schechter A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Yuri Slezkine, Chair John Connelly Victoria Frede-Montemayor Alexei YurchaK Spring 2015 Copyright © 2015 Brandon Michael Schechter All Rights Reserved Abstract Government Issue: The Material Culture of the Red Army 1941-1945 by Brandon Michael Schechter Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair This dissertation uses everyday objects to explore the meaning of the changes in Soviet society during the Great Patriotic War. The war was a fundamental shift in relations between citizen-soldiers and the state. It was also the greatest threat to the survival of the Stalinist state and Soviet people. The state survived by providing soldiers with the necessities and motivation to defend it. The former included rifles, boots, spoons and shovels, while the later encompassed harsh discipline, concern for well-being, and a shift to celebrating the accomplishments of the Russian Empire. All of this played out in objects, from underwear Kept lice free, newspapers and booKs to occupy soldiers' time and lamps to light their bunKers, to the introduction of medals depicting Russian Imperial heroes. Focusing on things (e.g. uniforms, weapons, tools, personal possessions) allows us to see the intersection of ideology and everyday life, of prescription and practice. Every chapter presents a different object or series of objects and uses them to both provide an ethnography of life in the Red Army and to highlight an aspect of the changes that tooK place in Soviet society during the war. In every chapter, we see how common experiences based on using the same objects – eating from the same pot, sleeping in the same bunKer, receiving the same medal, crewing the same gun – brought people of different ages, ethnicities, classes, creeds, and sexes together. The first three chapters focus on the soldier’s body and identity. Starting with the body itself, discussing how a diverse group of people became state property and how both the state and the soldiers managed this new relationship. Chapter 2 shows how uniforms refashioned soldiers’ biographies and made them readable texts consisting of medals and insignia, while allowing the state to present itself as having ancient roots. Chapter 3 focuses on how the state provided and soldiers used rations. The next section is devoted to violence. Chapter 4 examines the uses of the soldier’s spade and attempts by individuals to stay alive and craft something liKe normal life in the trenches. Chapter 5 is dedicated to weapons: both the act of killing and social hierarchy associated with different arms. A third section focuses on possessions, presenting a final chapter (6) on trophies, covering a sea change from a state that claimed a monopoly over everything on the battlefield to one that encouraging soldiers to taKe what they wanted from the defeated Third Reich. The dissertation concludes with a brief discussion of the subjects fostered by these objects. 1 Table of Contents AcKnowledgements……………………………………………………………………………………………………...…ii Introduction Government Issue ……………………………………………………………………………...……………………..iv-xv Chapter 1 The Soldier’s Body………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 2 A Personal Banner: Life in Red Army Uniform, 1941-1945…………………………………………… 33 Chapter 3 The State’s Pot and the Soldier’s Spoon: Rations (Paëk) in the Red Army…………………..…… 76 Chapter 4 Cities of Earth, Cities of Rubble: The Spade and Red Army Landscaping………………..……… 115 Chapter 5 “A Weapon is your honor and conscience”: Killing in the Red Army……………………………... 150 Chapter 6 Trophies of War: Red Army Soldiers Confront an Alien World of Goods………………….……. 190 Conclusion Subjects and Objects………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 227 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………231 i Acknowledgements I owe a tremendous debt to a small army of people in the realization of this project and am happy to list most of them here. I have had the great fortune to study at the University of California Berkeley’s History Department, which has forced me to thinK globally, comparatively and across disciplines. My committee provided guidance and assurance, and included a philosopher, bad cop/confessor, moralist and an aksakal. I am confident that they Know who they are in this list and I am immensely grateful to each of them. Their warmth, criticisms and openness has gone beyond the call of duty and never once did I doubt that I had made the right decision coming to Cal to worK with them. I cannot begin to thanK them enough. Yuri SlezKine, my chair, initially drew me to BerKeley with his ability to tell a story and sense of humor, both of which I hope rubbed off on me a bit. He has been an exceptional mentor who has challenged me to thinK about structure and narrative in ways that have made me understand history with greater depth and become a more interesting human. Victoria Frede-Montemayor has challenged me to seriously consider the words I use, staKes I claim and wider field in which I engage. She has also been one of the warmest people I have Known here and perhaps my most stern critic while being one of my greatest advocates. John Connelly has reminded me to thinK about both morality and what was happening outside the Soviet Union and introduced me to seeing Bolshevism and Stalinism through non-Soviet eyes. Alexei YurchaK has forced me to contend with the conceptualization of this project and seriously contemplate the importance of objects in an anti-capitalist society. While at Berkeley I have enjoyed the benefit of a superb Russian History Working Group (“The Kruzhok”), which has provided fellowship and intellectual sustenance since I first arrived. I would liKe to thanK all members and single out Nicole Eaton, Alexis Peri, Mirjam VoerKelius, Jason Morton, Charles Shaw and Eric Johnson in particular. Alice Goff has served as an outside reader of my worK on innumerable occasions. Several of the chapters in this dissertation were written in Research Seminars under the tutelage of Yuri SlezKine, Tom Laqueur, Kerwin Klein and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. I thanK both them and my fellow students in those seminars. This project has received generous support from a Fulbright Institute of International Education Grant, The Dean’s Dissertation Research Grant, several FLAS Fellowships and innumerable small grants and fellowships distributed by BerKeley’s Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES) and The Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies (BPS). I thank Ned Walker for support as the head of BPS, his critique and input from the ground floor of this project and most importantly for serving as “Godfather” to all of us studying the former Soviet space. I would also like to thank Jeff Pennington and Zach Kelly for all of their hard work. Before I arrived in California a number of people shaped my interests and continue to encourage them. I would liKe to thanK Dan Ivanovich Ungurianu, NiKolai Georgievich Firtich, Alexei Evgenievich Klimov and MiKi Pohl for introducing me to Russian culture, history and language at Vassar College. Bair Irincheev was my guide to the battlefields of the Leningrad and Karelian Fronts and has provided years of friendship. Alexander Mikhailovich Semyonov introduced me to both the historical profession and the conundrum of empires and continues to support my growth as a scholar. I thanK Boris Ivanovich KolonitsKii, Vladimir ViKent’evich Lapin, Oleg Nikolaevich Ken and Mikhail ii MarKovich Krom for convincing me to become a historian and preparing me for BerKeley while I studied at European University at St. Petersburg. I thanK Elena Andreevna Zdravomyslova and Sofia AleKsandrovna ChuiKina for introducing me to the issues of gender. A special thanks to NiKita Andreevich Lomagin and Geoff Hass, who have time and again challenged my assumptions and helped me become a better scholar while imbuing me with the confidence to push on. I would have never had made it to BerKeley without them, Dan Ivanovich or Nikolai Georgievich. While doing research I have had the opportunity to present my worK at a variety of forums. The International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, directed by Oleg Vital’evich Budnitsky, served as my institutional home in Moscow. Professor Budnitsky also introduced me to the wealth of diaries now available to researchers and gave me several opportunities to share my research with a Russian audience. Katia Buschl of The German Historical Institute in Moscow and Vanessa Voison of the Center for Franco-Russian Studies in Moscow allowed me to present my worK and provided great feedback and fellowship in Moscow. The 4th Annual International Social Science School in UKraine, “Violence and Its Aftermath in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Context,” held in July 2012 was a unique opportunity to run my ideas by a wide-range of international scholars, and I thank in particular Anna Colin-Lebedeva for organizing it and Amandine Regamey and François-Xavier Nérard for their comments and continued engagement with my worK. I would liKe to thanK the organizers of the 2012 and 2013 “Constructing the Soviet” Conference at European University in St. Petersburg and also Anatoly PinsKy for allowing me to present at European and for his friendship. I thank Gabore Rittersporn and François-Xavier Nérard for inviting me to present at L’univers des Choses Soviétiques in Paris and for their wonderful commentary. Finally, Jan Plamper and Nikolai Mikhailov organized an excellent colloquium “Little People and Big Wars in Russian History, mid-19th-mid-20th Centuries” that was the capstone of my time in Russia. Conversations there, before and since with Jan Plamper, Jochen Hellbeck and Masha Cerovic have had a fundamental impact on my thinking about where to taKe this project.