Listening to the Soviet Union’s “Silent” Majority: The Evasion of Labor Obligations on the Home Front, 1941–45

Abstract

Large‐scale evasion of the requirements of the law is a substantial part of the interaction between citizen and state under authoritarian regimes. Forced to exist within a coordinate grid established against their will, people routinely play games with the state with the goal of minimizing the hardships of life. Tactics of covert resistance are not necessarily politically motivated by conscious opposition to the regime. Instead, these are a matter of accommodation and survival. It is precisely these popular illegalities that, paradoxically, do not so much weaken a system intended to achieve full implementation of its instructions, but instead strengthen it to a certain degree. Evasion serves as a safeguard against social burnout, replete with unpredictable reactions born of desperation. This article examines practices of mass illegality via examples of evasion of labor obligations in the Soviet Union during the war with Nazi Germany. It analyzes instances that primarily involved peasants, especially women, who predominated in the Soviet rear areas after the men were conscripted into the army. This discriminated‐against and uneducated majority rarely enters historians’ field of vision, which concentrates on the diaries and memoirs of the educated, urban part of the Soviet population.