“Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families“: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda

Abstract

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 word rodina, from the verb rodit', 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.

Mobilizing a Nation: Persuasive Appeals in Vietnamese War Posters

“…A sense of sympathy and solidarity is expressed through the short social distance between the mother and her deceased daughter and viewers. The feminine identities and vulnerability of Vietnamese mothers are contrasted with their self-reliant wartime roles (fighters) in a starkly different way from the portrayal of American and German women as female war workers during World War II (Kirschenbaum 2000). The Western mothers, although taking on male jobs while preserving their feminine identities, were not victimized by the enemy's atrocities.…”

“…These “victim posters” provoked Vietnamese men's sense of duty and hatred toward the enemy, calling on them to join military service to fight injustice, defend their families and country, and stop the atrocities. This genre of posters was also popular in the Soviet Union, showing women and children as victims of Nazi occupation, unifying the diverse motivations of individuals under the banner of patriotism (Edele 1999) and family protection (Kirschenbaum 2000). During the Korean War, South Korean propagandists depicted Chinese and Russian soldiers in leaflets as marauders who raped South Korean women to create animosity and appeal to South Korean soldiers to protect their homes and country.…”

Reconfiguring the Empire through Performance: Petr Fomenko’s 2001 Production of Tolstoi’s War and Peace

“…33 Lisa Kirschenbaum identifies notions of motherland, home and family as key constituents of Soviet patriotism that emerged during World War II. 34 In this context the popularity of Tvardovskii's character Terkin among soldiers alongside War and Peace might be seen as odd. As Hosking puts it, 'Viewed in the light of pre-war proletarian internationalism, even in its neo-rossiiskii phase, Terkin is a strange and archaic figure, closer to the fantasies of the nineteenth-century narodniki than to anything Lenin or Stalin might have conceived'.…”

Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945-1955

“…128 Newspaper reporting also stressed the defense of native place, hometown, home and hearth, mothers, sweethearts, and the family. 129 No wonder that veterans did not come out of the war as a uniform mass of Stalinists. Most did, however, come back with a notion of having fought for a community-the family, the village, the hometown, the people, or Soviet power-which now owed them in return.…”