Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945-1955

Abstract

The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers were integrated neither as a generation nor as a status group with formal privileges and their own organization (as would be the case in later years). What held them together was instead a shared sense of entitlement based on wartime sacrifice. During the first postwar decade, therefore, Soviet veterans are best understood as an “entitlement group.” Only in the 1960s and 1970s was this entitlement group transformed into a status group that became one of the major pillars of the late Soviet order.

Writing Veterans’ History: A Conversation on the Twentieth Century

“…56 I called this an 'entitlement group'. 57 This choice of words has proved somewhat confusing to some readers. In English 'entitlement' can be used as a synonym for 'status', while I meant to distinguish claims to special treatment from their institutionalization.…”

Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German POWs, 1941–1943

“…93 By war's end, indeed, men who were likely to have fought in both the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War constituted nearly 50 percent of the male draft cohorts. 94 Others had access to such memories secondhand, from stories they had heard, read, or watched in the movies. 95 Such latencies were reinforced by other structural factors.…”

“What Are We Fighting for?” Loyalty in the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945

“…Neither were "the majority of the fighting men" born into the Soviet system, nor were the surviving veterans all "young men," and thus unable to remember life before Soviet socialism. 65 Men born between 1890 (or even, according to one source, 1885) and 1927 were drafted into the wartime armed forces, 66 and while the older of these cohorts tended to serve in support roles, there were combat soldiers in their forties and even in their fifties. 67 In 1942, the 1236th Rifle Regiment was dominated by men in their late thirties and early forties (Table 1), with thirtynine percent in their thirties, fifty-three percent forty and older, and only three percent born in the year of the October revolution or after.…”