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

Slavic Review ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

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.

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-160
Author(s):  
Roger Mac Ginty

This chapter examines informal truces and acts of humanity and reciprocity during violent conflict. It is interested in the ‘hard cases’ of all-out warfare and draws on World War I and World War II personal diaries and memoirs. The chapter demonstrates that in some circumstances, everyday peace—or at least everyday tolerance and civility—has been possible during warfare. It contains multiple examples of ‘ordinary’ combatants showing humanity, compassion, and generosity to their supposed opponents. These cases are particularly interesting from the point of view of this book as they often occurred ‘under the radar’ or outside the surveillance of the state and others. Indeed, in many cases, they were expressly forbidden by military organisations and were contrary to the prevailing national mood of antagonism towards the enemy. They show individual and group initiative, as well as resistance to a national or wider group.


Author(s):  
В.В. Митрофанов

Семья Постниковых не одно поколение верно служила России: мужчины-офицеры отдавали жизни на ратных полях Русско-японской, Великой Отечественной войн. Женщины оставили заметный след в сфере образования. М. А. Постникова (после замужества в 1903 году Александрова) вошла в историю как первая женщина-начальница первого женского учительского института, открытого в Рязани. Ее сестра Анна Алексеевна Наркович возглавляла гимназии в Смоленской и Рязанской губерниях. Многое в личной жизни и профессиональной деятельности Марии Алексеевны стало известно благодаря ее переписке с выдающимися учеными — С. Ф. Платоновым и А. Е. Пресняковым. Себя она считала верной ученицей первого и близким другом второго, который не раз упоминал ее имя в своих письмах. Поработав в Петербурге, проехав Россию до Хабаровска и обратно, в 1915 году М. А. Александрова после неожиданного назначения переехала в Рязань, где работала почти 10 лет. Здесь же и закончилась ее жизнь в 50 лет. О последних днях Марии Алексеевны известно из двух публикуемых нами в статье писем ее родной сестры Анны Алексеевны на имя Надежды Николаевны Платоновой. В письмах упомянуты и другие родственники, что позволяет уточнить и конкретизировать имеющиеся о них скудные сведения. For many generations the Postnikovs served Russia truly and well. Men of the family fought in the battles of the Russo-Japanese War and World War II, while women of the family were prominent educators. M. A. Postnikova (known by her married name M. A. Alexandrova) is the first female head of the first teachers’ institute for women in Ryazan. Her sister Anna Alekseyevna Narkovich headed gymnasiums in the Smolensk Region and in the Ryazan Region. We know about her private life through her correspondence with such prominent scholars as S. F. Platonov and A. E. Presnyakov. Being a devoted student of the former and a close friend of the latter she was often mentioned in A. E. Presnyakov’s letters. Having worked in St. Petersburg, and having traveled across the country to Khabarovsk and back, M. A. Alexandrova moved to Ryazan where she was appointed head of the teachers’ institute and where she worked for 10 years. She passed away in Ryazan in 1915 at the age of 50. Her last days are known to us due to the letters of her sister Anna Alekseyevna to Nadezhda Nikolayevna Platonova. The letters contain information about other relatives too, which provides more specific data.


2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-31
Author(s):  
Biljana Sikimic ◽  
Motoki Nomaci

For the linguistic landscape analysis of private signs of Banat Bulgarians we chose two cemeteries, both of them multiethnic, since Banat Bulgarians in Serbia do not form a majority population in any village. The cemetery in Jasa Tomic/Modos is religiously mixed, but the Catholic and Orthodox part are still divided. Banat Bulgarians in Konak village are buried in the Catholic cemetery; there is a separate Orthodox cemetery for the majority population. These two villages (Jasa Tomic and Konak) were selected because they share a similar situation from the diachronic socio-linguistical point of view: apart for a brief time during World War II, the Bulgarian/Paulician language was hardly taught since the early 20th century; Bulgarian was used only in the family and the Catholic church (there are prayer books in Banat Bulgarian); there were many mixed marriages; there was no revival of language and culture As inscriptions on all existing Banat Bulgarian Cyrillic headstones are in Serbian and none of the cemeteries visited have inscriptions in Bulgarian, or rather in the Bulgarian Cyrillic, this indicates that the use and knowledge of standard Bulgarian is limited among the Banat Bulgarians. At the same time, the use of Banat Bulgarian in the Latin alphabet on a proportionally large number of headstones up to the end of the 20th century in the Serbian part of the Banat, and also actively today in Vinga in the Romanian part of Banat, indicates the great importance of the Banat Bulgarian language in preserving the identity of Banat Bulgarians.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.


2019 ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
Anna Kimerling

The article is devoted to the features of the wartime culture. The source was a unique collection of letters from the fronts of World War II, written by political instructor Arkady Georgievich Endaltsev. The war led to the breakdown of familiar cultural models. It is important to understand how, adaptation to new standards occurred on an individual level. For A. Endaltsev, family care practices were a way to bridge cultural gaps. They are reflected in the letters. There, framed by ideologically verified stamps, one can find financial assistance to the family, control over the education of the daughter, the need for a continuous flow of information about the life of the wife and children.


Phytotaxa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 326 (1) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
TAPAS CHAKRABARTY ◽  
VENKATACHALAM SAMPATH KUMAR

While preparing a revised treatment of the family Combretaceae for “Flora of India Project,” our attention was drawn on Terminalia paniculata Roth (1821: 383) which was described on the basis of a specimen collected by Benjamin Heyne from peninsular India. The species is well documented in Indian Floras (e.g. Wight & Arnott 1834, Beddome 1869, Brandis 1874, Clarke 1878, Cooke 1903, Talbot 1911, Gamble 1919 and Chandrabose 1983). Gangopadhyay & Chakrabarty (1997) in their revision of the family Combretaceae of Indian subcontinent mentioned that the type of this species is not extant. The type material of T. paniculata housed in the Berlin herbarium (B; herbaria acronyms follow Thiers 2017) was presumably destroyed during the World War II. In the Kew herbarium (K), there is a collection by Benjamin Heyne (K000786096: image!) identified and listed in Wallich’s Numerical List as T. triopteris B.Heyne ex Wallich (1831: no. 3980B). This material contains two twigs, one flowering and the other fruiting and this appears to be a specimen not seen by Roth (1821) since he clearly mentioned in the protologue: “Fructum non vidi.” Thus, as per the provisions of the Code (Mc Neill et al., 2012), as there is no other extant original material (Article 9.7) traceable, a neotype (Articles 9.11 and 9.13) is designated here for T. paniculata from Peninsular India, where Benjamin Heyne made botanical explorations (Burkill, 1965). The neotype specimen is housed in the Central National Herbarium, Botanical Survey of India, Howrah, India (CAL) and its duplicate in the Madras Herbarium, Botanical Survey of India, Southern Regional Centre, Coimbatore, India (MH).


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-161
Author(s):  
Christian Klösch

In March 1938 the National Socialists seized power in Austria. One of their first measures against the Jewish population was to confiscate their vehicles. In Vienna alone, a fifth of all cars were stolen from their legal owners, the greatest auto theft in Austrian history. Many benefited from the confiscations: the local population, the Nazi Party, the state and the army. Car confiscation was the first step to the ban on mobility for Jews in the German Reich. Some vehicles that survived World War II were given back to the families of the original owners. The research uses a new online database on Nazi vehicle seizures.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
David Shneer

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.


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