Monthly Archives: October 2013

The Great Patriotic War, or World War II to us, was a time of resilience for the Soviet Union and would end in international power and prestige for the once backward country. The cost that the Soviets paid for victory, however, was outstanding. Our Freeze text estimates that about 8.6 million Soviet troops were killed and 17 million civilians had perished in addition to that. Americans fought the war abroad and while the home front had a distinct wartime character, the Soviet Union’s home front was the war. Nazi Germany completely destroyed the major cities of the Soviet Union in their attempted Operation Barbarossa. The city of  Leningrad, now and previously Saint Petersburg, underwent a terrible Nazi siege that began on September 8, 1941 and went on to last 872 days. The siege, often referred to as the “900 Days”  is credited to be one of the most destructive and deadly of any siege to a modern city.

Soviets observe the ravaged city of Leningrad

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in August of 1939. Two years later, in June of 1941, the Germans began plotting their attacks on the Soviets and began to mobilize their army. Despite receiving over eighty warnings of a German attack, Stalin refused to believed the truth and even ordered his army not to shoot at the Germans. In September, the German Army Group North (with help from the Finns) began encircling Leningrad and by November they had severed the last rail line to the city. Then the bombings began. The Germans bombed hospitals, schools, homes, industrial site, and everything in between. The siege of Leningrad is an important episode of the war because it highlights the extreme cost that the civilians paid to win the war. As if the constant bombings were not bad enough, the real problem (as it seems was usually the case for Russia) was hunger. Germany’s plan had been to “terrorize and starve the population to surrender” (Seventeen Moments) and this plan fit perfectly into Hitler’s so called war of extermination. Despite officials reassuring the city’s citizens that food and supplies would be available, they virtually disappeared by the winter.

Pictured here is a ration card. The vast majority of the city struggled with hunger despite the rations. Ration status was given out according to need, but need meant those vital to the city’s survival- not those starving. An average ration card entitled the holder to 125g of bread per day (about 300 calories worth), so the citizens began to get.. resourceful in their methods of procuring food. Lena Mukina was a teenager at the time of the Siege and kept a diary that was recently published and has likened her to be the “Anne Frank of Leningrad“. In one passage, Lena writes, “Today we had delicious soup with meat and macaroni. The cat meat will be enough for two more meals. It would be good to get hold of another cat somewhere. I never thought cat meat would be so good and tender.” It was not uncommon for a family to sacrifice their pet for a meal, and there are many accounts of citizens resorting to cannibalism in order to survive. In addition to the terrible hunger, the citizens were battling the winter weather. The citizens underwent three terrible winters in the city with no heat, and many who had been displaced by the bombings underwent the winters without homes.

The above picture was not an uncommon sight during the Siege. From the many accounts of diaries it was apparent that citizens often lost their entire families to starvation. Eleven year old Tanya Savicheva famously penned in her diary a timeline of her family members’ deaths and ended with, “Everyone died. Only Tanya is left.” (Tanya herself died in 1944 and her diary was later read during the Nuremberg Trials). The only relief came from the route known as the “Road to Life” which was not a road, but rather a frozen lake. Lake Ladoga was covered with ice in the winter months and the Soviets had some luck transferring supplies to Leningrad, but all too often something went wrong on the on the trip. The Road to Life also was used to evacuate over a million citizens from the city.

Despite all of the awful conditions that Leningraders were subjected to for 900 days, the citizens continued to persist. The war industries continued as people kept coming to work, students continued studying, and Dmitrii Shostakovich wrote and performed his famous Seventh “Leningrad” Symphony. The people refused to surrender and that in itself epitomizes the Soviet war effort. Today, people come to Piskarevskoye Cemetery to pay tribute to the approximate 1.5 million soldiers and civilians lost in the siege. Most visitors bring flowers to be placed on the mass graves at the cemetery but others lay loaves a bread in a sad remembrance of what brought those victims to their graves.

Background information from the Freeze text:

Freeze, Gregory L. Russia: A History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

I used Seventeen Moments in Soviet Histoy’s 900 Days:

http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1943leningrad&Year=1943

as well as other sites for more information:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035490/Lena-Mukhina-Diary-Russian-teenager-survived-900-day-Nazi-siege.html

http://www.saint-petersburg.com/history/siege.asp

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2011/sep/15/siege-leningrad-history-anna-reid#/?picture=378780232&index=0

http://www.pravmir.com/article_238.html

In addition, here are the links to the images used in the order in which they appeared:

http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&show=essay&SubjectID=1943leningrad&Year=1943&navi=byYear

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2011/sep/15/siege-leningrad-history-anna-reid#/?picture=378780232&index=0

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2011/sep/15/siege-leningrad-history-anna-reid#/?picture=378780240&index=1

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2011/sep/15/siege-leningrad-history-anna-reid#/?picture=378780245&index=2

Uzbeks listen to a Soviet speaker in front of a Mosque

In the 1920’s Russia began the implementation of the Bolshevik ideology after their victory in the Civil War. It was a time of great change politically and economically, but the great cultural change was most important. The Bolsheviks were professional revolutionaries and they knew that they must transform “values, myths, norms, mores, aesthetics, popular images, and traditions” (Freeze 329) for their new socialist state to be successful. In short, they sought to create “The New Soviet Man”. In the beginning, this was a challenge everywhere in Russia, but it had the most resistance in the Muslim East of Central Asia. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formally created when the Declaration of Union and a Treaty of Union were approved. This was an important moment, but since “the Russian Empire was not at all a Russian state” (M. N. Pokrovskii) it contained a huge minority population that had fundamentally religious and cultural customs that differed from the ethnic Russians. It would prove to be difficult for the New Soviet Man to catch on in the minority areas of the Union.

Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Russian SSR (1925)

While the Orthodox Christian religion had been defeated during the Civil War, many concessions had been made to the Islamic religion in an effort to keep Central Asia in the Bolshevik hands. This meant that their religious practices, which were a huge part of their national identity, were allowed to continue. During the 1920’s there were many cultural changes sweeping the empire, including redefining the family and the individual and subsequently giving more rights to women. The New Soviet Person was to be “unblinded by distinctions of nationality and gender” (Seventeen Moments). This was particularly hard to implement in the Muslim areas in the East because of the patriarchal nature of the Muslim religion. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History’s “Making Central Asia Soviet” section describes that during the 1920’s the Communist Party launched campaigns against many Islamic practices that were considered demeaning to women, such as polygamy, bride-price, forced marriage, and wearing the veil. Many women there embraced this liberation, and celebrated by burning their veils in town centers in masses of thousands. Their liberation did not go smoothly, and there were extremely violent retaliations by resisters. The situation reminds me of the Taliban’s violence against women in our century. When women were given new rights after the fall of the Taliban, they underwent  (and still do now) terrible violence for exercising these rights. Throughout the 1920’s and into the 1930’s the local communist parties were required to abide by the campaigns that gave more rights to women, but the party members simply evaded the requirement. Seventeen Moments mentions the party’s concentration on women in Central Asia as being a result of the lack of proletariat in the area, which makes me wonder if they would have been given the same concentration of a proletariat existed there. Besides the campaigns for women, the communist also promoted other Islamic defiance. For example, the man pictured below is was proudly disobeying the Islamic law that prohibited contact with pork.

The transition to being culturally soviet was an ongoing process in Soviet Central Asia. The defiance of Soviet practices in favor of their traditional culture persisted. The Bolsheviks understood that they needed to make Soviet in people’s natural conscious, but in a place where soviet ideology clashed so dramatically with the people’s customs and ideals, they would never truly be able to be Soviet. I think that this clash is shown really well in the picture that I used to open the post. It shows Uzbeks dressed in their traditional clothes listening to a Soviet speech given outside of a Mosque. They were able to support the Soviets, but they still favored their traditional dress and their religion was truly at the center of their lives.

Background information from the Freeze text:

Freeze, Gregory L. Russia: A History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

I used Seventeen Moments in Soviet Histoy’s Union Treaty and Making Central Asia Soviet sections respectively:

http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1924union&Year=1924

http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1929sovietization&Year=1929

Links to the images in the order in which they appear are:

http://www.soviethistory.org/images/Large/1929/RUSU1647.jpg

http://www.soviethistory.org/images/Large/1924/RUSU718.jpg

http://www.soviethistory.org/images/Large/1929/0-21740.jpg

Finally, I linked an article in the post to M. N. Pokrovskii’s  Russia as the Prison of Nations

http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=article&ArticleID=1924pokrovskii1&SubjectID=1924union&Year=1924