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Introduction THE SECOND WORLD WAR was an unprecedented cataclysm that rocked the entire European continent. It shook institutions, identities, and convictions that, until then, appeared to be solidly entrenched. This book explores the war's impact on the ideology, beliefs, and practices of the Soviet regime and its subjects by examining the ways in which various segments of the polity strove to make sense of this traumatic event. The "Great Patriotic War," as the war was heralded within the Soviet Union, transformed the Soviet polity physically and symbolically. It served to validate the original revolutionary prophecy while at the same time almost entirely overshadowing it; it appeared as proof—and perhaps the cause—of both the regime's impotence and its legitimacy; it redefined the party according to the ethos of veterans' sacrifices; it advanced the ethnicization of the Bolshevik "purification drive"; it rearranged the "fraternal family of Soviet nations"; it forced and inspired individuals to reassert themselves, take up new roles, and make new claims; and it forever divided Soviet history and life into two distinct eras. Not surprisingly, an event of this magnitude invited different interpretations from Soviet citizens. Some saw the war as the Bolshevik Armageddon , afinalcleansing of elements that had intruded on the desired socialist harmony, ushering in the era of communism. Others considered it a bloody sacrifice necessary to redeem the regime's past evils. Still others viewed the war as the long-awaited death blow to an evil enterprise. But for all, the war signaled the climax in the unfolding socialist revolution, sanctioning the ever changing methods employed to reach the ultimate goal of a homogeneous and harmonious society. Understanding the ways in which Soviet people coped with the experience and legacy of the war requires an in-depth look at the institutions that informed their world. To begin, the Soviet world was not an anomaly, nor did it emerge in a vacuum. Soviet contemporaries, party-state officials, and ordinary people alike were always attentive to the universal roots o f their world even when they carved their own path to socialism and communism . The Soviet ethos was ingrained in the politics that shaped the modern era where states sought the transformation of societies with the help of scientific models and a myriad of institutions charged with managing all social spheres. The Soviets co-opted or juxtaposed their ideology and practices to this phenomenon, and often did both, but never lost sight of it. The war reinforced the Bolshevik enterprise as part of the modern political universe. The direct encounter with competing ideologies and 8 IN TRO D UCTIO N movements, the prolonged exposure of large segments of the population to alternative rules, and the increasingly apparent proximity between the Soviet methods of social engineering in the wake of the war and that of its rivals, particularly the Nazis, compelled both the regime and its citizens to reassess the state of the Revolution and its distinct features at the very same time that socialism had finally managed to break its isolation. Second, contemporaries could not conceive of the war as detached from the permanent, unfolding socialist revolution. For Soviet citizens, the war was a crucial, integral link in the ongoing Bolshevik revolutionary enterprise . The war reinforced key institutions of the Soviet system, primarily the socioeconomic order, the endurance of the party, and the drive to purge the polity of elements that hindered the desired social and political harmony. But it also shifted conceptions and practices of the Revolution, superimposing a new set o f tropes onto prewar categories. Social origin no longer served as the dominant criterion of sociopolitical status, as former class enemies were allowed to redeem themselves through wartime exploits. The unprecedented deportations of entire ethnic groups, the replacement of temporary incarceration with eternal exile, and the extermination of separatist nationalist movements qualitatively altered the postwar drive for purity along ethnic lines. Within the pantheon of myths that endowed the permanent revolution with legitimacy and historical relevance, the Great Patriotic War loomed large. J uxtaposed against other heroic tales within the Bolshevik narrative of the Revolution, the war superseded other foundational myths, such as the civil war and the collectivization of the countryside, which were increasingly viewed as distant, irrelevant, and, in some cases, too controversial because of their traumatic legacy. Yet like the myths it displaced, the myth of the war defined criteria for legitimate membership in and exclusion from the Soviet family. As many discovered, Communists included, the stigma o...

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