Embracing Arms: Cultural Representation of Slavic and Balkan Women in War

Chapter 6 Graphic Womanhood under Fire

Chapter 6 Graphic Womanhood under Fire Helena Goscilo “War is not women’s history.” Virginia Woolf “War’s unwomanly face.”1 Svetlana Aleksievich “A really successful war, a psychologically Good War, requires not merely the extirpation of a cruel enemy abroad. It requires as a corollary the apotheosis of the pure of heart at home.” Paul Fussell2 1 U voiny ne zhenskoe litso, usually translated as The Unwomanly Face of War, is the title of the Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich’s most famous book. A hybrid that perhaps most closely resembles the genres of documentary prose or oral history, it chiefly comprises interviews with women who saw action in World War II, interspersed with authorial commentary. Originally published in 1985, it was reissued in amplified form by Pal’mira in 2004. Aleksievich, clearly, took lessons from her older countryman Ales’ Adamovich, who coauthored with Daniil Granin Blokadnaia kniga [The Blockade Book 1977– 81], an unsparing account of the prolonged siege of Leningrad during World War II. 2 Paul Fussell, “Writing in Wartime: the Uses of Innocence.” In Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York, London, etc.: Summit Books, 1988), 53. 154 EMBRACING ARMS Mapping through Images A frequently iterated truism about World War II holds that during that period of devastation, which cost approximately thirty million Soviet lives, culture served as a rallying point for Russians (von Geldern 1995, 52). Indeed, the imperative of uniting the population against the enemy prompted the government to mobilize all available modes of cultural production—radio, music, song, film, theater, journalism, literature, and graphics.3 On 23 June 1941, just a day after Germany invaded the USSR, the first Soviet anti-Nazi poster launched a concerted propaganda campaign that exhorted, reassured, and inspired the Soviet people throughout its harrowing four-year struggle. Were all other records of the war eradicated, one could still map its general course through these visuals, which, together with documentary films4 and radio broadcasts,5 responded with lightning speed to developments at the front and, as a corollary, to the nation’s immediate ideological priorities.6 3 Of the voluminous scholarship on World War II, of particular relevance to my analysis are the following sources, in addition to those contained in my bibliography : Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Denise J. Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), especially 55–81. For a list of recent publications on women’s contributions on the battlefield, see Gender War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe, edited by Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 19, footnote 10. 4 Peter Kenez reports that “[t]he first wartime newsreel, amazingly, appeared in movie theaters as early as three days after the outbreak of the war, on 25 June. In the following months a new edition came out every three days” (1995, 160). 5 About radio, see von Geldern (1995), 44–61. 6 Various veterans of the war interviewed by Nina Tumarkin remember the first two years of the war as a period of “spontaneous de-Stalinization,” inasmuch as Soviet unpreparedness and disorder forced people “to make their own decisions” as “independent human beings.” A consolidation of the war machine and the revival of full-fledged Stalinism, however, followed the vicious battle over Stalingrad (Tumarkin 1994, 65). The representation of gender in World War II graphic art, however, does not mirror this shift, though one could argue that in the last two years of the war, women’s physical appearance undergoes increased feminization. 155 Graphic Womanhood under Fire This array of affective images, accompanied by verses or compressed texts teeming with apostrophes and exclamation marks, was disseminated among the military, factories, and farms, as well as posted in TASS windows and along city streets.7 The panoply offers a composite picture of the nation’s self-presentation, in which rhetorical emphases and omissions draw on Russia’s centuries-old master narrative of martyred heroism—in bifurcated, gendered form. The very function of war propaganda determines, mutatis mutandis, certain ecumenical stereotypes within war rhetoric: “our” rectitude, bravery, and patriotism versus the enemy’s craven, brutal aggressiveness; “our” noble defense of sacrosanct values versus “their” numerically stronger military equipment but morally weaker fighting spirit; “our” troops’ defense of women and children, as opposed...