The Fate of the New Man: Representing and Reconstructing Masculinity in Soviet Visual Culture, 1945–1965

By Claire McCallum

Between 1945 and 1965, the catastrophe of war—and the social and political changes it brought in its wake—had a major impact on the construction of the Soviet masculine ideal. Drawing upon a wide range of visual material, The Fate of the New Man traces the dramatic changes in the representation of the Soviet man in the postwar period. It focuses on the two identities that came to dominate such depictions in the two decades after the end of the war: the Soviet man's previous role as a soldier and his new role in the home once the war was over. In this compelling study, Claire McCallum focuses on the reconceptualization of military heroism after the war, the representation of contentious subjects such as the war-damaged body and bereavement, and postwar changes to the depiction of the Soviet man as father. McCallum shows that it was the Second World War, rather than the process of de-Stalinization, that had the greatest impact on the masculine ideal, proving that even under the constraints of Socialist Realism, the physical and emotional devastation caused by the war was too great to go unacknowledged. The Fate of the New Man makes an important contribution to Soviet masculinity studies. McCallum's research also contributes to broader debates surrounding the impact of Stalin's death on Soviet society and on the nature of the subsequent Thaw, as well as to those concerning the relationship between Soviet culture and the realities of Soviet life. This fascinating study will appeal to scholars and students of Soviet history, masculinity studies, and visual culture studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Jul 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781609092399

Book preview

THE FATE OF THE NEW MAN

REPRESENTING & RECONSTRUCTING MASCULINITY IN SOVIET VISUAL CULTURE, 1945–1965

CLAIRE E. McCALLUM

NIU Press

DeKalb, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115

© 2018 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18           1  2  3  4  5

978-0-87580-783-6 (case)

978-1-60909-239-9 (e-book)

Book and cover design by Yuni Dorr

Earlier versions of chapters in this book appeared in the following: The Return: Post-War Masculinity and the Domestic Space in Stalinist Visual Culture, 1945–53, The Russian Review 74, no. 1 (2015): 117–43; Scorched by the Fire of War: Masculinity, War Wounds and Disability in Soviet Visual Culture, 1941–65, Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 2 (2015): 251–85. I thank the journals, Wiley Periodicals, and the Modern Humanities Research Association for permission to reprint materials from these publications.

For links to many of the images referenced in this book, please consult the website fateofthenewman.wordpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

For Lizzy, Kathy, and Jenn—for everything

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

INTRODUCTION

1. THE LIVING

Representing Military Comradeship and Male Homosociality after the War

2. THE DAMAGED

Representing the Wounded and Disabled Soviet Man

3. THE DEAD

Representing and Remembering the Fallen Soviet Soldier

4. HOMECOMINGS

Representing Paternal Return, Reintegration, and Replacement before 1953

5. FATHERHOOD AFTER FATHER STALIN

Representing Paternity and Domesticity in the Khrushchev Era

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURE 1.1. Iurii Neprintsev, Rest after Battle, 1951.

FIGURE 1.2. Boris Nemenskii, Scorched Earth, 1957.

FIGURE 1.3. Dmitrii Oboznenko, Compatriots, 1969.

FIGURE 2.1. Gelii Korzhev, Wounded, 1964.

FIGURE 2.2. Nikolai Solomin, He Came from the War, 1967.

FIGURE 3.1. Bezhan Shvelidze, In Memory of a Lost Son, 1964.

FIGURE 3.2. Gelii Korzhev, Old Wounds, 1967.

FIGURE 3.3. The two faces of the motherland, Volgograd.

FIGURE 3.4. Grieving man at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Ogonek 50, 1966.

FIGURE 4.1. Vladimir Kostetskii, The Return, 1945–47.

FIGURE 4.2. Tikhon Semenov, Sad News (A Letter from the Front), 1948.

FIGURE 4.3. Fedor Reshetnikov, Home for the Holidays, 1948.

FIGURE 5.1. Yurii Gagarin and his daughters, Rodina 2, 1966.

FIGURE 5.2. Father pushing pram in Novorossiisk, Ogonek 22, 1964.

FIGURE 5.3. Aleksandr and Sergei Tkachev, Father, 1964.

For links to many of the images referenced in this book, please consult the website fateofthenewman.wordpress.com

Acknowledgments

I have lived with the New Soviet Man for most of my adult life, starting this project at a time when the analysis of both masculinity and visual culture was in its infancy within the context of Slavic studies. Since then I have seen the field develop beyond all recognition and am thrilled that at last I can add my research to the ever-growing body of scholarship. During the decade or so that it has taken to reach this point, I have incurred many debts—personal, professional, and financial—and it is wonderful to finally get the opportunity to publicly acknowledge the support of all those who have helped me along the way.

Firstly, I would like to thank Susan Reid for being the best PhD supervisor any graduate student could hope for, and for her continued support in the years that have followed, not least in the form of writing many references for me while I was on the long, hard path to permanent employment. I would also like to express my gratitude to Miriam Dobson and John Haynes for their advice in the final stages of my PhD work, and to Melanie Ilic, Matthew Stibbe, and Kevin McDermott for their help during my time as a graduate teacher at their institutions. Thanks to the staff of the History and Russian and Slavonic Studies Departments at the University of Sheffield, and particularly to the postgraduate community of the History Department, who helped make my time there so intellectually stimulating. Likewise to all the conference, workshop, and seminar participants too numerous to mention who over the years have encouraged me to think harder, dig deeper, and push further, and have helped shape my work as it evolved through their constructive critiques. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support I received at this stage in my career from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Joseph Sassoon, without whose scholarship this research would never have got off the ground.

Thanks must also go to the numerous library and archival staff that have aided me in the research process: to those at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, who must have dreaded my filling up their office with endless boxes of periodicals; to the staff at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, California, the British Library in London and Boston Spa, the University of Birmingham, and the National Library of Finland, Helsinki; and to the interlibrary loans team at the University of Exeter, who have had to deal with all kinds of obscure requests over the years and have always proved up to the task. To the fabulous staff of the Slavic Library (as it was back then) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, especially Kit Condill and Jan Adamczyk, the latter of whom was literally responsible for putting a roof over my head and food on my table during my month there. To the ladies in the graphic department of the Russian State Library, in particular Svetlana Nikolaevna Artamonova and Iulia Petrovna, who took me under their collective wing and plied me with English tea and biscuits while in Moscow, and to the archivist at GARF who let me loose on the institution’s neglected poster collection and supplied me with much needed coveralls for the process. I’m also immensely thankful to Olga Kosheleva, who not only let me her apartment but helped with introductions to the archives, arranged for escorts to the market, and helped me negotiate the vagaries of Muscovite life during those first unsettling days.

Since completing the research aspect of this project, I have been very fortunate to work with some incredibly patient and understanding editors, who have helped this neophyte navigate the world of academic publishing. Thanks to Kurt Schultz, Michael Gorham, and Barbara Wyllie for assisting me in my first forays into publication, and of course to Amy Farranto and her colleagues at Northern Illinois University Press for their guidance and support during the whole process of producing this book. I am deeply appreciative of the staff at various galleries, museums, and archives across the former Soviet Union who have helped make the process of tracking down permissions for the images featured here as painless as possible, particularly Liza Zhiradkova at Kommersant, Vera Kessenich of the Russian Museum, Marina Ivanova at the Tretyakov Gallery, and Ralph Gibson at Sputnik. Beyond this practical support, I am hugely grateful to the anonymous reviewers who took the time to read my work and offer their insightful comments and recommendations, and to the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for their recognition of my research, which provided a much-needed boost in the final stages of editing the manuscript.

I count myself very privileged since embarking on my academic career to have worked with some of the most brilliant historians in the UK, who fortunately for me have also turned out to be immensely caring and encouraging colleagues. I am indebted to the whole History Department at the University of Exeter for their support over the past six years, but especially to Freyja Cox Jenson, Laura Sangha, Stacey Hynd, and Helen Birkett for their guidance and friendship, and to Tim Rees and Martin Thomas, whose sage advice has been crucial in helping me manage the pressures of teaching and research as an early career academic. The biggest thanks, though, must go to the wonderful Matthew Rendle: it is an amazing feeling to know that someone has complete confidence in your abilities at those points when you doubt yourself, and Matt has read more of my work, offered me more support, and bought me more gin than I could reasonably have expected from any colleague, and for this I will always be grateful. A special mention also to my former colleagues Andrew Holt and Emily Manktelow, who shared that tumultuous first year with me, and particularly to Sara Barker, who is not just a fantastic historian and the kind of teacher I aspire to be, but who has also become one of my dearest friends.

Anyone who has worked in academia will know how all-consuming this job can be, especially in the early days when there is often little stability and security, a lot of uncertainty, and a great deal of teaching preparation, job applications, grant proposals, writing, and editing to be done in the hope of becoming employable. I have been guilty of neglecting my friends and family as a consequence of this pressure, and yet despite my self-absorption, they have stood by my side throughout this whole process: I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your patience and your support. Many years ago, I made a promise to my oldest friends that I would dedicate my first book to them, something that at the start of the PhD process seemed like a complete fantasy: it with immense pleasure, then, that I can make good this promise here. To Lizzy Baker and Kathy Mclusky, both of whom came into my life when I was in the first few weeks of undergraduate study, and nearly twenty years later are still here. Although I may not always have shown it, your friendship and love over this time has meant more than I could ever possibly say, as we’ve shared heartbreak and hardship, as well as much joy, transitioned from students to (reasonably) responsible adults, and attempted to find our way in the world, often with many miles, and sometimes entire continents, between us. To the indomitable Jenn Schmidt, whom I met during a particularly low point, and who was almost single-handedly responsible for holding me together during this time. More than a decade on, I am still amazed by her fearlessness, her compassion, and her determination to be a force for good, and how this challenges me to emulate these qualities in my own life. I hope to be able to share many more adventures with you in the future, wherever that may lead us. It is to these three outstanding women that I dedicate this book.

To my family—where do I begin? Words cannot possibly hope to express the gratitude I have for a lifetime of unconditional encouragement and love. Huge thanks to my brother, Alastair, for his technical expertise that has saved my work, and consequently my sanity, on more than one occasion; to my aunt and uncle, Margaret and David Robson; to my grandma, Marjorie Palframan; and to all my extended family for their support of both myself and my parents through this whole process. My grandfather, William McCallum, didn’t live to see the book completed, but right up until dementia robbed us of this wonderful man, he was immensely proud of what I’d achieved, even though I was living and working in a world that was completely alien to his own, and I carry that with me to this day. Finally to my parents, Susan and Duncan McCallum: never think for one moment that all the worry and sacrifice you have endured to allow me to pursue this path is unrecognized or unappreciated. May this book stand as testament to, and a small token of thanks for, the unwavering and constant support you have given me throughout my life; it quite literally could never have been completed without you.

Note on Transliteration

Throughout this book the translations of Russian into English and the transliterations from Russian Cyrillic into Latin characters are my own, unless indicated otherwise. The Library of Congress transliteration system has been used, except for when alternative spellings are in common usage, such as for Ilya Repin, the Tretyakov Gallery, and Yuri Gagarin.

INTRODUCTION

More than a decade after its initial censoring, Mikhail Sholokhov’s short story The Fate of a Man was printed for the first time in the pages of the newspaper Pravda in two installments published on the last day of 1956 and the first day of 1957. The Fate of a Man was indicative of the emergence of a new kind of postwar hero: it is the tale of Andrei Sokolov, a truck driver from Voronezh who spends the majority of the Great Patriotic War as a prisoner of the Germans, before managing to engineer a daring escape in order to return to the Soviet trenches. It is here at the front that he learns his beloved wife and daughters were killed three years earlier when a stray missile destroyed his house. After the death of his mother and sisters, Andrei’s only son, Anatolii, had joined the army, risen quickly through the ranks, and was now a captain and a commander of a battery of forty-fives. Discovering that they are both on their way to the German capital, the separated father and son arrange to meet in Berlin, only for tragedy to strike on the morning of Victory Day as, just before the reunion, Anatolii is killed by a sniper. In the coming weeks, Sokolov is demobilized, and finding the prospect of returning to Voronezh too painful, he moves to be with friends in Urypinsk. It is there, outside a café, that Sokolov encounters the orphan boy Vania, whose father has died at the front, and who has been living on handouts and sleeping on the streets, since his mother had also been killed. Heartbroken following the loss of his own family and moved by the plight of the small boy, Sokolov decides to tell Vania that he is in fact the boy’s father. As the father and son board a boat to take them to a new life in Kashary, the narrator of Sokolov’s sad tale reminds the reader that not only in their sleep do they weep, these elderly men whose hair grew gray in the years of war. They weep, too, in their waking hours. [. . .] The really important thing is not to wound a child’s heart, not let him see that dry, burning tear on the cheek of a man.¹

In Andrei Sokolov, Sholokhov presented the reader with a very different vision of the Soviet man from the one they had grown accustomed to since the advent of Socialist Realism. Rather than the confident, self-assured, and optimistic hero of the 1930s, Sholokhov’s protagonist was rootless, homeless, searching for a place in society, struggling to rebuild his shattered life, and taking emotional comfort in the new surrogate son he had found, another soul cast adrift as a consequence of war. It was a tale of the aftermath of conflict that was a world away from the images of happy homecomings and loving family reunions that had graced the pages of the popular press back in the 1940s.

Within two years the story had been turned into a film by first-time director Sergei Bondarchuk, had been seen by 39.25 million Soviet viewers, and had been voted film of the year for 1959 by the readers of Sovetskii ekran (Soviet Screen Magazine).² Stills from the film appeared in the popular magazine Ogonek in early 1960, and illustrations for a new edition of the book by L. Petrov and V. Petrova were reproduced in the art journal Iskusstvo in June 1965, around the same time as another set of sketches based on the story, this time by the famous graphic artist Petr Pinkisevich, were published over two pages in Ogonek as part of the publication’s ongoing commemoration of the end of the Great Patriotic War.³ When the book was reprinted in 1964 by Khudozhestvennaia literatura, the new edition featured illustrations by none other than the trio of Porfiri Krylov, Mikhail Kupriianov, and Nikolai Sokolov, known collectively as the Kukryniksy, a group of graphic artists whose work had defined wartime visual culture. The moments of the story that were chosen as the basis for the Kukryniksy’s illustrations are telling: the grief of Sokolov and his wife at their separation, the pain caused by the injury he sustains, the moment he comes face-to-face with the bombed-out shell of his former home, the coffin of Anatolii being borne by his comrades, and the emotional reunion of father and son were all presented visually.⁴ Likewise, writing in Iskusstvo about their work on the novella, Petrov and Petrova stated that we felt it necessary to find the most epic moments that would talk about the main characters and events of the book: the farewell before leaving for the front, the wounded Sokolov in captivity, and Sokolov with his foster son.⁵ For these artists the emotional heart of Sholokhov’s work was the separation from the family, physical and psychological trauma, and the reconstruction of life around the father-child bond.

In many ways, this book echoes the overarching themes of Sholokhov’s short story by focusing on the dual indentities of the Soviet man as a soldier and as a father as it traces the development of the visual representation of the ideal Soviet man over the two decades that separate the end of the War from the reinstatement of Victory Day (May 9) as a public holiday in 1965. It provides the first in-depth study of the use of visual culture to articulate what it meant to be a New Soviet Man during this period, and offers a new assessment of the impact of the War on a model of masculinity that has to date been viewed as constant in its construction and almost entirely removed from the real-life experiences of actual Soviet men.

In order to chart the changes that can be seen in the twenty years under scrutiny here, the full range of official visual culture will be explored, from posters, illustrations, photographs, and cartoons to the great monumental paintings of the day. Rather than confine the focus to what was simply being produced by artists, however, a consideration of how these images circulated in society through the print media will form a crucial part of the study. The aim of this book, therefore, is not only to examine how the vision of the New Soviet Man changed over the course of these turbulent decades, but also how that vision was presented to the vast reading public of the Soviet Union. This approach allows for an investigation that not only explores issues to do with the portrayal of the ideal man in the years following the Great Patriotic War, but that also engages with some of the broader questions raised by the study of Soviet culture during this period: Is it possible to speak of one homogeneous way in which culture responded to the events of the War and its legacies? What impact did the Thaw-time liberalization of culture have on how issues that had been ignored under Stalin were now handled artistically? And how did the emergence of the cult of the Great Patriotic War under Brezhnev shape how those years and their legacy were presented through visual culture?

The analysis offered here is based on an examination of a wide range of print media, from the national press to magazines such as Ogonek, which had a yearly circulation of tens of millions, to the thick journals of the art world, most notably the long-running publication Iskusstvo. Looking across this spectrum enables us to do a number of things: we can see how the reproduction of certain pieces, in particular fine art, may differ across the professional and popular press; we can gauge what works did or did not find an outlet in print and why this might be the case; and we can see how the other forms of visual material, such as photographs and sketches and cartoons, sat alongside the copies of paintings that were such an important element in magazines of the era. In short, this methodology allows us to not only think about what was being produced across all these genres but what was reproduced and in what context, and subsequently what role these works played in shaping the image of the ideal man in the postwar period.

WHO WAS THE NEW SOVIET MAN?

Before we can establish the impact that the War had on the Soviet model of masculinity, though, we need to think about what constituted that model prior to 1945. For all that the issue of women under Soviet rule has been a part of scholarship since the birth of gender studies in the 1970s, the experience of men and the state’s ideas about what a man should be were largely neglected until the turn of the twenty-first century. In the decade and a half that has followed the emergence of masculinity as a vibrant part of Russian and Slavonic studies, a whole raft of work has been carried out that has brought to light that self-evident but oft-neglected fact that there was no such thing as a universal male experience of Soviet rule.⁶ What has been harder to challenge, however, is the notion that there was one consistent idea about who the New Soviet Man was, as if this ideal were utterly impervious to political upheaval and social change. As a consequence the phrase New Soviet Man has become an almost unconscious signifier for a range of behaviors and characteristics that we think we are familiar with, with little regard to what actually was encapsulated by this ideal and, crucially, how that ideal may have changed over time.

For all the Bolshevik government wished to create the world anew following the revolution of 1917, it did not enjoy the luxury of an entirely blank slate, and the foundations of the new regime were built upon the ruins of the old. It stands to reason, then, that many of the qualities that were held up as being exemplary of the New Soviet Man were neither new nor Soviet in their origin.⁷ Traits that were presented as being central to this Soviet ideal, such as heroic struggle, a readiness for sacrifice, comradeship, and patriotism clearly have roots in both the chivalric code of Western civilization and the pagan warrior model celebrated in Celtic and Slavic cultures. Indeed, as Barbara Evans Clements has pointed out, there was little difference between the cries for courage and glory that proliferated in the Soviet press in the years between 1941 and 1945 and those that were to be found in the twelfth-century epic, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign (1185–87),⁸ a fact that is underlined by the extensive references to the exploits of mythic heroes such as Aleksandr Nevskii and Dmitrii Donskoi in the wartime poster. Similarly, the idea that a man’s primary identity was established by his work is one that sociologist R. W. Connell has traced back to at least the nineteenth century with the continued development of industrial capitalism and the emergence of the urban bourgeoisie.⁹ The connection between work and masculinity was one that was cemented in the earliest days of the revolution and can be seen as absolutely rooted in the so-called cult of the machine that dominated the first wave of Soviet industrialization. Born of a concern with the former empire’s industrial backwardness, the overarching aim of this new relationship between worker and machine was ultimately to free the working class from the whims of overseers and to turn them into what Nikolai Bukharin called qualified, especially disciplined, living labor machines.¹⁰ It was in every way a utopian mission and an integral element in the project of social transformation that underpinned the Bolshevik agenda right from the start of the regime. The new Soviet workforce was to be transformed—in the words of Evgenii Zamiatin—into the steel heroes of a great epic.¹¹

The influence of the theories of Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor, the development of the conveyor-belt system of production, and the increasing mechanization of the workplace was not confined to the new Soviet state, and the impact of these ideas on the conceptualization of the male working-class body was in many respects a pan-European phenomenon. The Nietzschean ideal of hypermasculine bodily construction, as popularized in the culture of the post-1918 period, can be seen as part of this trend: at the time when strength, durability, and consistency were the buzzwords of this new mechanization, so the male body came to be associated with these characteristics.¹² Therefore, as Maurizia Boscagli points out, the modernist agenda was not simply to emulate and challenge technology but instead to identify with it, leading to a shifting aesthetic appreciation of the male body, which now focused upon its productive uses rather than its physical beauty.¹³ In line with the theories of Taylor, which had advocated the rationalization of work through breaking it down into single repeated tasks, by assimilating the machine with the male body it too became a series of moving parts to be kept in good working condition through physical training and away from corrupting influences that could harm its productivity, such as alcohol, religious practice, and illiteracy. It was a radical departure from the Classical ideal of the beautiful and harmonious male form: from the Soviet and modernist perspective, the body was something to be admired, not simply for its beauty and strength, but for what it could achieve and the exertion it could withstand, particularly when a part of a larger labor unit.

This conceptualization of the male body fell out of favor with the decline of the avant-garde movement after 1932 and the move toward Socialist Realism, an aesthetic that had human interaction rather than technology as its central ethos. However, the idea of a physically perfect body, well-tuned to the demands of labor, continued to resonate throughout the 1930s, and the concern with fitness, sporting prowess, and youth during these years can be seen as an offshoot of these early revolutionary ideas.¹⁴ These ideals, of course, were of primary importance at a time when war seemed almost a certainty, as the Soviet workforce now had to be willing not only to fight for the achievement of socialism but to fight against the foreign threats that loomed on the horizon. As the 1930s developed, this militaristic strand that had always been a part of the Soviet masculine model became increasingly prominent, leading to what Thomas Schrand has argued was actually a new configuration of male hegemony [that] made the male role of soldier a primary element in the new masculine identity.¹⁵ This was a celebration of martial behaviors and qualities that went far beyond just a celebration of the military itself;¹⁶ as it had been since the earliest days of the Revolution, this was a militarism that pervaded almost every aspect of society—everything was a battle and everyone was expected to be willing to fight and sacrifice in order to win the war being waged by both the internal and external enemies of the Soviet state.

The final aspect of what can be seen as a typical part of the ideal masculine model—certainly since the move away from the monastic ideal in the Early Modern period—is paternity, and it is here where we find the most divergence from both contemporary Western and traditional Russian values. The deep patriarchal roots of Russian society were challenged by the Soviet regime on all fronts: practically, through industrialization and the disruption of the family network; ideologically, through Marxist hostility to the family unit; and symbolically, through the range of legislation that was introduced during the early Soviet period that replaced biological fatherhood with the paternalistic state. It was not until the middle of the 1930s that being a good father came to be seen as a relatively important part of being a good Soviet citizen, a rhetorical shift that has been somewhat overlooked in light of the increasing emphasis on mothering and fertility that paralleled this development in the years around 1936. At the same time, the place paternity had as part of this idealized model of manhood was severely restricted by the fact that after 1934 Stalin himself had donned the mantle of ultimate Soviet father, followed by the emergence of what Katerina Clark termed the Great Family Myth, the idea that one’s loyalty to the state and its leadership should always overrule any loyalty one may have to blood kin.¹⁷ This combination of the very public orientation of the male role, the celebration of the mother under Stalinism, and the paternal outlook of the state itself has led to an assumption that fatherhood was always a minor part of what it meant to be a New Soviet Man, if indeed a part of this archetype at all.¹⁸

The image that we have of the New Soviet Man, then, is one that is highly militarized, based on values of self-sacrifice and loyalty, where dedication to work and the well-being of the collective overrode any personal or private considerations, and demanded physical health and moral fortitude. But as will be shown over the coming chapters, this model of the New Soviet Man created in the 1930s was not a fixed and unchanging constant: as the outlook of society changed, both with the end of the War and then the death of Stalin, so too did ideas about who the ideal man was and how he was represented.

In this respect, this study of the visual representation of the ideal man makes an important contribution to the far more nuanced understanding scholars now have of the late Stalin era and the early years of the Thaw. The postwar period has proved to be one of the most dynamic fields of study in recent years, leading to work that has fundamentally altered perceptions of late Stalinist society—both in terms of its mechanics and policies and in terms of lived experience in the harsh years of reconstruction and officially sanctioned normalization—reclaiming it as a distinct period of Soviet development, rather than dismissing it as of lesser importance when viewed alongside the tumult of the 1930s and the verve of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Running in parallel to this new, more complex understanding of the final years of Stalinism came a body of scholarship that began to break down the boundaries between this period and the years traditionally labeled as the Thaw, as time and again significant continuities were highlighted across the 1953 divide; trends that had to date been seen as a product of the liberalization of the Thaw era were shown to have their roots in the 1940s and early 1950s, and the notion that late-Stalinist society was one that was static and calcified has been repeatedly challenged by research into areas as diverse as official science policy and consumerism.¹⁹ While this emphasis on continuity and the limits of de-Stalinization has raised important questions regarding the perception of the Khrushchev years as a Thaw in its own right, when viewed in relation to the preceding regime, scholars have convincingly shown that to speak of one singular Thaw in the period between 1954 and the mid-1960s is also problematic. As the work of academics such as Polly Jones, Miriam Dobson, Stephen Bittner, and others has shown, the decade or so that is traditionally seen as a period of liberalization and relaxation can more accurately be viewed as one that was marked by waves of thaw and freeze, as both popular attitudes and official polices fluctuated and society as a whole attempted to deal with the complex legacy of Stalinism.²⁰

This book will demonstrate that what can be seen in terms of the visual representation of the New Soviet Man also contests both the perception of 1953 as a great watershed moment in Soviet history and the notion of one unproblematic and consistent process of thawing society after 1956. It will be argued here that it was the experience of the War, not the death of Stalin nor the changing gender or cultural policies of the later 1950s, that had the greatest impact on what qualities now constituted the new man and, crucially, how he was portrayed visually, as important shifts in representation occurred after 1945 and equally important continuities remained after 1953. Looking at visual culture it becomes apparent that the heroic-soldier archetype that had previously been so dominant was fundamentally challenged by the actual experience of war, as after 1945 depictions of the military man became softened and romanticized, and over the course of the mid-1950s, an increasing emphasis came to be placed on the heroic nature of labor and the courage and tenacity of those who fought in that arena for the achievement of socialism. Likewise, what is found in visual culture contests the conventional wisdom that there was no place for the New Soviet Man within the family home, as in the aftermath of war the presence of the returned veteran within scenes of homecoming and, later, general everyday life became synonymous with the return to normality. While the roots of this development lay firmly in the postwar period, the inclusion of men in the domestic space, particularly as fathers, only expanded and diversified as the decade progressed, meaning that by the end of the 1950s being a good father and having a real emotional bond with one’s children was absolutely integral to how the Soviet man was depicted across a whole range of visual genres. Thus, what will be demonstrated throughout this book is that the way in which the ideal man was represented visually was never the same again once the War was over: it was an experience so profound and so monumental that even the realm of fantasy was shaken by it.

SOCIALIST REALISM AND SOCIALIST REALITY

After the dynamism and excitement of the years of revolutionary experimentation—which came to a crashing halt in 1932 with the disbandment of the autonomous artistic organizations, followed rapidly by the official introduction of Socialist Realism a couple of years later—the art of the Stalin era has been traditionally viewed as conservative, staid, and repressive; a microcosm of society itself, where strict limits were placed on individual expression, and rhetoric and representation were far removed from the realities of life.²¹ Although purporting to be a reflection of the great and heroic transformations taking place within society, Stalinist Socialist Realism is an art form that is rightly seen as disingenuous and blindly optimistic, in which life is presented through the rosiest of lenses.²² All those aspects that are synonymous with the Soviet Union in the 1930s—famine, hardship, squalid and cramped living conditions, the upheaval of collectivization, arrest, and incarceration—had no place in this version of reality. Socialist Realism was an aesthetic that was geared toward the future, representing society as it was meant to be in its most ideal form, rather than providing Soviet citizens with a way of making sense of the world around them as it really was. By extension, the figures that populated Soviet visual culture were, with a handful of exceptions, paragons—dedicated and hardworking students, heroic workers of industry, smiling and well-fed kolkhoznitsas, and the nation’s leaders—although the principle that lay behind this representation was tipichnost’ (typicalness). These were meant to be figures drawn straight from life, characters that were understandable and relatable for the average Soviet audience, and while the realist style fueled this pretense, what was presented as being typical invariably became a depiction of the ideal.

It is both this varnishing of reality and the environment in which such art was produced that resulted in it being dismissed as a useful tool for exploring Soviet society for most of the twentieth century. Fortunately, as scholars such as Katerina Clark, Susan Reid, and Denise Youngblood have repeatedly demonstrated in the years since the cultural turn of the 1990s, the art, literature, and film produced under the watchful eye of the state may not allow us to access the complexities of lived experience, but they do provide us with an invaluable insight into the ideals and shifting priorities of the regime and, crucially, how those ideals and priorities were articulated to the rest of the Soviet population.²³ What is also becoming apparent as the culture of the post-Stalin period is more