Patriotism without Patriots? Soviet People in World War II
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69567/3007-0236.2025.1.121.136Keywords:
USSR, German-Soviet War, Great Patriotic War, Red Army, patriotism, mobilizationAbstract
The article examines the use of "traditional" Russian patriotic rhetoric during the German-Soviet War of 1941-1945. This war, from the first days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, began to be called the Great Patriotic War in Soviet official documents. With the outbreak of the war, Soviet patriotic discourse turned to the historical experience of military victories of the Russian people and, above all, to the "Patriotic War" of 1812, thereby ending the period of revolutionary internationalism that dominated after the October Revolution of 1917. According to some historians, the appeal to past victories of Russian arms became one of the factors in the general mobilization of the population of the Soviet Union to fight against the external enemy and its incredible heroism in the war. Other historians doubt the mobilizing power of Soviet patriotism for the population and its desire to defend Stalin's Russia, which most of this population hated. Nevertheless, these historians believe that the first news of Nazi atrocities and terror against the Soviet population in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union left no alternative but to defend the homeland. At the same time, an appeal to historical evidence of the era indicates a multiplicity of patriotic discourses addressed to Soviet soldiers and the population from the beginning of the war, as well as the fact that patriotism did not receive the due response among the population and its real role in the German-Soviet war seems to be overstated. It is not only about Soviet patriotism. From the very beginning of the war, the Nazis launched their "patriotic" propaganda aimed at the peoples of the USSR, including the Russians. On both sides of the front line, love of the fatherland was used for combat mobilization, unity, and overcoming differences. Patriotisms of the Great Patriotic War are always multiple, contradictory, and often inconsistent. Most Soviet citizens were probably not patriots in 1941, and it is doubtful that they became so during the war, although all combatants were subjected to intense patriotic discourse and socialization
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