I’m home today, because Russia is celebrating Defender of the Fatherland Day (former Soviet Army and Navy Day). There are two definitions of the “defender of the Fatherland” at play. One is a narrow professional one – the holiday, after all, started as a celebration of the military, and February 23 is still a military holiday. The other is much wider – the defender of the Fatherland is male, and to celebrate this, a woman is to buy him a new tie and some aftershave. Two weeks later, on March 8, the International Women’s Day, he will reciprocate with flowers and perfume.
When I was in primary school, February 23 and March 8 were parades of embarrassment. On the first occasion, girls of the class gave presents to boys – collectively, because giving an individual present to an individual boy is unbearable at that age – boys giggled, and the homeroom teacher smiled benignly looking at the fruits of her organizational labor. Two weeks later, the story was reversed. Since two thirds of my class was female boys always got a better deal out of February 23, so we were also bitter (after we stopped giggling). None of this, not surprisingly, had anything to do with the holidays’ original meanings, it was more like Valentine’s day split down the middle, the lovers separated by two weeks.
Russia, of course, is not the only country with a pair of gendered holidays, but what an odd pair. While others celebrate mothers and fathers – sexes in their most biologically essential – Russians celebrate men for their capacity to be soldiers and women for their capacity to work like men. Never mind that a growing number of young men evade conscription – and who is to say that serving in this fatherland’s brutal, hungry and inefficient army is the best way to defend it? Never mind that women certainly don’t get equal job opportunities or equal pay for equal work. It all gets lost in the flurry of ties and flowers, and the whole thing becomes a double farce.
What a sad reason to miss two days in the library.
But you know what? I’ll tell you a story about defenders of the fatherland. Men and women. Not fighting.
I’ve been reading a lot about the home front – memoirs, government documents, reports on morale. I don’t know yet which of these stories will become important for the dissertation and which ones will remain buried in my notes, but one of the things that keeps coming up again and again is that not fighting was hard.
I’m not even talking about food rations – so much smaller than rations at the front that all wounded soldiers marveled at how people survived, and some tried to speed up returning to their units because they were afraid of starving. And people at the home front did starve. Those in final stages of exhaustion were sent to “rest homes” for a day or two, to sleep, eat some more, recover a little. Some died on the first day of their vacation – and rest home directors wrote enraged letters to trade unions who sent people in need of an IV drip to get a glass of milk.
I’m not talking of twelve-hour work days, without days off. Or crowded homes – locals had to host families evacuated from the west. Or shortages of soap, boots, hats, coats (in the winter of 1941-42 temperatures dropped to -45 celsius, outdoor workers had twenty-minute shifts).
It was really hard to be left behind. Sure, there were people who didn’t want to go to the front and were glad to be left behind for any reason. But many, many wanted to fight.
Some considered themselves lucky to be drafted in the first two days of the war, before the state realized that it wanted some people to stay behind and started “booking” them. Some asked, and asked, and asked again, until someone finally gave them a gun (and some were repeatedly cursed at). Some were deliberately caught in a round-up without documents – those without proof of “booking” were conscripted on the spot (some, however, were found out, pulled off trains and sent back to their workplaces). Many of those who stayed played war.
One young Communist from Uralmash hit on an idea of a “front brigade,” which turned an ordinary work team into a military unit – with their brigadier a “commander” and a “political officer” in one, with military salutes, morning and evening reports, marching to and from work – and the idea caught like wild fire. When party propagandists did their jobs properly, there were days, weeks, months of “frontline work,” special efforts to help the army when it was retreating, or celebrate its successes when it was advancing, a constant attempt to sustain an emotional connection between the tide of war and the tide of work. When propagandists were absent, people moped and deserted (they often did anyway, for more pragmatic reasons, but there was a connection). Men of eligible age gathered after work – remember rations and 12-hour shifts – to march in the square, or go cross-country skiing in “military preparedness training” (“most had no proper footwear. They’d wrap newspapers around their feet to try and fit what was available,” “it was difficult to teach people in these exercises – everyone was tired… Men worked until 17:00 in the shops, and then, after work, from 18:00 till 22-23:00 marched in the stadium or did tactical exercises in the woods”).
In any country at war some of the “home” will be washed out of the “home front,” as normal activities acquire different meanings. In the Soviet Union, “home” was virtually eliminated and a lot of it was done from below. I suspect the party machine did not have to do too much to create the Myth of the Great Patriotic War – great army, heroic soldiers, brave leaders. For four years millions of people had played out this exact war.
Happy February 23.
