Overview

Catastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society. Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.

Full Product Details

Author:   Erica L. Fraser
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.50cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.540kg
ISBN:  

9781442637207

ISBN 10:   144263720
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   08 April 2019
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Introduction Soviet Masculinities The Soviet Union after the War Sources and Narratives Part I: Martial Masculinities and the Postwar Armed Forces Chapter 1. Conscripting Soviet Manhood Conscription in War and Peace DOSAAF and Young Men in Civilian Defence No One is Interested : Avoiding DOSAAF Cataloguing Evasion Soldiers without an Army: Khrushchev's Troop Reductions Conclusion Chapter 2. Looking for Role Models in Education and Literature War Orphans and Boyhood at the Suvorov Academies Cadets and Community Surveillance of Masculine Behaviour Defence Instructors as Surrogate Fathers Masculine Role Models in Literature and Film Conclusion Part II: Martial Masculinities Outside the Military during the Early Cold War Chapter 3. Gender and Militarism in Foreign Affairs Cartoons Sex, Humour, and Visual Culture Franco in a Skirt: Cross-dressing and Misogyny Assaulting Marianne The Soviet Counterpoint Conclusion Chapter 4. Telling Manly Stories About Nuclear Physics Masculinity and Scientific Impotence The Gendered Cold War Workplace Some Kind of God : Rearming a Soviet Prometheus Telling Manly Stories Conclusion Chapter 5. Martial Masculinity and the Cosmonaut Brotherhood Gendering Sputnik Even Martian Girls Want to Date Gagarin The Cosmonaut's Wife Cosmonaut Masculinity on Tour Conclusion Conclusion

Reviews

Throughout the book, the author emphasizes the ways in which military masculinity was defined in opposition to femininity and with disregard to women's responsibilities and accomplishments. For these reasons, this book would be useful for students as a model of both thoughtful source interpretation and thorough gender analysis. -- Deborah A. Field, Adrian College * <EM>Slavic Review</EM> * As she explores the process of reclaiming military masculinity in the postwar period in the context of competing masculinities in the Soviet landscape, Fraser divides her study into sections according to her source base, beginning with archival sources of military and Komsomol institutions and then moving on to sexualized and gendered imagery from Krokodil, then to memoir literature from nuclear physicists, and finally to the public celebrity of the first cosmonauts in the 1960s. Her use of a wide variety of sources and viewpoints allows for a unique perspective into 'how hegemony as a relational form was reconfirmed and maintained - as part of postwar recovery narratives.' -- Greta Bucher, U.S. Military Academy, West Point * <em>The Russian Review, Vol 79</em>, July 2020 *

Throughout the book, the author emphasizes the ways in which military masculinity was defined in opposition to femininity and with disregard to women's responsibilities and accomplishments. For these reasons, this book would be useful for students as a model of both thoughtful source interpretation and thorough gender analysis. -- Deborah A. Field, Adrian College * <EM>Slavic Review</EM> * As she explores the process of reclaiming military masculinity in the postwar period in the context of competing masculinities in the Soviet landscape, Fraser divides her study into sections according to her source base, beginning with archival sources of military and Komsomol institutions and then moving on to sexualized and gendered imagery from Krokodil, then to memoir literature from nuclear physicists, and finally to the public celebrity of the first cosmonauts in the 1960s. Her use of a wide variety of sources and viewpoints allows for a unique perspective into 'how hegemony as a relational form was reconfirmed and maintained - as part of postwar recovery narratives.' -- Greta Bucher, U.S. Military Academy, West Point * <em>The Russian Review, Vol 79</em>, July 2020 * This study is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Soviet masculinities as it powerfully shows how worries over postwar manhood shaped Cold War security concerns. -- Brandon Gray Miller, Southern Methodist University * <em>Canadian Slavonic Papers</em> * Fraser has written a solid monograph that fills a significant lacuna in the historiography of the Soviet Union. [...] This pioneering work is a concise, overall well-written piece of scholarship that showcases an impressive toolbox full of methodologies. -- Brandon Schechter, New York University * <em>American Historical Review</em> *

Throughout the book, the author emphasizes the ways in which military masculinity was defined in opposition to femininity and with disregard to women's responsibilities and accomplishments. For these reasons, this book would be useful for students as a model of both thoughtful source interpretation and thorough gender analysis. -- Deborah A. Field, Adrian College * <EM>Slavic Review</EM> *

Author Information

Erica L. Fraser is an instructor in the Department of History at Carleton University.

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