The Stuff of Soldiers

Once the state ceased to promise existential and spiritual change with any credibility, it was left only with stuff.

For the first three decades of Soviet power, mobilization had been the ethos that kept the project going,

After all, they were reduced to the same set of objects, their everyday lives made uniform in the most literal sense.

As they returned home, soldiers couldn’t help but speak a language that borrowed heavily from official Soviet discourse. The experience of the war could unify and standardize as no prior event.

Much of what they had seen undermined Soviet claims, but the horrors the enemy had committed, the end result of the war, and the sacrifices Red Army soldiers had made created significant overlaps between how the government and soldiers understood the cataclysm they had weathered.

The state was constantly reacting to the ways in which soldiers and commanders undermined its authority, often forced to compromise and acknowledge the limits of its power.

What they did with government issue items demonstrated a great deal of agency.

Making peasants more urban had been part of the Soviet project from the very beginning. The army provided an urban space in which to mold soldiers, exposing them to propaganda, the wider world of the Soviet Union, and even foreign capitals.

subjected to a specific form of urbanization and modernization in the ranks of the Red Army

The war transformed people.