So thrilled to see this piece in Jacobin to mark the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR by the departmental coordinator of Penn’s Russian and East European Studies, our very own Alina Yakubova.
Thrilled to be a guest on Dr. Fern Riddell's History podcast →
The Night Witches were the feared, all-female military aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Yet the Night Witches weren't the only Soviet women on the front-line during the Second World War. Women were pilots, doctors, partisans, snipers and anti-aircraft gunners. Dr Fern Riddell speaks to Dr Reina Pennington and Prof Kristen Ghodsee.
News item from June 1, 1942
I love this little dispatch from the New York Times in June of 1942 when the Soviet sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, was recognized for her 257 conformed Nazi kill. She accepted her award with only three words: “i’ll get more.” She kept her promise. After four injuries, she left the front lines later in the year with 309 confirmed kills in her sniper’s tally book.
Quote from the book Love, Marriage and Friendship in the Soviet Union (1984)
“One of the major factors that has contributed to the sexualization of the Soviet mentality today, according to Igor Kon, is ‘the drastic increase in female sexual activity.’ Kon derogates Victorian morality and medical theories that contend that ‘a decent woman in general does not enjoy sex.’ He asserts, referring for lack of Soviet data to Czechoslovakian sources, that the proportion of women from the younger generation who experience orgasm reached 79 percent, against 31 percent among women of the older generation. He further suggests that this sexual awakening of women is a source of conflict between men and women, presumably because now men cannot satisfy the increasing sexual appetites of Soviet women (Kon 1982, p. 118).” Page 55-56
Just the book I needed
I ordered this gem through interlibrary loan and discovered many fascinating facts about sex and love in the Soviet Union. The author, Vladimir Shlapentokh, was a prominent sociologist before he emigrated to the United States in 1978. This was his first book published in his adopted country in which he argues that the Soviet citizen had become hedonistic in the extreme.
The Rouge Exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris
While I was in Paris, I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of the Rogue exhibition at the Grand Palais. This was an exhibition of art from 1917 to 1953, and included amazing works from the early Soviet Era, while not whitewashing the horrors of Stalinism.
One thing that fascinated me were the quasi-erotic paintings of athletic bodies produced during the Stalinist era. According to the curators, because Soviet society was so prudish, the only way to paint nudes or scantily-clad figures was to portray young Soviet citizens engaging in sports activities. These images would have been quite titillating, I imaging, but they were acceptable because they upheld socialist ideals of physical fitness.
