Moscow’s “Southern Outpost”: War Memory and the Struggle for Recognition in the Hero City of Tula

Abstract

ABSTRACT The memory of the Great Patriotic War was one of the fundamental forces of political and societal integration in the Soviet Union. It has largely retained this towering status in contemporary Russia. Within the idealized retelling of a traumatic and devastating military conflict that claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens, Hero Cities played a crucial role: The widely revered places where the bloodiest battles took place became, in official propaganda, exemplars of courage, steadfastness, and discipline. As such, they received the highest government awards during the reign of Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev (1964–1982), when official war memory became codified and propagated widely. This article traces the case study of Tula, one of the key cities during the Battle of Moscow in 1941, to shed light on the genesis and consequences of its Hero City status. As a provincial center that stood in the shadow of the capital, Tula nevertheless benefited from Moscow’s elevation within official war memory in the mid-1960s. Still, it had to wait until 1976 to be welcomed into the exclusive ‘club’ of Hero Cities, as there was considerable resistance — not least because many actors in the Soviet elite feared that putting ‘minor’ locations like Tula on the same level as Stalingrad or Leningrad may inflate their significance. There was a clear link between wartime heroism and economic benefits in the post-war era: As part of a ‘socialist contract’, Soviet citizens made considerable sacrifices for the state — in return, they expected remunerations. Hero Cities like Tula used this well-established understanding to ask for and often receive investments into urban infrastructure and popular welfare. The case study also shows, however, that the Soviet system’s ability to uphold its end of the deal increasingly waned during the stagnation of the 1970s. Disappointed hopes and expectations were the result.