Soviet Diaries of the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

To make sense of the unprecedented destruction wrought by World War II, Soviet historians have increasingly turned to diaries for insight into how this conflict was experienced and understood by individual citizens. This essay explores recent historiographical approaches to Soviet wartime diaries by examining the groundbreaking and diverse methods of Oleg Budnitskii, Jochen Hellbeck, and Jeffrey K. Hass, as well as discussing my own research. Using soldiers’ diaries, Budnitskii has illuminated lesser known and taboo aspects of frontline service, complicating both the celebrated myth of the Great Patriotic War and the assumption that Soviet people did not think outside of the categories of Soviet ideology in the process. Hellbeck has investigated Stalin-era practices of diary writing as a tool for perfecting oneself, purging it of bourgeois individualism, and aligning it with collective. Based on this, he has argued that Soviets had a unique self-concept (or subjectivity), which was distinct from the liberal, western tradition. Donning a historical-sociological approach, Hass has studied diaries from the Leningrad Blockade to discern how extreme starvation put pressure on various norms and behavioral logics at work in the besieged community. Drawing inspiration from all of these researchers, my study – also of wartime Leningrad – attends to the cognitive and narrative strategies that Leningraders employed to come to intellectual grips with the siege. I treat the diary as a sense-making text rather than as a laboratory of self.