The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs

Abstract

The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on postrevolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans' memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the batdefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a “darker side” of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation.