The Soviet Culture of Victory

Abstract

The Soviet Union after the Second World War can serve as a prime example of how victory ’locks in’ a political system. In a mirror image of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s argument of how ‘cultures of defeat’ encourage social and political innovation, the Soviet ‘culture of victory’ reaffirmed a dictatorial system of government and a command economy based on collectivized agriculture and centrally planned industry. At the same time, however, the war also engendered changes, which played themselves out somewhat subterraneously at first. They include a complex system of veterans’ privileges, a growing welfare state, a more routinized administration, and an economy where individual and family farming played a major role in the provisioning not only of the rural, but also of the urban population. Moreover, counter-narratives and counter-memories of this war could never be completely silenced by the bombastic war cult and would break forth at the end of the Soviet century. Finally, the economic and human costs of this victory were such that they formed a constant dark underbelly to the celebration of the ‘Great Victory’. This article surveys these contradictory legacies of the war and the ways in which they helped shape late Soviet society.