Fascinated by food as a basis and dimension of war and inspired by Sara’s mentioning a study finding women survived better than men during the blockade of Leningrad, I have been doing some reading on the event. Namely, I’ve been reading The War Within, by Alexis Peri, which reconstructs the experiences of the blokadniki (men of the blockade) through their diaries.
In addition to being shocked that, during the periods when water wasn’t available, blokadniki received their bread rations as raw flour, I was doubly amazed in reading how local officials and journalists tried to frame famine, disease, and exposure positively through the lens of Soviet ideology; especially the experiences of Leningrad’s women.
As the Wehrmacht marched northwards and the Finnish army southwards towards Leningrad in 1941, most of the city’s male population had already been conscripted into the military. Those who remained were children, the elderly, the infirm, and men who had avoided conscription. Mostly, though, those who were left were women. Blokadniki were not the ‘men’ of Leningrad. ‘Blokadniki’ – ‘niki’ meaning ‘men’ – was the label adopted by Leningraders facing starvation and exposure so severe that they could no longer recognise themselves in the mirror. They were both male and female, child, adult, and elder, and every one of them was infirm from cold, hunger, and lack of contact with the outside world. The Leningrad Pravda framed these physical changes as an evolution. Aligning themselves with New Soviet Man theory, they celebrated all Leningraders as having been reborn through the fires of war and strife; that these slow, sore, cold, and above all hungry wretches were the product of fighting the good fight of communism. Women were particularly singled out for this praise.
Just as Rosie the Riveter and Swingshift Sallie framed women in the U.S. as both domestic goddesses and feminine beauties who could use a blowtorch or machine a bullet, woman blokadniki received much the same treatment. Their bodies brittle, hardened, and shrunken, their families and homes destroyed, their fertility stolen by a continually dropping caloric intake, these women were praised for becoming New Soviet Men: unflinching, unquestioning, driven, and tough- while also receiving praise for continuing to act as mothers, wives, aunties, loving daughters and nieces. They were women in the eyes of the Soviets and the Pravda, even having lost all semblance of femininity.
However, blokadniki conceived of themselves quite differently. Most importantly in this context was their loss of gender perception, as men began wearing women’s clothes to stay warm, vice versa, and the cold and calories dropped so low that sexual physiology became as fickle as trustworthy news. What amazed me the most, though, was that through the Soviet-Pravda frame, there was not a single attempt at celebrating the adoption of feminine traits by men, nor any interrogation of the role of the feminine in Russian or Soviet society.
Perhaps what speaks most to the point I’m getting at is that most of the diary authors and blokadniki were women, but their experiences were, as in much of Soviet society and history in general, first filtered through the masculine gaze, and then again through military and political romance, before being considered palatable or appropriate for appreciation by the status quo.