Catastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society.

Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.

Erica L. Fraser is an instructor in the Department of History at Carleton University.

Erica L. Fraser's profile page

"Fraser has written a solid monograph that fills a significant lacuna in the historiography of the Soviet Union. […] This pioneering work is a concise, overall well-written piece of scholarship that showcases an impressive toolbox full of methodologies."

<em>American Historical Review</em>

"As she explores the process of reclaiming military masculinity in the postwar period in the context of competing masculinities in the Soviet landscape, Fraser divides her study into sections according to her source base, beginning with archival sources of military and Komsomol institutions and then moving on to sexualized and gendered imagery from Krokodil, then to memoir literature from nuclear physicists, and finally to the public celebrity of the first cosmonauts in the 1960s. Her use of a wide variety of sources and viewpoints allows for a unique perspective into ‘how hegemony as a relational form was reconfirmed and maintained – as part of postwar recovery narratives.’"

<em>The Russian Review, Vol 79</em>, July 2020

"This study is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Soviet masculinities as it powerfully shows how worries over postwar manhood shaped Cold War security concerns."

<em>Canadian Slavonic Papers</em>

"Throughout the book, the author emphasizes the ways in which military masculinity was defined in opposition to femininity and with disregard to women’s responsibilities and accomplishments. For these reasons, this book would be useful for students as a model of both thoughtful source interpretation and thorough gender analysis."

<EM>Slavic Review</EM>