“We Know What War Is”: Veterans, Soldiers, and Military Masculinity in the Soviet “Fight for Peace,” c. 1955–65

Abstract

The aim of this article is to bring the issue of peace more definitively into the increasingly complex vision we have of the postwar era and to give particular thought to the place of the military man within a society that was now supposedly orientated toward peace. To do so, the discussion will range across both lived experience and cultural representations—predominantly of a visual nature—that broached the issue of peace, paying close attention to the ways in which the legacies of the Great Patriotic War shaped how serving soldiers and demobilized veterans articulated the need for peace and their role in ensuring its preservation. What will be repeatedly demonstrated in what follows is that the shadow of the Great Patriotic War loomed large over both cultural representations and personal conceptualizations of the ideal of peace, and as such the military man—both real and imagined, serving and demobilized—was integral to the discourse surrounding this most pressing social concern.