Gender and the Construction of Wartime Heroism in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union
In: European history quarterly, Volume 39, Issue 3, p. 465-489
ISSN: 1461-7110
During World War II, the Soviet media featured both male and female military heroes as part of an effort to mobilize the entire nation for the protection of hearth and home. The wartime hero cults inspired post-war commemoration in both the Soviet Union and in countries it `liberated' from Nazism. However, no single Communist/Soviet model of commemoration and heroism was imposed on post-World War II Eastern Europe. The relative lack of female heroes constituted one of the most striking differences between the `cults' of the war in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. The difference can be explained in part as a consequence of the very different Soviet and Czechoslovak wartime experiences. The absence of female heroes also points to post-war differences in how the two states' leaders understood and employed the legitimizing potential of the war. These differences in turn shaped the post-Communist fate of hero cults in both countries.