Designing the Mother-Peacemaker in the USSR of the 1980s: From Stagnation to Perestroika

Ekaterina S. Cherepanova; Maria A. Yantsen

doi:10.2298/FID2503723C

Authors

Ekaterina S. Cherepanova Ural Federal University
Maria A. Yantsen Ural Federal University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2503723C

Keywords:

Soviet post-conflict culture, project for engineering a new human, war, motherhood, struggle for peace, women’s magazines of the 1980s

Abstract

This article examines the representations of the mother fighting for peace in Soviet culture of the 1980s. There is substantial research literature on the struggle for peace in the Soviet Union, which was a key aspect of the country’s foreign policy after the Great Patriotic War. This article aims to explore the results of this activity from the perspective of post-conflict culture, which is understood as an evolving set of norms and meaning- making processes that emerge in a society after a conflict, as it reflects on the experience of war. The revision of the military conflicts’ outcomes and its moral lessons is reflected in efforts to engineer “a new human” and construct a new vision of his future. This study examines the image of the mother-peacemaker as part of the Soviet post-conflict project that began after the end of the Second World War, in order to reveal the principles and norms that shaped the re-evaluation of later military conflicts and the creation of symbolic visions of a peaceful future. The analysis draws on publications and illustrations from the Soviet women’s magazine Rabotnitsa, which had a circulation of millions in the 1980s.

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