1 - Werewolves, Vampires, and the “Sacred Wo/men” of Soviet Discourse in Pravda and beyond in the 1930s and 1940s

Summary

While in the 1930s the Soviet population was subjected to violence in the form of mass arrests and petitions for the death penalty, the official literature steered clear of its realistic depictions. World War II provided a psychological and artistic release by presenting an enemy whose actions demanded a violent response. As a result, a language of physical struggle based on a new war mythology emerged. Typically, the official discourse of World War II works toward establishing murder as self-defense and avoids portraying the Soviet warriors doing anything morally suspect; there is a clear and unambiguous line between right and wrong, between the Russians and the Germans.

Of particular interest within this mythology is the treatment of the human body, with its inconvenient needs and the tendency to encroach on the life of consciousness, ideological or otherwise. Soviet war stories often show the Nazis going to impossible lengths in their torture of captured partisans, and the Russians persevering through seemingly impossible hardships. While Elaine Scarry demonstrates that torture creates a balance of power, which destroys the victim's world (identity) and turns him or her into a body, in Soviet war stories the bodies of the tortured partisans all but disappear. If, according to Victor Erofeev, prostitutes in the works of psychological realism sold the bodies they did not have, in Russian war stories partisans submit to torture bodies that are immune to pain. Without disputing the issue of historical accuracy, this chapter investigates this stylization and its various vantage points in the context of the Soviet aesthetic.

I believe that the body's disappearance should be read in the larger context of its treatment in the official narratives of the 1930s and 1940s. For example, in the coverage of the show trials, the accused are presented not only as fully embodied but also obscured by camouflage, which must be stripped away to reveal the “body” of crime. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben points out that the history and etymology of the writ of habeas corpus, or the law that demands the presence of the accused at the trial, demonstrates the “law's desire to have a body.” Soviet discourse goes so far as to treat the very presence of the “enemy bodies” as a method of making concrete their alleged crimes of plotting and spying.