Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVII:4 (Spring, 2017), 521–535.

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

The Meaning of Resilience: Soviet Children in
World War II Does the behavioral category of resilience have
any explicatory power in the psychology of traumatic experience?
How resilient can children be when subjected to the horrors of
war? During World War II, the Soviet media used images of
threatened, wounded, and murdered children to condemn Nazi
brutality and mobilize resistance. In May 1943, Fadeev wrote that
when he visited besieged Leningrad in April 1942, as it was emerg-
ing from the deadliest months of the blockade, he saw clear evi-
dence of trauma: “The imprint of that terrible winter remained on
[children’s] faces and was expressed in their games. Many children
played by themselves. Even in collective games, they played silently,
with serious faces.” Quoting from reports made by a director of
a children’s home for preschoolers in the city, he told heartbreak-
ing stories of damaged children. A child named Lorik, arriving
only two days after his mother’s death, anxiously focused on pro-
tecting a locket with a photograph of her that he had made from a
powder compact. Five-year-old Emma, who had “trouble lacing
up her boots,” cried bitterly, but made no attempt to ask for help.
The children in the “youngest and middle groups” (probably be-
tween three and ﬁve years old) “expressed all their requests and
demands with tears, whims, and whimpers, as if they’d never
known how to talk.” In a city where the bread ration for depen-
dents during the winter had fallen to a low of 125 grams of coarse,

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is Professor of History, West Chester University. She is the author of
The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York,
2006); International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (New York,
2015); with Choi Chatterjee and Deborah Fields, Russia’s Long Twentieth Century: Contested
Voices, Memories, and Perspectives, 1894–2008 (New York, 2016).

The author thanks Matthew Romaniello and Anastasia Kostetskaya, the organizers of the
University of Hawaii Russian Studies Workshop, for the opportunity to present an early
version of this research note, and all of the participants at the Workshop for their feedback.
Special thanks go to Susan Gans, who generously shared her expertise and insight.

© 2017 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Histoire, Inc., est ce que je:10.1162/JINH_a_01053

1 Aleksandr Fadeev, “Deti geroicheskogo goroda: Iz leningradskikh zarisovok,” Komsomol’skaia
pravda, May 12, 1943. The ﬁrst quotation is from idem (trans. R.. D. Charques), Leningrad in the Days
of the Blockade (Londres, 1946), 44, available at http://bibliotekar.ru/informburo/30.htm (accessed

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adulterated bread, all of the children were obsessed with food. Ils
hid “microscopic” pieces of bread in matchboxes, taking hours to eat
it and “treating it as some kind of wonder.”1

Fadeev left no doubt about the political implications: The en-
emy would “pay with streams of his own black blood” for the
tears of children. Néanmoins, his detailed descriptions of chil-
dren’s distress ring true. Under less dire circumstances, psychoan-
alysts Anna Freud and Burlingham reported similar behaviors
among children evacuated from London to war nurseries. Comment-
jamais, Fadeev’s concluding assertion that “by the time this report
fell into my hands, all the children were more or less free from
the terrible trauma” seems too optimistic to be believed. In July
1942, he assured his readers, “the majority of children appeared
completely normal and healthy.” Skomorovsky and Morris, dans
an account published two years later in English for Allied con-
sumption (one contemporary reviewer described it as afﬂicted
with a “bad case of ofﬁcialese”) reached a similar conclusion.
On the basis of letters and documents, they surmised that even
though parents in Leningrad “worried over the psychological effect
of such abnormal times, remembering stories of embittered,
gnome-like children and maladjusted, unhealthy adults, the spawn
of warfare, . . . most of the children who remained in Leningrad
developed a sardonic and simple humor that was indestructible.”2
These stories of resilience and recovery, like the stories of
trauma, had clear political uses. They deﬂected attention from
the Soviet state’s failure to evacuate children, downplayed the ex-
tent of starvation in Leningrad, and explained children’s ability to
withstand trauma as the result of the upbringing provided by the
Soviet state. Fadeev praised “Leningraders, and above all the

Juin 7, 2016). For propaganda, see Julie deGraffenried, Sacriﬁcing Childhood: Children and the Soviet
State in the Great Patriotic War (Lawrence, 2014), 104–111.
2 Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, War and Children (New York, 1943). Fadeev, “Deti”;
idem, Leningrad, 44 (second quotation); Boris Skomorovsky and E. G. Morris, The Siege of
Leningrad: The Saga of the Greatest Siege of All Time as Told by the Letters, Documents, and Stories
of the Brave People Who Withstood It (New York, 1944), 42; John Chamberlin, “Books of the
Times,” New York Times, 3 Fév. 1944. Skomorovsky, a Russian émigré, and Morris contrib-
uted to the communist press in the United States. For Skomorovsky, see Al’bert Pavlovich
Nenarokov, “Protokoly zagranichnoi delegatsii RSDRP,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, III (2007), 101.
Morris, “Revolt on Thirty-Fourth Street,” New Masses (Août 3, 1937), 19–20, available at
https://www.unz.org/Author/MorrisEmanuelGoldsmith (accessed June 7, 2016).

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Leningrad women, who can be proud that in blockade conditions
they saved the children who,” for reasons left unspeciﬁed, “did not
manage to evacuate.” Skomorovsky and Morris traced children’s
fearlessness and “complete contempt” for the “invaders” to the fact
that “most . . . had received splendid training as members of the
Young Pioneers,” the Soviet scouts, et, at a still younger age, comme
Little Octobrists. They marshalled children’s own words to authen-
ticate these conclusions: A little girl who refused to cry when play-
ing the patient in a game of “stretcher bearer” explained, “I’m one
of our wounded, not theirs. . . . Our wounded don’t cry.”3

Collected, mediated, and disseminated by adults, the words of
children in wartime narratives can tell us much about the “political
instrumentalisation of children.” Seemingly too good to be true,
skeptical historians dismiss stories such as Fadeev’s about women’s
salutary “love for children” and children’s rapid recovery as mere
propaganda. Cependant, work by social scientists investigating more
recent conﬂicts suggests an alternative reading that emphasizes not
“trauma” but “resilience.” Studies of children in war zones as diverse
as Afghanistan, Palestine, and Uganda document how individuals
and communities have effectively managed the stress of war, opening
the possibility of understanding children not only as innocent and
damaged victims but also as historical actors—even when their ex-
ploits appear in accounts shaped by adult intentions and agendas.4

From a historian’s perspective, the most illuminating recent
studies of war-affected civilian populations highlight the impor-
tance of social supports and cultural resources in collective efforts
to manage the traumas of war. These works, which we discuss be-
faible, maintain that a shared belief in making sacriﬁces to serve a
just and worthwhile purpose, as well as a public encouragement
of “cooperative effort and solidarity,” may help those experiencing
war to view themselves not as “passive victims” of trauma but as
“active citizens.” Although war experiences often produce lasting
dommage, the central point for humanitarian-aid organizations and
for historians is that such “damage” cannot be assessed without
taking full account of how children, no less than adults, understand

3 Kirschenbaum, “Innocent Victims and Heroic Defenders: Children and the Siege of
Leningrad,” in James Marten (éd.), Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York,
2002), 280–281; Fadeev, “Deti”; Skomorovsky and Morris, Siege of Leningrad, 42, 44.
4 Alexis Artaud de La Ferrière, “The Voice of the Innocent: Propaganda and Childhood
Testimonies of War,” History of Education, XLIII (2014), 107.

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| LI S A A . K IR S C H E NB A U M

524
the disruptions and sacriﬁces of war. In the case of Russia’s war-
time and postwar narratives, two factors that built resilience stand
out—children’s bond with caretakers and children’s sense of actively
participating in the war effort.5

Emphasizing the cultural and social dimensions of resilience, ce
research note, like work on more recent conﬂicts, challenges both
the naturalistic assumption that certain events are inherently trau-
matic and the prevailing Western assumption that all war-affected
children are “psychologically ‘vulnerable’ or damaged.” Children
clearly suffered profoundly during World War II. This research note
explores, if not children’s own understandings of their suffering, comment
enfants (and the adults that they became) utilized public, ofﬁcial,
narratives to make sense of, and recover from, war experiences.6

THE CONCEPT OF RESILIENCE The widespread assumption in
Western societies that “shattering events” naturally and universally
“traumatize” individuals who experience them has fostered a war-
iness about stories of children’s rapid recovery from the “trauma”
and “emotional scarring” of war. Merridale, who compiled exten-
sive oral histories from Soviet veterans of World War II and sur-
vivors of the purges, explains Soviet (and post-Soviet) indifference
to the concept of psychological trauma as the result of a cultural
and political preference for stoicism and silence. Societies, she em-
phasizes, cope with hardship in distinctive ways, and for many
people in the Soviet Union, silence (and censorship) seem to have
been effective. Merridale noted that most of her interviewees were

5 Derek Summerﬁeld, “The Social Experience of War and Some Issues for the Humanitarian
Field,” in Patrick J. Bracken and Celia Petty (éd.), Rethinking the Trauma of War (Londres, 1998),
23; Cindy A. Sousa et al., “Individual and Collective Dimensions of Resilience within Political
Violence,” Trauma, Violence & Abuse, XIV (2013), 244; Theresa Stichick Betancourt and Kashif
Tanveer Khan, “The Mental Health of Children Affected by Armed Conﬂict: Protective Pro-
cesses and Pathways to Resilience,” International Review of Psychiatry, XX ( Juin 2008), 325;
Jo Boyden, “Children under Fire: Challenging Assumptions about Children’s Resilience,»
Children, Youth and Environments, XIII (2003), 18–21. Studies of more recent wars highlight the
importance of “a strong bond between the primary caregiver and the child” and “the assumption
of responsibility for the protection and welfare of others” as protective factors. See Emmy E.
Werner, “Children and War: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery,” Development and Psychopathology,
XXIV (2012), 555; Sousa et al., “Individual and Collective,” 241–250; Betancourt and Khan,
“Mental Health,» 325.
Summerﬁeld, “Childhood, War, Refugeedom, and ‘Trauma’: Three Core Questions for
6
Mental Health Professionals,” Transcultural Psychiatry, XXXVII (2000), 425; Jeffrey C. Alexander,
“Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in idem et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
(Berkeley, 2004), 8.

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“neither incapacitated nor diminished by their choice of lifelong
silence” about hardship—whether it be famine, political repression,
or war. Encore, she expressed discomfort with the “basically coercive”
Stalinist practices and myths that encouraged survivors to suppress
their memories in favor of “focussing on work and family,” a strategy
. . . built around concealment.”
that produced “whole lives
Merridale doubts that these strategies were able to produce real re-
covery, asserting that the “hidden past” retains its full “power to in-
jure.” Describing the Soviet approach to trauma as “crude,” despite
its apparent, limited effectiveness, she sympathized with the surprise
of Western relief workers in Armenia after the earthquake of 1988,
who found that their Soviet counterparts had no understanding of,
or interest in, the “psychological consequences of disaster,” much less
the need for “western-style counselling.”7

Such responses reﬂect the common (Western) belief that “trau-
matic events” produce pathologically traumatic memories that re-
quire the intervention of a therapist for alleviation. Since 1980,
when posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was ﬁrst included in
the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, the classiﬁcation of trauma as an ob-
jective psychiatric disorder has shaped medical practice and human-
itarian efforts, as well as historical and cultural studies of war and
mémoire. En effet, as Summerﬁeld asserts, “because medicalized and
psychologized thinking are now so embedded in popular construc-
tion . . . accounts that do not use the language of trauma . . . sound as
if what children must endure during and after war is being played
down.”8

7 Alexander, “Toward a Theory,” 2–3; Summerﬁeld, “Childhood,» 422. Catherine Merridale,
“The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-Shock in Twentieth-Century Russia,” Journal of
Contemporary History, XXXV (2000), 55, 54, gives the date of the earthquake as 1983.
Summerﬁeld, “Childhood,» 428, 422; Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2000),
8
2–3; Alison Howell, “The Demise of PTSD: From Governing through Trauma to Governing
Resilience,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, XXXVII (2012), 215–218; Judith Herman, Trauma
and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York, 1997);
Selma Leydesdorff et al., “Introduction: Trauma and Life Stories,” in Kim Lacy Rogers, idem,
and Graham Davis (éd.), Trauma and Life Stories: International Approaches (Londres, 1999), 1–26.
The concept of trauma has been both inﬂuential and controversial in cultural and literary studies
of the Holocaust. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (éd.), Testimonies: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, 1992); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1995); Saul Friedlander (éd.), Probing the Limits of
Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Dominick LaCapra,
Representing the Holocaust: Histoire, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994).

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Yet psychologists and psychiatrists have raised “numerous”
challenges to the authority of the diagnosis of PTSD and to the
“special,” abnormal status of traumatic memory. For historians,
critiques that emphasize the social and cultural aspects of trauma
are particularly compelling because they approach survivors of
war as historically situated participants rather than as exemplars
of universal psychological principles. In this vein, psychiatrists
involved in treating individuals in non-Western war zones argue
that the “discourse on trauma” “has systematically sidelined the
social dimensions of suffering; instead it promotes a strongly indi-
vidualistic focus, presenting trauma as something that happens
inside individual minds.” Such an approach ignores the perspective
of war-affected populations, who may see their world, not their
minds, as damaged. Questioning the universality of PTSD, le
emphasis of this work is on the meanings that individuals attach,
or come to attach, to their own suffering. Such meaning shapes
their perceptions and memories of the war experience.9

From this perspective, the pervasive Stalinist narratives of
steadfastness and courage (stoikost’ i muzhestvo) are meaningful
not as true representations of the realities of war but as authentic
components of survivors’ understandings and memories of war.
En effet, because the tellers of war stories in the Soviet media often
experienced the horrors of war themselves, it can be difﬁcult to
separate cleanly the “individual” from the “ofﬁcial” discourse:
Individual memory informed ofﬁcial narratives, even as ofﬁcial
narratives worked to attach particular meanings to individual
experiences. “Individuals,” as Summerﬁeld notes, “will largely
organize what they feel, say, do, and expect to ﬁt prevailing
expectations and categories.” In the Soviet case, what was expected
was not “trauma” but “steadfastness” or “resilience.”10

9 Howell, “Demise of PTSD,” 219–220; Stephan Porter and Angela Birt, “Is Traumatic
Memory Special? A Comparison of Traumatic Memory Characteristics with Memory of Other
Emotional Life Experiences,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, XV (2001), S101–117; Patrick J.
Bracken, “Hidden Agendas: Deconstructing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in Bracken
and Petty (éd.), Rethinking the Trauma of War, 38.
Summerﬁeld, “The Invention of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Social Usefulness
10
of a Psychiatric Category,” British Medical Journal, CCCXXII ( Janvier 13, 2001), 96. The blending
of public and private memory in “ofﬁcial” narratives of the war separated war memory from the
memory of other traumas, notably political terror. For a contrasting view, see Merridale, Ivan’s
War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York, 2006), 373–380; idem, Night of Stone:
Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York, 2000), 328; Polly Jones, Myth, Mémoire,
Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953–70 (New Haven, 2013), 129–211.
Merridale emphasizes the repressive, rather than the productive, aspect of “ofﬁcial” war stories

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Resilience might be considered the ﬂipside of trauma, haut-
lighting the fact that exposure to trauma does not necessarily result
in PTSD. Recent studies suggest that posttraumatic resilience might
even be the norm. Resilient individuals “may experience at least
some form of transient stress reaction that will be mild to moderate
in degree and will not signiﬁcantly interfere with their ability to
continue functioning.” In the ﬁeld of trauma psychology, la clé
challenge has been to understand and account for individual varia-
tions in “human adaptation to traumatic stress.” The emphasis on
individuals’ capacity to adapt in extreme circumstances, like the
focus on damage to individual minds, cependant, runs the risk of
sidelining the “social dimensions of suffering.” Much of the psycho-
logical research about the role of “meaning making” in successful
adaptation to trauma understands both meaning and the process of
“making” it in individualistic terms, investigating, Par exemple, comment
individuals integrate stressful events into their “self-concepts” or
“personal biographical narratives.”11

Néanmoins, many of the theoretical approaches to under-
standing adaptation to trauma point out that factors promoting
resilience may operate at both the interpersonal and social levels.
Par exemple, a recent review of the social-science literature about
“resilience within political violence” contends that “resilience must
be understood within a framework that prioritizes the dynamic
interaction between individuals and their social and political envi-
ronments.” Such an approach begins with the recognition—familiar
to historians—that war “is a public and collective experience," et

and argues that the “traumas” of the war and of political repression produced similar state re-
sponses. In all cases, survivors were “denied” the “strategy” of “bearing witness.” Jones similarly
groups “1937” and “1941” together as Stalinist “traumas,” emphasizing that both could be inte-
grated into “optimistic” Stalinist narratives of progress and heroism.
11 Howell, “Demise of PTSD,» 219; Catherine Panter-Brick et al., “Trauma Memories,
Mental Health, and Resilience: A Prospective Study of Afghan Youth,” Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry, LVI (2015), 821; Brian K. Barber, “Annual Research Review: The Experience of
Youth with Political Conﬂict—Challenging Notions of Resilience and Encouraging Research
Reﬁnement,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, LIV (2013), 463–464; George A. Bonanno
and Anthony D. Mancini, “Beyond Resilience and PTSD: Mapping the Heterogeneity of Re-
sponses to Potential Trauma,” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, IV (2012),
77, 78; Charles C. Benight, “Understanding Human Adaptation to Traumatic Stress Exposure:
Beyond the Medical Model,” ibid., 1. Crystal L. Parc, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature:
An Integrative Review of Meaning Making and Its Effects on Adjustment to Stressful Life
Events,” Psychological Bulletin, CXXXVI (2010), 261. Much of this work deals not with the social
trauma of war but with bereavement and cancer.

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thus focuses on individual and collective efforts to make suffering
bearable and even meaningful.12

Dans ces études, meaning making remains central to the pro-
cess of coping with trauma, but the emphasis shifts from integrat-
ing the traumatic event into personal biographical narrative to
making the personal narrative meaningful by integrating individual
experience into larger narratives of collective and constructive
endeavor. This process is evident in a comparative ethnographic
study of Palestinian and Bosnian adolescents’ understandings of
their respective wars. In interviews, Bosnian teenagers, “not able
to make sense” of the violence that engulfed them, représentée
themselves as powerless and damaged. Par contre, the Palestinian
youths, who could draw from widely circulating themes of historic
and heroic communal struggle to endow their experiences with
signiﬁcance, described themselves as competent, essential actors
in signiﬁcant events. Barber’s contention that the critical variable
in Palestine was the availability of “existing explanatory informa-
tion sourced outside the self” suggests the importance of propa-
ganda as a component of the wartime context. During World
War II, the Soviet media provided a constant stream of narratives
that represented children as both recipients of excellent care and
vital ﬁghters on the home front. For some critics, such stories
might indicate a systematic denial of individual trauma and a
coercion of silence, but they are also interpretable as contributors
to a “meaning system” that promoted resilience.13

MOTHERS AND “SUBSTITUTE MOTHERS” AS SAVIORS No one knows
how many children died in the siege of Leningrad during World
War II. When the blockade enclosed the city in the fall of 1941,
only a small fraction of the city’s 400,000 children had been evac-
uated. Few of those left behind managed to escape during the ﬁrst
months of the blockade, when the daily ration for dependents fell
to starvation levels. Ofﬁcial ﬁgures provide only an approximation
of the number of deaths during the blockade and no information

Sousa et al., “Individual and Collective,» 236 (emphasis added); Summerﬁeld, “Social

12
Experience,» 22.
13 Brian K. Barber, “Making Sense and No Sense of War: Issues of Identity and Meaning in
Adolescents’ Experience with Political Conﬂict,” in idem (éd.), Adolescents and War: How Youth
Deal with Political Violence (New York, 2009), 290, 291.

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about the number of children who died. The winter of 1941/2
saw thousands of Leningraders die of starvation every day; the city
lacked the capacity to bury, let alone identify, all of them.14

As noted earlier, the Soviet state had a political interest in
making sure that information about the extent of starvation did
not reach wartime accounts of the blockade. It had to straddle a
ﬁne line between publicizing Nazi atrocities and suggesting that
the Soviet state had failed to protect children from the ravages of
war. Ainsi, alongside powerful representations of innocent victims,
the wartime Soviet media ran sentimental accounts of the extra-
ordinary acts, often performed by mothers, to rescue their children.
Fadeev used the report from the children’s home to illustrate the
“holy work of Leningrad women,” who possessed deep “knowl-
edge of the child’s psyche” and “voluntarily devoted their strength
to saving and raising the children.”15

Properly analyzed, such stories of mothers as saviors reveal—
albeit in a distinctively sentimental and nostalgic key—how the
presence or perception of “supportive, loving adults” and children’s
“ability to emotionally attach to supportive caregivers” can facili-
tate resilience and recovery from trauma. The assumption that war
traumatizes children allows us to take the stories of Soviet children’s
suffering seriously, despite their political purposes. De plus, concernant-
cent research about resilience can lead us to accept the optimistic
stories of Soviet women’s selﬂess parenting as the truth, even if
not the whole truth, regardless of their political purposes. Le
numerous child survivors who attributed their survival to loving
caregivers offer support for such an approach. A collection of poems
published in 1999 by the organization Young Participants in the
Defense of Leningrad included a chapter devoted to celebrating
“our mothers—holy blockade women.” A poem by Molchanov
in that volume begins with the well-known aphorism, “Everyone
who survived the blockade / Had a kind guardian angel," et
concludes with the sentiment, “But most frequently the angel was

14 Dmitri Pavlov (trans. John Clinton Adams), Leningrad 1941: The Blockade (Chicago, 1965),
48, does not specify the age range included in the category “children.” According to conservative
postwar estimates, the dead numbered about 670,000. Plus récemment, historians have suggested
that a death count of 1 million due to starvation is a reasonable approximation. See A. R..
Dzeniskevich, Leningrad v osade: Sbornik dokumentov o geroicheskoi oborone Leningrada v gody Velikoi
Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1944 (St. Petersburg, 1995), 279–280, 313–343.
15

Fadeev, “Deti.”

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| LI S A A . K IR S C H E NB A U M

530
mama— / Holy Leningrad mama / Giving her bread up mama, /
Immortal blockade mama.” The collection’s depiction of selﬂess
maternal care as the norm in blockaded Leningrad underscored
the importance of both received and perceived social support as
protective factors.16

In other post-Soviet reminiscences, teachers became surrogate
mothers, nursing orphans back to physical and psychological
health. Dans 2014, Aleshin wrote that at age thirteen, after his mother
died of starvation and his father died at the front, he “became a
ward of the state.” Decades later, he recalled Children’s Home
Non. 17 “with gratitude,” remembering that the children “lovingly”
called its director “mamasha.” The insistence among Soviet sur-
vivors that children in such care “do not remember the horrors
of war” so much as “the love with which the adults related to
us” conﬁrms Fadeev’s happy conclusion. They are also in line with
the wartime observations of Freud and Burlingham, who saw “no
signs of traumatic shock” in children who had survived the air raids:
“If these bombing incidents occur when small children are in the
care of either their own mothers or a familiar mother substitute,
they do not seem to be particularly affected by them.”17

The Soviet focus on mothers’ extraordinary devotion to their
children owed much to the Stalinist “resurrection of the family.”
The legislation of the mid-1930s that recriminalized abortion and
made divorce more difﬁcult and expensive to obtain coincided
with a new sentimentality toward mothers and children, by no
means eradicating Stalinist constructions of motherhood and child-
hood. Revolutionary conceptions of emancipated women and

16 Werner, “Children and War,» 555; Sousa et al., “Individual and Collective,» 242;
Benight, “Understanding,» 5. Iunye uchastniki oborony Leningrada, Blokadnoi pamiati stra-
nitsy: Poeticheskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, 1999), 59, 60 (emphasis in original). See also Viktor
Petrovich Ivanov, “Ia vyzhil blagodaria materi!” in Blokada Leningrada: Narodnaia kniga pamiati
(Moscow, 2014), 292–293; Marina Gulina, “‘The Child’s Past in the Adult’s Present’: Le
Trauma of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944),” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XCVI
(2015), 1315.
17 Elena Shul’gina, “Na risunkakh doshkoliat nashi vsegda bili nemtsev,” Smena, 19 Avril
1995. Evgenii Vasil’evich Aleshin, “My voevali samootverzhenno!” in Blokada Leningrada, 24;
Elena Shul’gina, “V dvadtsat’ let oni posedeli,” Smena, May 7, 1995. See also Galina
Nikandrovna Baburkina (Baikova), “Vse detdoma byli ochen’ khoroshie!” in Blokada Leningrada,
91. Freud and Burlingham, War and Children, 21. More recent studies support their ﬁndings.
See Ann S. Masten and Angela J. Narayan, “Child Development in the Context of Disaster,
War, and Terrorism: Pathways of Risk and Resilience,” Annual Review of Psychology, LXIII
(2012), 243–244.

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activist children quickly regained their prominence during the
war. Unlike Freud and Burlingham, who emphasized the “primitive
animal tie between mother and baby, which in some respects, still
makes one being out of the two,” Soviet writers in wartime tended
to highlight children’s conscious recognition of their mothers’ suffer-
ing and self-sacriﬁce. Such recognition allowed children (si
at the time or in retrospect) to see themselves less as dependents
than as junior members of a collective for which they, aussi, might
be called to ﬁght and sacriﬁce.18

“WE FOUGHT SELFLESSLY” The question of children’s agency is
particularly salient for the Soviet Union during World War II.
Unlike in the West, Soviet children at the time were not generally
viewed as “overwhelmingly vulnerable and dependent.” Even as
Fadeev praised women’s work on children’s behalf, he also praised
children for assuming adult responsibilities in “defending and sav-
ing the city.” In Leningrad, boys and girls “extinguished tens of
thousands of the incendiary bombs dropped from airplanes, put
out ﬁres in the city, stood watch on rooftops on freezing nights,
carried water from ice holes in the Neva, stood in line for bread,
and caught spies and saboteurs.” Soviet propaganda told children
that they were “heroic defenders” of the motherland. Despite the
terrible dangers that these children faced, recent studies of resil-
ience suggest that their activities may have provided them a means
of coping with, and making sense of, the traumas of war.19

The young defenders that Fadeev described in his wartime
reporting appear frequently in the stories that survivors later told.
In a contribution to the collection Deti goroda-geroia (Children of
the Hero City) published in 1974 and directed at children born
after the war, one such survivor, named Krestinskii, acknowledged
the romantic cliché of the hero child. Although he afﬁrmed that

18 Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life,
1917–1936 (New York, 1993), 296–336; Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia,
1890–1991 (New Haven, 2007), argues that in the 1930s, “attitudes to children became much
more consistent” and “all commitment to children’s autonomy was abandoned” (93), though she
also says that “initiative was still expected from [enfants] in some ways” (108). DeGraffenried,
Sacriﬁcing Childhood, takes Kelly’s emphasis on “consistent” attitudes as a point of departure,
arguing that the war constituted a “great rupture” in Soviet understandings of childhood (4). Le
contrast has clear heuristic value but may overstate the consistency and uniformity of Stalinist
norms. See Freud and Burlingham, War and Children, 32.
19 De La Ferrière, “Voice of the Innocent,» 119; Fadeev, “Deti.”

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| LI S A A . K IR S C H E NB A U M

children did, in fact, disarm bombs and catch spies, he did not claim
to do so himself. His primary intent was to show “today’s kids how
we really were: ragged, hungry, bereft of loved ones, and at the
same time not depressed, resourceful, desperate boys of the be-
sieged city.” His was a story of hardship but also resilience, told
in the high diction of a heroic struggle that “tested our character
and will, our honor and friendship, our human virtue.”20

Forty years later, dans 2014, the aforementioned Aleshin wrote
that in 1941, when he was ten years old, “very quickly we boys
and girls became accustomed to [the explosions], and stood watch
without fear on streets and rooftops. In attics we extinguished in-
cendiary bombs dumped from airplanes not individually, but in
batches.” He downplayed the danger, noting that the “bombs
were small and light and even a child could grab them with special
tongs and discard them in a safe spot or throw sand on them.”
Looking back on his childhood, he understood that the blockade
“had a powerful effect on people’s psyches and that the echoes of
these disorders still remain.” At the same time, he emphasized,
“We fought! We fought selﬂessly, especially as some of us at that
time had not yet come of age.”21

What should we make of such stories of resourceful, deter-
mined, resilient children? Hearing similar tales from adult veterans
in the 1990s, Merridale concluded, “Kitsch war poetry and ﬁlm
created a consensual world, a fantasy of survival and endurance.
It was a collective escape, a voluntary anesthetic, and the people
who remember it believe that it worked.” Alternatively, tel
stories can be read as evidence of survivors’ strategies for coping
with unimaginable experiences. The stories that survivors told
long after the war, even after the end of the Soviet Union, echoed
“kitsch war poetry and ﬁlm” because the afﬁrmation, “We fought
selﬂessly!” made their suffering meaningful, and because believing
that their suffering had a larger purpose helped—and continued to
help—them to survive.22

Adults’ recollections reﬂected Soviet ideas that granted chil-
dren individual agency and a signiﬁcant role in the larger collective

20 Gulina, “‘Child’s Past,’” 1323; UN. Krestinskii, “Gorod nevdaleke,” in Deti goroda-geroia
(Leningrad, 1974), 246. For the “high diction” of honor and sacriﬁce that ended with World
War I, see Paul Fussell The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975), 21–23.
21 Aleshin, “My voevali,» 19, 22.
22 Merridale, Night of Stone, 251.

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struggle. Ainsi, Par exemple, Bliumina, another contributor to the
2014 collection, who was eleven years old in 1941, recalled the
organization of “children’s brigades to help adults extinguish in-
cendiaries.” Wearing canvas gloves and helmets, children aged
ten and older grabbed the bombs, “spinning like tops, throwing
off a sea of sparks,” and tossed them out of the attic windows to
the paved courtyard, where they burned out. Ivanov—only four
years old when the blockade began—remembered joining the
adults who were hauling sand onto a roof to extinguish incen-
diaries “with [his] own child’s bucket.” Although he had only
enough strength to make one trip to the attic, he confessed himself
to be “immensely proud of having added my grain to the cause of
the city’s defense.” Goncharenko recounted that when her father,
who had volunteered for the home guard (opolchenie) returned to
his family on leave, he told her that the situation in the city was
worse than it was on the front: “ [In the city] . . . we didn’t know
when a bombardment would begin” because the sirens howled
continuously. In memory, Leningrad remained the “city-front” that
it had been in the wartime press, and children appeared, much as
they had in the wartime press, as active and vital contributors to
the war effort.23 Even if this shared narrative was a “fantasy,»
it was also a real resource that could help individuals to alleviate
trauma.

Many of the survivors who drew strength from the process of
writing themselves into the shared narrative of heroism also hinted
that they knew and felt the limits of the heroic story. Concluding
his account of the wartime fates of his neighborhood friends,
Goppe, for one, remembered, “At the beginning of the war we
said: ‘We are almost a platoon.’ Now I must sorrowfully say: Ce
platoon, like any real shock troops, came out of the battle with
enormous losses.” His representation of the boys as “shock troops,»
not passive victims, offered a way to ﬁnd some signiﬁcance in the
death of his neighbors, not so much anesthetizing pain as allowing
survivors to make narrative sense of persistent sorrow.24

23 Galina Evgen’evna Bliumina, “My pomogali vzroslym gasit zazhigalki,” in Blokada
Leningrada, 62; Iurii Il’ich Ivanov, “Ia vnes svoiu krupinku v delo osvobozhdeniia goroda,»
in ibid., 283; Larisa Ivanovna Goncharenko, “Otets, skazal, chto u nas strashnee, chem na
fronte,” in ibid., 148; DeGraffenried, Sacriﬁcing Childhood, 64–118.
24 G. Goppe, “Marshruty odnogo puteshestviia,” in Deti goroda-geroia, 88.

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| LI S A A . K IR S C H E NB A U M

In recent work on children and political violence, psychologists,
psychiatrists, and anthropologists have moved away from “deﬁcit
and trauma frameworks,” invoking resilience instead. De la même manière, un
number of historians have questioned whether children should “be
considered as passive victims” of war, without explicitly referring
to the parallel social-science literature. Other historians, cependant,
continue to use the language of trauma, even as they note the
complex ways in which children adapt to, and cope with, conﬂict.
De plus, historians particularly sensitive to the mediated nature
of sources about children tend to interpret stories of children’s re-
silience and political activism as serving adult political purposes,
thereby dismissing any diminution of trauma as propaganda, if not
dangerous self-deception.25

The concept of resilience offers an alternative approach: Adult
wartime memories about childhood clothed in Soviet clichés are
not necessarily suspect in every respect. Taken seriously, ces
stories of maternal sacriﬁce and children’s “steadfastness and cour-
age” are signiﬁcant components of child survivors’ understandings
and memories of the war, even if they are not fully accurate ac-
counts of wartime experiences. Historians, à son tour, can advance
understandings of resilience by calling attention to its political, donc-
cial, and cultural dimensions, placing individual stories in their
proper context and highlighting the centrality of shared narratives
in the process of endowing the traumas of war with meaning.26
Enfin, a focus on resilience need not entail a neglect of suf-
fering and trauma so much as an appreciation of the complexities
of children’s functioning in wartime. Certainly World War II often
brought an abrupt, premature, and painful end to childhood—
“happy” as it always was in the Stalinist lexicon. More than seventy
years after the war began, Grigor’eva recalled the war as the moment
when she and her peers stopped playing with toys: “Childhood
terminé, we started to grow up fast and before long came a difﬁcult,

25 Célia Keren, “Spanish Refugee Children in France, 1939: An Insight into Their Experiences,
Opinions and Culture,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, LXXXIX (2012), 281; Olga Kucherenko, Little
Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941–1945 (New York, 2011), 7–8, 247–248, 250; de La
Ferrière, “Voice of the Innocent,» 118; Gelinada Grinchenko, “‘And Now Imagine Her or Him as
a Slave, a Pitiful Slave with No Rights’: Child Forced Labourers in the Culture of Remembrance of
the USSR and Post-Soviet Ukraine,” European Review of History, II (2015), 389–396.
26 Barber, “Annual Research Review,» 461. Gulina, “‘Child’s Past,’” 1312, calls attention to
the importance of “faith in victory” but designates it an “inner,” not an external cultural resource.

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| 535

S O V I E T C HI L D RE N I N W O R L D W A R II
orphaned young adulthood (iunost’).” During the famine winter, her
neighbor “sometimes joked that I looked like a wizened little old
lady.” In retrospect, cependant, Grigor’eva emphasized not only her
losses but also her heavy responsibilities. As her mother weakened,
twelve-year-old Zinaida took over the physically demanding task of
queuing for the family’s bread ration: “I had to hold on in order to
calm mama and sustain my brother Gena, who had turned six.”27

War exposed Soviet children to unimaginable physical and
psychological risks. Fadeev’s catalog of orphaned, isolated pre-
schoolers who had seemingly lost the ability to speak stands as
moving testimony to children’s need for protection from the
ravages of war. Often unwilling to make children’s safety a prior-
ville, the Soviet state encouraged children to participate in such
“adult” duties as extinguishing incendiary bombs or waiting in
bread lines. Such activities no doubt added to the dangers, mais ils
might also have been adaptive. The state provided a framework for
understanding children as essential to a great cause, allowing some
enfants (and the adults that they became) to conceive of them-
selves not as passive victims but as active citizens defending the
motherland and helping their loved ones. Such stories did not
necessarily anesthetize pain. As one survivor, who at the age of
eight had watched her mother die and who had acquired the
responsibility of procuring bread for her family, asserted, “Not
one of us, even today, after sixty years, can speak calmly about
the blockade; we all cry.” Documenting both “courage and suffer-
ing” (muzhestvo i stradaniia), child survivors’ reminiscences under-
score children’s potential strength and competence, as well as war’s
enormous destructive force.28

27 Zinaida Fedorvna Grigor’eva, “Krys my boialis’ bol’she, chem trupov!” in Blokada
Leningrada, 161, 163.
28 Valentina Vasil’evna Griaznova, “Tol’ko trupy i my s mamoi!” in ibid., 171; Leonid
Ignat’evich Vdovichenko, “My uvideli troikh nastoiashchikh nemtsev v voennoi forme,” in
ibid., 132.

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