Liberation and Containment: Re-visualising the Eugenic and Evolutionary Ideal of the Fizkul'turnitsa in 1944

Abstract

In July 1944 cross-country races and parades of physical culturists were prominently used to celebrate Soviet liberation from German occupation. While journalistic accounts stressed the manly health and vigour of the victorious Red Army, press photographs in Pravda and Red Sport, and Aleksandr Deneika's monumental painting ‘Liberation’, emphasised images of the young female physical culturist. This essay explores what a contextualised analysis of these images may have to tell historians about the connections between women, physical culture and liberation being projected. The argument suggests that, on one level, the images straightforwardly symbolised and celebrated the liberation of the Soviet ‘Motherland’. On another, more complex level, the images represented a particularly nuanced notion of constricted liberation for Soviet women deriving from 1920s eugenic and evolutionary discourse, inscribed into the contemporary imperative for engagement with physical culture as a necessary stage of healthful body discipline on the path to hygienic and successful motherhood.

Keywords:

• Deineka
• eugenics
• evolution
• gender
• physical culture
• Soviet

Notes

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 2. Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, 262–4; ‘Za nedel’ia. Na frontakh Otechestvennoi voiny’, Krasnyi Sport 29 (18 July 1944), 1.

 3. O'Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 83.

 4. ‘Za dal'neishii rost fizkul'tury’, Krasnyi Sport 29 (18 July 1944); 1; A. Vit, ‘Vsesoiuznyi den’ fizkul'turnika’, Pravda, 17 July 1944, 4; Zakharov, ‘Mass Celebrations in a Totalitarian System’, 217.

 5. ‘Uchites’ u frontovnikov', Krasnyi Sport 28 (11 July 1944), 1.

 6. Soviet War News 912 (18 July 1944), 4; O'Mahony, Sport in the USSR, 125–8, 145–9; Riordan, ‘The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Sporting Women’, 193.

 7. Brooks, ‘Pravda Goes to War’, 21; Cottam, ‘Soviet Women in World War II’, 345–8.

 8. Krasnyi Sport, 18 July 1944, 1.

 9. Kiaer, ‘Was Socialist Realism Forced Labour?’, 321–45; Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 208.

10. ‘Velikaia tema iskusstva’, Literatura i Iskusstvo 8 (19 Feb. 1944), 1.

11. Sinfield, Soviet Sport, 19; ‘Vtoroi v sovetskom soiuze’, Krasnyi Sport 26 (27 June 1944), 1; Krasnyi Sport 28 (11 July 1944), 1; ‘Shire razmakh massovoi fizkul'tur’, Krasnyi Sport 32 (8 Aug. 1944), 1; ‘V chet’ osvobozhdennia Sovetskoi Ukrainy. Fizkul'turnye prazdniki v gorodakh SSSR’, Krasnyi Sport 42 (17 Oct. 1944), 1.

12. V. Varikov, ‘Zadacha khudozhnikov’, Literatura i Iskusstvo, 14 March 1943, 3; B. Ioganson, ‘Bor'ba za kartinu’, Literatura i iskusstvo 8 (19 Feb. 1944), 2.

13. Available online at http://bobart.org/docent/deineka-mother.jpg; http://soviethistory.org/images/Large/1934/athlete.jpg; http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3105/2789636022_ fcb0d1a9c3.jpg; http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/werckmeister/April_ 6_1999/ParadeKirov.jpg; and http://www.uoregon.edu/∼kimball/images/METRO/M.ArP.PRe.mtr.chd.JPG.

14. V. Mukhina, ‘Tema i obraz v monumental'noi skul'pture’, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 2 (14 Nov. 1944), 2.

15. B. Ioganson, ‘O zhivopisi’, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 22 (24 May 1946), 2; V.Gaposhkin, ‘Zhivopissty Moskva i Leningrada’, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, 4 (25 Jan. 1946), 2; M. Orlova, ‘Risunok, graviiora, akvarel”, Sovetskoe iskusstvo 13 (22 March 1946), 2.

16. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 37 (14 Sept. 1945), 1; Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 23 (31 May 1946), 1.

17. Simpson, ‘On the Margins of Discourse?’.

18. Mukhina, ‘Tema i obraz’; A. Mizin, ‘Printsipy monumental'noi zhivopsi, zametki khudozhnika’, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 37 (14 Sept. 1945), 3.

19. Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka, vol. 1, 225, fig. 151; Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (al'bom), 13.

20. Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka, vol. 1, 224, fig. 150; Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (al'bom), plate 69.

21. Hubbs, Mother Russia; ‘Pobeda sotsialisticheskogo realizma’, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 1 (5 Jan. 1941), 1; A. Tikhomirov, ‘Master peizazha vystavka kartin G. Shegelia’, Literatura i Iskusstvo 18 (1 May 1943), 4.

22. Available online at http://greyfalcon.us/pictures/Motherussia.jpg.

23. Snopkov et al., Zhenshchiny v russkom placate, 60.

24. ‘K zhenshchinam vsego mira!’ Sovetskoe Iskusstvo 36 (11 Sept. 1941), 1; ‘Zhenshchiny vsego mira – na bor'bu protiv fashizm’, ibid.; Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman, 158.

25. Snopkov et al., Zhenshchiny v russkom placate, 10.

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33. Adams, ‘Eugenics as a Social Medicine’, 200–1, 207–8; Adams, ‘Eugenics in Russia’; Joravsky, ‘Soviet Marxism and Biology before Lysenko’; Iudin, Evgenika; Adams, ‘The Politics of Human Heredity’, 880; Simpson, ‘The Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism’; Overy, ‘Eugenics, Sex and the State’; Green, ‘Veins of Resemblance’; Allen, ‘Eugenics and American Social History’.

34. Semashko, Nauka o zdorov'e, 53–4.

35. Adams, ‘Eugenics as a Social Medicine’, 218–19; Adams, ‘Eugenics in Russia’, 191, 196–7; Joravsky, ‘Soviet Marxism and Biology before Lysenko’, 103.

36. G.S. Kostiuk cited in Bauer, The New Man, 145; ibid., 137–46.

37. Zhdanov, ‘Soviet Literature. The Richest in Ideas’.

38. Riordan, ‘The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Sporting Women’, 187.

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40. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 50; Reich, The Sexual Revolution, 157, 170, 193–7, 206, 217–18, 261–7; Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement, 369, 387; Halle, Woman in Soviet Russia, 139–40; Naiman, Sex in Public, 55, 111, 130; Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 106–10; Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene, 1–48; Adams, ‘Eugenics in Russia’, 158; Semashko, ‘Friedrich Erismann’, 6; Bernstein, ‘Envisioning Health’, 193; Kollontai, Rabotnitsa za god revoliutsii, 28; Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement, 258, 260–4.

41. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, 191; Batkis, ‘Soderzhanie i metody’, 146–8; Tsetkin, Vospominaniia o Vladimire Iliche Lenine, 85; Podvoiskii, Rabotnitsa i fizicheskaia kul'tura, 3; Semashko, Puti razvitiia sovetskii fizkul'tury, 57; N. Semashko, ‘Polovoe vospitanie i zdorov'e’, Komsomolskaia Pravda, 15 Aug. 1925, 5; Bekhterev, Znachenie polovogo vlecheniia v zhiznedeiatel'nosti organizma, 16–17; Lunacharskii, O byte, 21–2, 37; Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society, 98; Simpson, ‘Bolshevism and Sexual Revolution’.

42. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–69, 187; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, 77–80, 106, 116, 120–4, 127, 145; Naiman, ‘Historectomies’, 260–1; Naiman, ‘Of Crime, Utopia and Repressive Complements’; Clark, The Photograph, 20; Slater, ‘Photography and Modern Utopia’, 222.

43. Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b), ‘O mezhdunarodnom zhenskom dne – 8 Marta’, Pravda, 5 March 1944, 1; Professor I. Trainin, ‘The Stalin Constitution: II The Soviet Woman’, Soviet War News 493 (19 Feb. 1943), 3.

44. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 152–6.

45. Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, 158; Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity, 241; ‘Zamechatel'noe soveshchanie’, Pravda, 10 May 1936, 1; ‘Pered soveshchaniem zhen inzhinero-tekhnicheskikh rabotnikov tiazheloi promyshlennosti’, ibid.; Pravda, 11 May 1936, 1–3.

46. Cullerne Bown, Art Under Stalin, 115–16; Pravda, 13 June 1937, 1; O'Mahony, ‘Archaeological Fantasises’.

47. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 156–63.

48. Medynsky, ‘Schools and Education in the USSR’, 287, 291; Soviet Youth News Service 5 (Oct. 1943), 2; ‘A State Act of Outstanding Political Significance. New Soviet Maternity and Child Welfare Charter’, Soviet War News 905 (11 July 1944), 8; ‘July’, in Soviet Calendar 1917–1947; Nakachi, ‘K.S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law’.