Summary:

This article examines a propaganda campaign to mobilize “non-Russians” into the Soviet war effort and highlight their participation through the translation of Soviet war aims into national traditions and idioms. It begins with a look at the crisis situation that had developed in 1942, with an influx of soldiers who did not speak Russian into the army. Unable to understand commands or the war’s aims, many viewed these soldiers as liabilities and rates of desertion and self-inflicted wounds were found to be higher among “non-Russians.” This led to serious action on the part of the army’s Political Department, which crafted special propaganda to both explain the war’s goals to “non-Russians” and to clean up their image among “Russians.” This propaganda campaign found keen expression in a series of letters that were first published in local and all-union press and later in a collected volume, Nakaz Naroda (The People’s Instructions). The author argues that these nearly symmetrical texts utilized statistics, folk sayings, ethnic stereotypes, a Soviet reading of the past as well as national epic heroes to indigenize the war effort and create connections across space, time, and ethnic groups. These tropes were ultimately considered quite successful, and by the summer of 1943, “non-Russians” had ceased to be an issue. The article concludes with an explication of how shifts in propaganda made aspects of these texts potentially dangerous by the war’s end.