Colloquium: Emotional Regimes and Refuges in the Great Patriotic War – The Case of Red Army Soldiers

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Matthew Lenoe, University of Rochester

Emotional Regimes and Refuges in the Great Patriotic War – The Case of Red Army Soldiers

The question of Soviet soldiers’ morale, readiness to fight and motivations in 1941-1942, the years of the great defeats, remains a vexed one. Soldiers’ letters and diaries express a complex range of moods, from “boldness and courage” (bodrost’ i smelost’) to despair. This talk uses William Reddy’s theory of the history of emotions, in which individuals work on themselves to manage their feelings, to elucidate the seeming paradoxes of Red Army soldiers’ affects and actions.

Matthew Lenoe received his Ph.D. from University of Chicago in 1997, studying with Sheila Fitzpatrick, and is now associate professor of history at University of Rochester. He is the author of Closer to the Masses, on early Soviet journalism and the origins of Stalinist culture, and The Kirov Murder and Soviet History, which won the 2011 Zelnick Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. At present Lenoe is writing a book on the daily experiences and emotions of Red Army soldiers in 1941-1942, using ego sources from the time – diaries, letters, and secret morale reports, to name three.