‘That Was How We Lived’: Remembering Childhood and Adolescence in Kursk Oblast during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1943

What is it about?

This article examines how noncombatants who lived in the Central Black Earth Region during the Soviet-German War (1941-45) remembered their experience of combat and Axis occupation seventy years after the last shots were fired. Based on interviews with over a dozen individuals who were children during the war, this study finds that despite an overwhelming and annually celebrated official narrative of the war that emphasizes resolute leadership of the Communist Party, exceptional military competence and bravery, and selfless devotion of the Soviet population to the victory over the Axis coalition and the liberation of Europe from fascism, the interviewees restrict the narration of their experience of the same war to their own horizon of observation. Oral narrative theorists argue that people tend to narrate past experience in such a manner in order to ascribe meaning to their past at a later point in life. With a focus on themes common to all the interviewees (family, childhood, and labor), this essay stresses the fact that while modern warfare is a national (or international) phenomenon, it is always experienced locally by combatants and noncombatants alike. Such an examination highlights the complexity of the experience of warfare and how this complexity is demonstrated in how personal memory of the event diverges from official memory.

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