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« Pisatel´skaia rota » : K istorii stalinizma voennogo vremeni
In July 1941, about 100 writers joined the People’s Militia of Moscow. This article is devoted to the history of the formation and destruction of the “writers’ company” of the 8th division of the People’s Militia. This story represents a very revealing page in the social history of Soviet literature. In this article I am trying to answer the questions: why were these writers “delegated” to the people’s militia by the leadership of the Union of Soviet Writers? What were their own motives for joining the militia? Why were there so many “suspicious” among them by the standards of the Stalinist regime? The history of the “writers’ company” intertwined the history of the mechanism of mobilizing society during the World War II with the history of repressions. This is another page in the history of wartime Stalinism, which still remains very fragmentarily studied.