Listening to the Soviet Union’s “Silent” Majority: The Evasion of Labor Obligations on the Home Front, 1941–45

Russian Review. 2023. Vol. 82. No. 2. P. 277–291.

Khlevniuk O. V.

Large-scale evasion of the requirements of the law is a substantial part of the interaction between citizen and state under authoritarian regimes. Forced to exist within a coordinate grid established against their will, people routinely play games with the state with the goal of minimizing the hardships of life. Tactics of covert resistance are not necessarily politically motivated by conscious opposition to the regime. Instead, these are a matter of accommodation and survival. It is precisely these popular illegalities that, paradoxically, do not so much weaken a system intended to full implementation of its instructions, but instead strengthen it to a certain degree.

Keywords: Великая Отечественная война, labour relationship, труд на войне, the Great Patriotic War (the 1941–1945 War)

Publication based on the results of: Soviet Social, Political and Cultural Practices in Transnational Context (2022)