The Making of a Dominant Myth: The Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity

W orld War II was a watershed in the articulation of political and ethnonational identities within the Soviet polity. The myth of the war became a point of departure in the self-identity and conduct of large segments of the population and the body politic, including those whose identity was allegedly shaped by the profound transformations of the Civil War, collectivization and industrialization. The experience of the war became a yardstick by which identity, meritocracy and status were measured throughout the Soviet polity, superimposing a new set of tropes onto prewar categories. Regardless of the general awareness of the mythical place that the war had come to occupy in the public and private spheres of Soviet society, the prevalent interpretation of the impact of the experience of the World War II on Soviet society and politics has been to marginalize it either as merely a continuation or as a temporal disruption of prewar structured policies. The primary voices in the Soviet historiographical discourse have argued for the primacy of socioeconomic structures and have subscribed to the view that the experiences of the 1920s and early 1930s constituted the formative and enduring moments in the Soviet polity.' Within the di-