Soviet Second World War Veterans

As Soviet veterans returned from World War II, they were portrayed as enthusiastic supporters of Stalin's state who quickly reintegrated into civilian labor as exemplary workers helping rebuild the country. The Soviet state cared 'like no other' for the defenders of the motherland who were surrounded by the 'love, care and attention of the whole people.' Much of this discourse was window dressing. There were no across-the-board privileges for war veterans after 1945, although many officials treated them with more respect than other categories of citizens. By 1948, only severely disabled veterans received some aid, which was carefully calibrated to force as many of them to work as possible. At the same time, the postwar repression wave also victimized veterans, in particular repatriated POW. It was only in the 1970s that real gains in veterans' benefits were made – at a time when many of the survivors of the war were already dead.

The institutionalization of veterans as a status group in 1978 was one of the biggest victories of the organized Soviet veterans' movement. This movement had a slow start, despite many attempts to set up organizations ever since the war: the regime consistently forbade such organizations as unnecessary and potentially 'reactionary' for more than a decade. Only in 1956 was a Soviet Committee of War Veterans organized, which was to constitute a front organization to infiltrate the World Veterans Federation. Soon, however, the veterans drafted to run this front organization transformed it into a genuine veteran’s organization, which constantly broke the prohibition to organize on a local level, and which became a major lobbying organization within the Soviet political structure.