Claire McCallum | University of Exeter (original) (raw)

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Papers by Claire McCallum

Revolutionary Russia, 2020

Between 5 November 1957 and 16 March 1958, the new Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow (Manezh) hos... more Between 5 November 1957 and 16 March 1958, the new Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow (Manezh) hosted the All-Union Exhibition dedicated to the Great October Socialist Revolution. Coming as it did just over a year after Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, this hugely significant exhibition offers a unique lens through which to examine the dynamics of early Destalinization and the artistic conceptualization of the October Revolution in this new post-Stalinist landscape. This article demonstrates that while the general appeals for greater party spirit in art were highly influential in shaping how the Revolution and Civil War were presented thematically, the period was impervious to concurrent calls for artists to grapple with some of the more conflicted aspects of the human condition, leading to depictions of these events that were romantic and often sentimental in tone. This was in stark contrast to works displayed that dealt with the Great Patriotic War, which at last started to address the far more problematic and conflicting legacies of victory in 1945. Consequently, at the All-Union Exhibition, visitors were presented with two very different visions of the Soviet Union’s foundational experiences, and at the root of this was the instability unleashed by Destalinization.

Social History, 2019

interesting avenue for future research. Reid’s methodological focus on the written products of th... more interesting avenue for future research. Reid’s methodological focus on the written products of the labour conflict brings him into close contact with a lot of political rhetoric and trades union jargon. The translation of this difficult material can lead to some unfortunate English (a deal is said to ‘bring water to the mill of class collaboration’ for instance: 255). Gallicisms also leak into the prose, impeding its flow (‘enterprise’ is preferred over ‘business’, workers engage in ‘contestation’, ‘numbers’ of a journal are produced rather than ‘issues’ etc.). These may seem like small issues of translation, but they have a larger impact on Reid’s aim of transmitting the vibrancy and relevancy of the Lip struggle to a new generation of activists. Indeed, in providing us with such a comprehensive history of the Lip experiment, Reid is as much demonstrating how the events of the ’68 years have passed into history as they are an example for activism on the left today.

The Slavonic and East European Review, 2015

Drawing on images reproduced in both professional and popular publications, this article charts t... more Drawing on images reproduced in both professional and popular publications, this article charts the changing representation of the war-damaged man in Soviet visual culture from the outbreak of war in 1941 until the reinstatement of Victory Day as a public holiday in 1965. Through such images it is shown that art followed a very different trajectory than literature or film when it came to dealing with such problematic aspects of the war experience, a disjunction that is attributed to the inherent nature of the various cultural genres. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the most dramatic shift in the depiction of the damaged man came — not in the Thaw as we might expect — but in the mid 1960s as part of a wider reassessment of the War and its legacy in Soviet visual culture.

Journal of Contemporary History, Mar 29, 2012

Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad : Soldiers to Civilians, 2015

British Journal for Military History, 2020

The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union, Dec 1, 2017

The Handbook of European Communication History

Revolutionary Russia, 2013

Journal of Contemporary History, 2012

Following the end of the Great Patriotic War, an estimated twenty-five million people were left h... more Following the end of the Great Patriotic War, an estimated twenty-five million people were left homeless and countless more were left dealing with the realities of single-parenthood, fatherlessness and bereavement. This article will chart the attempts to both articulate and obfuscate the impact of this loss on the family in contemporary visual culture, focussing primarily on the conceptualisation of the Soviet soldier as a father. It will argue that the war represented a fundamental shift in the imagining and portrayal of fatherhood: the use of the family as a motivational tool in fighting against the Fascists had intrinsically tied masculinity to paternity and patriotism, and this new focus on the Soviet man as a family man would be carried into the post-war period. Running parallel to the increased emphasis on the Soviet male in the domestic space, it will also be shown that the demographic reality of the postwar family was articulated in numerous works of the period, through the representation of the single mother with her children and the introduction into the home of the ultimate surrogate father, Stalin himself. The degree of control which the Soviet state exercised over cultural production--particularly during the years of Stalinism--is well-known and this has led to an acceptance that Soviet culture therefore offered a monochrome and uniform vision of Soviet identity and experience. The representation of the domestic space in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War challenges this perception. As the material for this research has been gathered from images found in the popular press, the fact that these works were not only being created but were then being circulated to a mass audience requires us to reconsider our totalising perceptions of Soviet cultural production, and demands a far more nuanced analysis than seeing Socialist Realism, even under Stalin, as being completely devoid of social reality.