What did it mean to be a man after the Great Patriotic War and how was this image represented in visual culture? Claire McCallum interprets paintings and photographs (mostly published in Ogonek and Iskusstvo) for representations of the Soviet Man. Aware of her sources’ pitfalls, she nevertheless hopes to reach a better understanding of the real-life experiences of men in the Soviet Union from the 1940s to 1960s. The notion of the thaw as an era looms large in her analysis of the reconfiguration of the Soviet Man, an analysis that questions changes and traditions, beginnings and endings. Her book speaks to many topics recent studies have raised about the impact and legacy of World War II, of the Thaw as an era of leisure and liberalism, as well as of the Brezhnev era as an era of stagnation or normalization. McCallum argues against a monolithic understanding of the Soviet Man, claiming that the characteristics and images of Soviet men changed over time. While after 1917 the Soviet Man was idolized first and foremost as a (heroic) worker, for the years following 1945 McCallum identifies two main representations of the Soviet Man: the (heroic) soldier and—surprisingly—the father. It is these two images she follows closely in her five chapters that deal with surviving the war, being disabled by the war, having died during the war, coming home from the war, and finally being a father after the war. While right after 1945 the soldier seemed to be the recurrent image, the image of the father gained in importance after 1953, when, at the same time, the image of the soldier gradually changed from heroic soldier to wounded veteran. Throughout the book, McCallum identifies the year 1965 as the turning point for more realistic depictions of wounded and disabled soldiers, which she attributes to the introduction of May 9 as public holiday and the accompanying rising importance of memory of the Second World War.

McCallum identifies the experience of war as the most decisive experience in terms of how Soviet men were perceived and understood, which is why the soldier receives more attention than the father (Chapters 1–3). The soldier was depicted as heroic, militarized, and fighting until the outbreak of the war, but this picture changed after 1945. In visual culture there is almost no depiction of violence and death in World War II. What was portrayed was male camaraderie, homosociality, and male bodies stripped of any sexuality whatsoever. The image of the heroic man was transferred to the image of the heroic worker, another archetype of male representation, particularly during the Thaw, as McCallum claims, yet one which she unfortunately does not explore, as she confines her analysis to “the two main and interrelated male identities” (197)—soldier and father. Being a wounded and disabled war veteran was a reality for the majority of soldiers, however, a reality that was almost never represented in visual arts or photography. As McCallum points out, this gap between reality and its depiction in art is more than just curious considering that the disabled male body was a recurrent theme in literature and cinema. In contrast to other scholars, McCallum claims that grief was depicted in Soviet post-war visual culture, however, in decidedly gendered ways. Male grief is rarely seen; it seems to be an entirely female preoccupation.

The second part of the book (Chapters 4 and 5) focuses on the role of the father. Fathers gained importance in pictorial representations of families and homecoming since 1945 and were thus represented as positive role models. Interestingly, McCallum demonstrates that even though fathers were absent in most of the pictures of homecoming she looked at, their roles as fathers were nevertheless emphasized in visual representations in which wives and children anxiously waited for them to return home. Although McCallum questions the year 1953 as the “great watershed moment” (9), this year remains crucial in her reading of this period: only after the father-figure Stalin had died was there space for understanding men as fathers of their families, liberated from competing with Stalin as the father of the nation. In interpreting fatherhood, McCallum to a certain extent conflates the pictorial representation of fathers and their actual role in the household, claiming a much greater responsibility for men in households since 1950s, a claim that is derived from her reading of visual representations. Nevertheless, the ideological turn in itself is striking, particularly when compared with representations of men in the west, which would take another fifteen to twenty years for the radical new male fate: that of the father.