Women's participation in combat during World War II, as well as the war's calamitous impact on the male population, both served to disrupt the long-standing association between military service and Soviet masculinity. In this innovative book, Erica L. Fraser describes how postwar leaders sought to reestablish the social and cultural salience of military masculinity, which they saw as vital to reconstruction and Cold War victory. This effort entailed excluding women from the military, but also inculcating martial attitudes and disciplined behavior in a sometimes reluctant new generation of men.

Fraser argues that military masculinity was regenerated through a variety of policies, methods, and narratives during the twenty years following war, and each chapter of her book focuses on a specific aspect of this process. Part I draws on archival and published materials to examine military institutions. Chapter 1 describes conversations at the Ministry of Defense and Komsomol about conscription, avoidance, and malingering, and it highlights official concerns about the military fitness and zeal of young men. Chapter 2 focuses on the search for appropriate male role models for boys at the Suvorov officer training academies and the Voluntary Society for Cooperation with the Army, the Air Force and the Navy (DOSAAF), a civil defense organization. Fraser concludes that the military could not resuscitate its version of masculinity unaided; a broader cultural effort was needed, which forms the subject of the second part of the book. Chapter 3 examines cartoons from the satiric journal Krokodil, which linked masculinity with the Cold War by depicting enemies as feminized, homosexual, or violent; such images featured General Francisco Franco in drag, for example, or Uncle Sam menacing Marianne, the symbol of France. In Chapter 4, Fraser analyzes the memoirs of nuclear physicists, and provides a nuanced analysis of their relationship to military masculinity. These scientists portrayed themselves in contradictory terms as victims of the state, yet also as members of an exclusive brotherhood of heroic cold warriors. The final chapter describes the publicity campaigns surrounding the first cosmonauts of the 1960s, which Frasers sees as the culminating moment in the regeneration of military masculinity. The five male cosmonauts, especially Yuri Gagarin, were presented as avatars of disciplined, moral, and military masculinity; incidences of drinking and marital infidelity were hushed up. The image of Valentina Tereshkova, the only woman in the group, was quite different: she always appeared in public wearing a dress rather than a uniform or flight suit, and her expertise was downplayed.

Fraser weaves together seemingly disparate topics and sources with great creativity. She is transparent about the strengths and limitations of the different kinds of sources she uses, reflecting, for example, on the silences of official archives and on the methodological complications of memoirs. She also demonstrates the value of a relational conception of masculinity. Throughout the book, she emphasizes the ways in which military masculinity was defined in opposition to femininity and with disregard to women's responsibilities and accomplishments. For these reasons, this book would be useful for students as a model of both thoughtful source interpretation and thorough gender analysis.

Fraser has formulated her arguments in response to the relevant scholarship on gender, the military, and post-Stalinist Soviet society. She breaks new ground by focusing on Soviet masculinity in the postwar years, which has only recently begun to receive attention from scholars such as Claire E. McCallum and Marko Dumančić. Because this topic is so understudied, Fraser frequently flags issues that require further research: what was the impact on Soviet military masculinity of the widespread rape committed against German women? How did the Jewish origins of many of the nuclear physicists shape their identities? How and why did the Soviet Union continue to exclude women from combat duties, despite demographic challenges?

The presence of so many intriguing and unanswered questions makes this book thought-provoking and potentially generative of future scholarship. It will fascinate students and scholars concerned with postwar Soviet society and the gendered dimensions of the Cold War.