Testing the Silence: Trauma and Military Psychiatry in Soviet Russia and Ukraine During and After World War II

Dale, R

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-84663-3_3

Testing the Silence: Trauma and Military Psychiatry in Soviet Russia and Ukraine During and After World War II

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Robert Dale ORCiD

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Abstract

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. This chapter calls for a re-examination of how historians understand war-related trauma in the Red Army during and after World War II. Dale argues that Soviet war trauma was neither completely off limits nor shrouded in silence. The chapter analyzes three main bodies of evidence: published medical and psychiatric research, combatants’ vernacular expressions of trauma in letters and memoirs, and archival files which reveal how veterans were treated by medical institutions. The chapter suggests that Soviet society possessed a variety of understandings of how wartime service could be traumatic, and a language of trauma which circulated beyond professional psychiatrists. If we look beyond the official rhetoric during and after the war, trauma found regular and repeated expression, which penetrated the silence supposedly woven around it.