Kul'turnost' Meets Kultur: Lyusya’s Testimony on Russian‐German Sexual Relations in Occupied Smolensk

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines German racial colonization in the occupied city of Smolensk in 1941–43 as a coerced but no less profound Nazi German‐Soviet Russian cross‐cultural encounter. Perhaps no other aspect of it was as fraught and taboo as the extensive sexual relationships between German men and Russian women. Liudmila Madziuk, known as Lyusya, was a member of the Komsomol underground whose testimony assumes special significance because of her political work among German soldiers. Her extraordinary accounts centered on the key Stalin‐era concept of kul'turnost' (culturedness), which in her hands competed with the ideological‐cultural claim to domination in the racialized Nazi version of the German key concept of Kultur. Her accounts are the kind of qualitative, first‐person sources that have been lacking as historians grapple with issues of sexuality, sexual barter, prostitution, rampant sexual violence, and the clash of the German and Soviet gender orders on the Eastern front. Lyusya and other young women of the 1930s generation glossed kul'turnost' in light of their own youthful, socialist, and feminist ambitions, implicitly counterposing it to the barbaric, backward‐looking brutality of Kultur. But what they assumed to be the bedrock of the communist world‐view and Soviet culturedness was shifting rapidly beneath their feet.