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A Personal Banner

This chapter provides an ethnography of soldiers' clothing and explores the meaning of the uniform's iconography. In the summer and fall of 1941, hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers and commanders surrendered to the enemy or abandoned their uniforms while fleeing the battlefield. The army was on the verge of disintegrating, but many soldiers continued to believe in their duty to fight on. For those soldiers, the uniform was like a personal banner. This rhetoric was closely associated with a major change in style in 1943, when the army abandoned the uniform that so many soldiers had themselves cast-off or worn into German captivity, introducing a “new-old” uniform that reproduced late tsarist styles. Pogony (shoulder boards), a key old regime symbol, were recast as a point of pride. Along with pogony, a variety of decorations, many of which referenced old regime heroes, formed a rich text that was readable by both soldiers and civilians. The chapter then shows how soldiers' biographies and the state's self-presentation changed via medals and uniforms.