Formation of a new identity in the conditions of the military everyday life of the Civil War (by the material of Karelia)

Abstract

The article was prepared on the basis of materials on the history of military units stationed in the Olonets province and the Kemsk district of the Arkhangelsk province during the Civil War in Karelia and immediately after it. The author shows how the army and navy political and educational bodies coped with the task of “re-educating” yesterday's peasants, of whom the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and the new Red Fleet were in the overwhelming majority. As a result, a new social identity of servicemen was formed. In the cultural context of the early Soviet period of Russian history, the idea of educating the “new man” was one of the most significant. The ideological background of such education was the militarization of the 1920s, which largely predetermined the transformation of this fruitful idea into a kind of authoritarian state intervention in all aspects of the life of the army and society as a whole.