Global peace and frontline wounds: creating of the Soviet committee of war veterans and the contradictions of the memory policy in the USSR of the 1950s

The article examines the background and process of creating the Soviet Committee of War Veterans (SKVV) in 1956, as well as its activities in the first years of its existence in the context of international peacekeeping and internal socio-cultural changes. Since 1945, this marked the first attempt to create a public organization that united all major-categories of Soviet veterans of the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet leadership’s desire to join international federations of former World War II participants became primary motivation behind the SKVV’s formation in the mid-1950s. The leadership of the USSR wanted to use the memory of the war in peacekeeping discourse as one of the relevant and effective tools of public diplomacy. To achieve this, they made previously undesirable compromises. For example, they agreed to intensify the exchange of veteran delegations with foreign countries and recognized the veteran status of former Soviet prisoners of war who participated in the resistance movement in Europe. In parallel with international activities in the internal political conditions of the “thaw”, the structures of the SKVV became the environment for the emergence of numerous grassroots initiatives among veterans in social and memorial spheres. As a result, the state-party leadership received not only a new collective actor for public diplomacy, but also a formalized community of former war veterans who proposed various initiatives and were ready to participate in their implementation. The paper is based on little-known documents from the federal archives, including the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, State Archive of the Russian Federation, and Russian State Archive of Contemporary History.