World War II and Change of Generations: Trauma, Myth, and Memory

... families, alive or dead. War casualties translated into personal losses and a generation of children being raised in incomplete families. War returnees often had their health destroyed. In the 1980s the word ‘invalid’ was commonly used in Russian language with reference to the war veterans with missing body parts whom we could still frequently encounter back then. The war generation. The dawn of their lives coincided with the tumultuous October revolution, their adolescence with the radical times of collectivization and industrialization,...