What to Give: Popular Response in the Soviet Union to the Warm Clothes Drive during the Great Patriotic War

What to Give: Popular Response in the Soviet Union to the Warm Clothes Drive during the Great Patriotic War In 1941 and 1942 the Red Army needed more warm clothes for its soldiers than the Soviet economy was able to produce, which forced the Stalinist state to turn to the people to get them. We argue that the warm clothing drive represents not only a failure on the part of the state in going to the people, who soundly rejected the appeal, but it also illustrates the Communist Party’s greatest failure to date to mobilize its organization, its members, and the general population to fulfill its wishes in contrast to other wartime successes in mass mobilization. This may explain why the warm clothes drive is seldom mentioned in the history of war. The reluctance of the people to give their clothes does not, however, represent a rejection of the Stalinist state or non-support for the war. Their desire to keep their coats led people to find alternative means to show loyalty to the rodina-mat’ (mother Russia) and to soldiers at the front without sacrificing their warm clothing, which was vital to survival in the Soviet Union’s long and brutal winters. The party organs responsible for conducting and supervising the collection of warm clothes were as reluctant as the citizenry to both ask for clothes as well as to give their own. Party officials needed their warm clothes as much as the ordinary Soviet citizen did. They also had more pressing responsibilities related to the conduct of the war than the warm clothes drive. Quite against the orders of the bosses in Moscow, oblast and local party officials responsible for collecting warm clothes joined the population in using donations of cash to substitute for clothes. Initially, higher Party administrators tried to fend off cash donations but gave in to unyielding popular practice. Thus all involved could show good faith and patriotism, and still keep their warm clothes. How and why the drive failed yields insight not only into the wartime relationship between state and citizen; it also highlights the tensions within the Party about the priority of goals relative to the war effort as well as the willingness of Party leaders at various levels of authority and responsibility to resist the demands of superior Party organizations. The primary source for information for this article was the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), fond 17, opis 76, delo 280.