Evacuees or deportees? Images of strangers and strategies of everyday life in the reports of the Kama region party leader

Abstract

The conflict between the evacuated citizens and the local population at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War is the subject of the paper. The mechanisms of painful identifying of “us” and “them” in the military rear are considered. The social conflicts were compounded by the clash of different discourses and meanings: the language of official slogans and everyday meanings, dating back to the pre-war period. The practices associated with evacuation created a special language of official statements. The features of social trauma tested by the evacuated and local people are recognized in the euphemisms of the party documents. That trauma manifested itself in a contradictory identification of those who have been evacuated. The image of an evacuee was ambivalent for the representatives of the local authorities and population. An honest toiler and an impudent stranger, a victim of the war and a spy could coexist in this image. Those contradictions of images were associated with a low pre-war standard of living in the Kama region, as well as with the marginality and vagueness of the social position of the evacuated population.