The Mother in 'The Motherland': The Cranes Are Flying and Redemptive Motherhood
In addition to their crucial role in the Soviet labor force, the primary duty of women in the Khrushchev era was that of reproduction and repopulation. At the end of the war women comprised over 60% of the adult population in the Soviet Union, and thus women “were placed at the center of ambivalent Krushchevian policies aimed at reestablishing domestic ‘normalcy’ while also being expected to play a role in the public sphere” of workplace unions and party organizations (Natasha Kolchevska, “Angels in the Home and at Work: Russian women in the Khrushchev Years” p. 115). However, given the unequal composition of the male and female populations during this time, there was a marked shift in attention from the traditional ‘nuclear’ family to alternative structures. By the 1950s, “the state was resigned to the idea that its family model included the single parent family” (Greta Bucher, “Struggling to Survive: Soviet Women in the Postwar Years” p. 145). Both children produced out of wedlock, as well as children of divorced parents, became part of the mainstream cultural norm.
In The Cranes Are Flying, it is this role of the patriotic single mother that straddles the ideological divide of WWII and post-war valuation of women. The narrative resolution to Veronika’s attempted suicide is one of redemption: instead of throwing herself into the path of a speeding train, she instead saves an orphaned child alone in the street. Heightening the symbolic significance of her choice is the revelation that the little boy shares his name with Boris, implicitly connecting Veronika’s fidelity to her boyfriend’s memory with the ‘sacred feminine duty’ of protecting children; both are in a larger symbolic sense the greatest service that Veronika is able to offer to her country. This moment is key in establishing what Alexander Prokhorov considers “the dominant narrative of homefront melodrama during the Thaw: the reconstitution of the nuclear family around the trauma of irrecoverable loss generated by war” (“Soviet Family Melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s: From Wait for Me to The Cranes Are Flying” p. 214). It is worth noting that Veronika gains redemption in her assumption of the role of a triumphant, post-war single mother, without any of the sexual transgressions that were often associated with single parenting, namely that of extramarital sex. Where the perception of her sexual infidelity to Boris was the result of her ‘fall’, her atonement is necessarily absent of sex in any form, so that she may fulfill her sacred obligation of raising the next generation in a pure and uncompromising way.
The final scene of The Cranes Are Flying finds Veronika at a celebration with soldiers returning from the front on the day that victory in Europe has been announced. It is here that Boris is confirmed dead by a fellow soldier, and the chapter of Veronika’s life during the war concludes. Through the rescue of Borichka at the height of the film’s action, as well as the dénouement centering on the celebration of victory, The Cranes Are Flying is a not a historical film, but rather a cultural artifact that uses recent historical events to look towards the future of the Soviet Union—and the values that are driving it there.