A. Y. Vatlin “We are dealing with a very good  human material”: members of the  Austrian Schutzbund in the U.S.S.R.

Abstract: The article is a study of the 1930s’ integration process into the Soviet system of the Schutzbund – combatants of the militarized Austrian Socio-Democratic organization, who in February 1934 rebelled against the “Austrofascist” regime of E. Dollfuss. On the basis of archive sources introduced for scientific use for the first time (Politburo guidelines, Communist International documents, investigation files of the victims of the “Great Terror”), the author demonstrates the efforts undertaken by various authorities in the USSR to use the Schutzbund manpower potential, which entered the country through mass immigration, for the benefit of propaganda and industry. Originally placed in a “golden birdcage”, they were deprived of seeing the realities of Soviet life. The subsequent integration process produced positive examples of Austrian workers becoming loyal Soviet citizens, but also instances of growing rejection by a significant number of Schutzbund of the rules of conduct and ideological stereotypes of the Stalin period. The article uses the method of comparative historic analysis, and also the methodology of everyday life history, which lays the foundation for the depiction of the collective portrait of a unique socio-national community within the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. The Schutzbund joined the political pantheon of the 1930s’Soviet propaganda alongside record-setting aviators and polar explorers who wintered on ice. Before their arrival in the Soviet Union, the only European collective heroes were the communists, although it was no longer a secret that they were not up to the role of leading social progress. The “soldiers of the Vienna barricades” brought a new meaning to the thesis of the contemporary intensification of the class struggle, inserting in it the anti-Fascist component.

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