| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE WINNER in the Great Patriotic War is a unique phenomenon. It is the psychology of those people who lived through its initial period with its crushing defeats and retreats and the no less difficult subsequent stages with their unprecedented large-scale battles, when it was still not totally clear who would be the winner. But now there was no longer any doubt: our Victory was close at hand. And the feeling of being a winner, on the eve, during, and immediately after the Victory, indeed created a special psychological state in the people who had endured all the trials and tribulations and destroyed a strong, ruthless and lethal enemy.
It stands to reason that the entire war was a test of the spiritual and moral fiber of the Soviet soldier in conditions of constant risk, in situations that required immense exertion of every human strength, and often also self-sacrifice. Each period of the Great Patriotic War, with its particular moral and psychological dominant, determined the changes in the spiritual makeup of the frontline soldiers and in an individual's attitude to different areas of reality and life's values. But the feeling that Victory was near was particularly inherent in the final stage of the war, which in itself aroused an entire set of thoughts and feelings and a complex psychological state.
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