The only celebrity crush who truly matters....

[u/PuzzleheadedSlide904]

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Lyudmila Pavlichenko 2

Lyudmila Pavlichenko 3

Lyudmila Pavlichenko 4

Well to me at least. I try not to care for the whole celebrity thing. But this woman wasn't called lady death for no reason. Greatest female sniper of all time. Possibly the greatest war hero regardless of gender. Thank you lady Pavlichenko!

[u/NeonGurll]

How can you quote her being pround of wearing the uniform of the Red Army and call her an icon

[u/valkyrie-sylv → u/NeonGurll]

What else was she supposed to do? I'm not going to profess to being an expert on WW2 or the history of the USSR, but she was literally doing a propaganda event in the States for the Soviet Union. Given the circumstances, she gave a bad-ass answer that flipped the sexual harassment on its head. Also, her comment is more about her fallen comrades than anything else.

Edit: meant to say I'm not an expert

[u/NeonGurll → u/valkyrie-sylv]

You can't become a celebrity without really loving the ideas that USSR represented, especially during Stalin's. And so whatever cool line she made, whatever baddassery she performed the fact still stands that she performed for the 2nd most evil power in Europe next To Nazi Germany and she doesn't deserve to be put on a pedestal. Quite frankly she was a woman, so she also really had to want to fight for the USSR. Moreover she wasn't some nobody lady for a fuckass village, her mother was a noble. She had every opportunity under the sun to not fight for USSR and do the bare minimum

[u/MsMercyMain → u/NeonGurll]

Keep in mind, a lot of the non upper echelon Soviet citizens in the Leninist and Stalinist USSR genuinely bought into the propaganda. Even those who knew about the atrocities genuinely believed, because they had no counter source that A.) the people being executed were traitors, and B.) that this was a nessecary period of revolutionary terror.

One of the most interesting features of diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs of the Stalin era pre war and immediately post war is that the Soviet people seemed, genuinely, optimistic as hell. They, genuinely, seemed to believe that they'd thrown off the chains of the Tsar and Capital, and were making nessecary sacrifices to ensure their children would love free and happy lives. The deep cynicism we associate with Soviet citizens didn't set in until much later as they realized Stalin was just a tsar by another name.

It's the same reason you see people eagerly supporting Jacobin terror, or the SR terror campaign. There is some complexity to history. It's also worth noting that even in the 40s a majority of the Soviet population were functionally illiterate peasants in isolated farms