Exile, Gender, and Communist Self-Fashioning: Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Focusing on the Soviet exile of the Spanish communist and orator Dolores Ibárruri ( La Pasionaria ), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum brings into dialogue two topics often treated in isolation: Soviet subjectivities and the selfunderstandings of international communists. During the Spanish civil war, the Soviet media popularized Ibárruri's performance of fierce communist motherhood. The article traces Ibárruri's efforts in exile to maintain and adapt this public identity by analyzing sources in two distinct registers, both of which blurred the boundaries between public and private selves: Ibárruri's “official” correspondence and her interventions in party meetings. Reading such sources as sites of self-fashioning, Kirschenbaum argues that Ibárruri was at once empowered and constrained by her self-presentation as the mother of the Spanish exiles. Ibárruri's case both internationalizes understandings of Stalinist culture and suggests the possibility of a history of international communism structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists.