This article focuses on the Soviet/Russian narrative concerning the war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, which has been called the “Great Patriotic War” in the USSR and today’s Russia. This narrative portrays the armed conflict and the role of the invaded nation as follows: the atrocious enemy suddenly attacked us, the peace-loving Soviet people, but we fought back and finally defeated the invaders at the cost of countless lives of our compatriots, saving our motherland and the whole world from the evil. This mythical version of the war memory has its powerful influence over modern Russia – not only the official rhetoric around Russia’s invasion into Ukraine but also the spontaneous national identity among the ordinary people, as shown by the poll results for many years before the full-scale invasion. Therefore, analyzing the Russian tradition of remembering the events on the Eastern Front of WWII is crucial for understanding how it influences Russia’s politics and its society.

This article aims to examine the basic plot of the “Great Patriotic War” narrative and its shift in emphasis after the Soviet-German war through content analysis of official speech texts. To accomplish this goal, the study analyzes the texts of four wartime speeches and two Victory Parade speeches in 1945 and 1965 using quantitative text analysis and frame analysis. Previous works on this theme using frame analysis have not adopted the methods of quantitative analysis. However, content analysis benefits significantly from combining both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In this article, the quantitative text analysis is conducted by software “KH Coder,” and the frame analysis is based on following twelve frames: “war sufferings,” “atrocious enemy,” “peace-loving Soviet people,” “friendly nations,” “fighting,” “victory,” “patriotic/holy war,” “heroes,” “saving people of the world,” “wartime leader,” “contribution to the Allies” and “new threats.” Besides these frames, the author examines the roles of different values（“traditional/universal” and “revolutionary/socialistic”）in the speech texts.

The analysis results allow us to draw the following conclusions:

1. The “patriotic/holy war” frame is prominent through all the texts.

2. The “war sufferings,” “atrocious enemy” and “peace-loving Soviet people” frames are highly noticeable at the beginning of the war.

3. While the “traditional/universal” values are overwhelmingly dominant during the war, the “revolutionary/socialistic” ones revive in 1965.

4. The subject for praise switches from Stalin in 1945 to the “heroic Soviet people” in 1965.

5. The Cold War significantly influences the 1965 speech text: now the U.S. is seen not only as a friend in the war against Hitler but also as a “new threat” against world peace.

6. The content of Stalin’s speech at the military parade on November 7, 1941, more closely resembles that of his speech celebrating the victory over the Third Reich in 1945 rather than that of the other two speeches in the first year of the war.

Exploring speech texts that represent the “Great Patriotic War” narrative by quantitative text analysis reveals minor shifts in the unchanged, if seen from afar, narrative. This would help us deeply understand the mechanism by which one of the Soviet-era mythical narratives survived the collapse of the communist regime and enjoys today’s unrivaled status as the core of Russia’s national identity.

This paper discusses female allegorical statues, that is, Motherland and the Lamenting Mother, as Soviet monuments and memorials about the German-Soviet War of the Second World War. In general, we do not meet female citizens in public monuments because modern nations purge women from public spaces to private areas, that is, family spaces. Instead of individual women, they use images of allegorical women, for example, the Archaic goddess Nike/Victoria as a symbol of an imagined community and Marianne in the French Republic.

In Soviet war monumental/memorial space, we meet such a symbolic gender structure: Red Army soldiers and allegorical females. In this case, we consider the Archaic goddess featured in Motherland and the Lamenting Mother statue. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the process of restructuring war memorial spaces, newborn nations have removed male statues, for example, Lenin, revolutionists, politicians, generals, academicians, artists, and Red Army soldiers, which commemorate great Soviet hegemony. In contrast, female allegory stays in public spaces even today because female unindividual statues are an empty medium that can introject any concept.

It was found from the result of fieldwork in the former Soviet Union that Motherland, which has occupied a position as national symbol in the Russian Federation, has lost power to unite nation and people. In fact, the Motherland statue had not been built in Estonia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, or Central Asia. Regarding Latvia, Moldova, Belarus, and Georgia, we meet small-size variants. On the other hand, Lamenting Mother statues, who mourn for the war dead, have been raised in the whole country, even today. Local communities find space to share the pain of loss of relations and friends, homes, property, and life, in memorials in the shape of the Lamenting Mother, who is similar to the Holy Mother.

We are here concerned with the implications of social and cultural context of these two female allegories. In the first chapter, we focus on the period of Khrushchev. Stalin had oppressed all war memory and, after his death, people began to narrate personal experiences about war and build memorials for the dead in burial places. We cannot find a clear distinction in early female allegory statues. The 20th anniversary of the Victory, that is, the year 1965, brought a fundamental change in war memorial-commemoration spaces. In those days, Nike-type statues were raised as national symbols to unite the nation and people, such as The Motherland Calls at the top of Mamai Hill to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad. In the second and third chapters, we illustrate distribution, location, size, shape of Motherland and Lamenting Mother statues in detail. Next, in the fourth chapter, we classify Lamenting Mother statues according to type of icons of the Holy Mother: Eleusa, Pieta, Our Lady of Sorrows, and Orans. We consider that the cult of the “Lamenting Mother” is based on the faith of the Holy Mother. Next, we surmise that early Christianity had united the faith of the Holy Mother with the cult of local great mothers in the course of Christian religion in Europe. Similarly, Islam assimilated local great mothers in Central Asia. It is possible that Soviet people, including Muslims, had a basis for accepting the Soviet secularized Holy Mother. And, finally, we examine threat factors inherent in the Lamenting Mother-type statue.