Sofia Petrovna

The titular protagonist of Chukovskaya’s novella embodies the ideal of the new Soviet woman, an archetype of a better, more productive woman propagandized by the Communist Party. Sofia upholds the expectation that woman be not only devoted mothers but industrious members of the workforce. Following her husband’s death, Sofia doesn’t languish: She learns typing and joins a patriotic enterprise, the publication of fiction that extolls the Soviet Union. Her productivity and ambition (shown by her frequent promotions at work) and her devotion to Stalinism (shown when she lovingly hangs a portrait of Stalin for the office party) characterize Sofia as a hardworking and conformist patriot. By casting Sofia in this archetype of the new Soviet woman, Chukovskaya exposes the hypocrisy of Stalinist propaganda: A paragon of Soviet excellence, Sofia nonetheless suffers the persecution of the USSR.

Initially, Sofia is almost comically ignorant of the crimes of the state: Given that she lived through the famines of the early 1930s and the first wave of purges following Sergei Kirov’s murder, her total faith in Stalin strains credulity. By exaggerating Sofia’s faith to hyperbolic proportions, Chukovskaya emphasizes the outsize power the state had in controlling thought—as Chukovskaya writes in the afterword, Sofia is “a