Both Shushkin’s “Gogal and Raika” and Platonov’s “The Cow” humanize cows, making them into martyrs for the starving Russian Peasants during political change and uncertainty.

The cow in “Gogal and Raika” is used as the name of the short story: Raika. She immediately becomes a sympathetic character when the speaker, after lamenting about spending short stints of time outside in the harsh Siberian winter, reminds the reader that “the cow’s out in the pen” (220). The cow is described as having “sad eyes” and an aura that once she has been seen “you feel no peace inside: here — poor and badly off though you may be — you can at least warm up, but she has to stand out there” (220-221). Raika’s freezing starvation could be compared to those exiled to the Gulags (This could definitely be a reach but Gulag and “Gogal,” from the title of the short story” are very similar sounding words). After the harsh winter, which the family barely survives, “Raika was no more… Raika arrived at our gate with her intestines hanging out of her belly, dragging along after her. She’d been run through with a pitchfork” (227-228). Raika was killed eating from a neighbors haystack so that she did not starve. 

The cow in Platonov’s story, “The Cow,” similarly has sympathetic human qualities, such as her “warm, dark eyes” and how she misses her son: “Our cow’s already crying!” (248, 259). When her son dies, the cow falls into an irreversible depression. Platonov includes a crucial difference between cow grief and human grief that makes her loss even more tragic: “She was unable to allay this grief inside her with words, consciousness, a friend or any other distraction” (255). This absolute hopelessness is similar to the hunger felt by Shushkin’s cow, and many peasants alike.