FIRST-CLASS ICONS, SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS Reflections on female Soviet soldiers
Patrycja Pompała Student number: 01501590 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rozita Dimova
Master’s dissertation
A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in East European Languages and Cultures Ghent University Academic year: 2017/2018 Date of submission: August 2018
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Statement of permission for use on loan
The author and the supervisor give permission to make this master’s dissertation available for consultation and for personal use. In the case of any other use, the copyright terms have to be respected, in particular with regard to the obligation to state expressly the source when quoting results from this master’s dissertation. The copyright with regard to the data referred to in this master’s dissertation lies with the supervisor. Copyright is limited to the manner in which the author has approached and recorded the problems of the subject. The author respects the original copyright of the individually quoted studies and any accompanying documentation, such as tables and graphs.
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Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express genuine gratitude to my supervisor Professor Dr. Rozita Dimova. I would like to thank you for your assistance and your feedback regarding my dissertation. I must thank you for broadening my mind and sharing your passion for science with me. What is more, I would like to thank you for encouragement and consideration. Secondly, a special thanks to Professor Dr. Aleksey Yudin for your consultation regarding the Soviet reality and any valuable advice that I have received from you. This dissertation would not have the current shape without human right defender and historian Stefania Kulaeva. I would especially like to thank you for the enormous contribution to my thesis by sharing with me your family archive, your stories and knowledge. Finally, I must also express my gratitude to teaching and research assistant Charlotte Bollaert, human right defender Olga Abramenko and all my family and friends who supported me in the process of writing.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 6
1. Social organization of sex: Gender in the pre-war and Soviet war society with a focus on female soldiers ...... 10
1.1 Women in the society before WW2 ...... 10
1.2 Women in society during WW2, with a focus on the war front ...... 12
1.3 Conclusion ...... 15
2. Image of the female soldier ...... 16
2.1 During the war ...... 16
2.2 After the war ...... 18
2.3 “The Unwomanly Face of the War” by Svetlana Aleksevic ...... 20
2.4 Conclusion ...... 21
3. The first-class icon ...... 22
3.1 Matuŝka Rossija (Mother Russia) ...... 22
3.1.1 Theory ...... 22
3.1.2 In Russia ...... 23
3.2 Women as an icon during the war ...... 24
3.2.1 Women in Soviet’s visuals arts during the WWII – posters (and monuments) ...... 25
3.2.2 Icons of ‘Soviet hagiography’ ...... 31
3.3 Conclusion ...... 35
4. Case studies: excerpts from female soldiers lives during and after WW2 ...... 36
4.1 Broken Trajectories: Outline of the situation of the Soviet (ex) female soldiers after the Great Patriotic War 37
4.1.1 Perception of the intimate relations at the front ...... 38
4.1.2 ‘Unwomanly’ female soldiers ...... 40
4.1.3 The Soviet (ex) female soldiers and their testimonies ...... 42
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4.1.4 Invisible ‘backstage’ ...... 43
4.1.5 Education, employment and position in the society of (ex) female soldiers ...... 44
4.1.6 Disfigured soldiers ...... 45
4.2 The case study of Nina Petrovna Borisova ...... 47
4.3 The case study of Boris Stepanovič Kulaev and Klavida Kalašnikova ...... 48
4.4 The case study of Susana Aronovna Brejdo ...... 51
4.5 Conclusions ...... 53
5. The second-class citizen ...... 54
5.1 Empowerment of women in crisis situations ...... 54
5.2 Underlying patriarchy in society ...... 55
5.3 Empowerment of few chosen women to show state modernity and in order to mask gender discrimination ...... 56
5.4 War as a male domain ...... 57
5.5 Women as the womb of a nation and a resourceful housekeeper ...... 59
5.6 Suppression of female sexuality and victim blaming ...... 62
5.7 Herstory ...... 64
5.8 Conclusion ...... 65
6. End Conclusion ...... 66
Bibliography ...... 68
Annexes ...... 75
Word count: 25062.
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Introduction
The cult of army and militarism was a pervasive occurrence during the whole period of the Soviet Union. The emphasis was put on patriotic-military education in schools and other public institutions. The veterans of World War 2 are nowadays perceived almost as saints. Velikaja Otečestvennaja vojna (The Great Patriotic War, as World War 2 is called in Russia) and its soldiers, until now, have been an object of glorification in the national discourse throughout the whole year, not just on the occasion of Victory Day. The victory over Nazi Germany is, together with the fact that the first man in space was a citizen of the Soviet Union, the biggest boast of Russians. This war can be distinguished by the unprecedented involvement of women at the frontline, as well as in purely military missions. Women saved lives as nurses or killed the enemy as snipers or aviators. Around 800 thousand women participated in the war at the frontline on the Soviet side. Although women coped with the assigned tasks during the war on a par with men, they received a much smaller amount of gratitude for their contributions to the victory. Their image was willingly used by the Soviet authorities for their propaganda goals during the war, but women themselves and the memories of women who fought in the Second World War were absent from official narratives. There was a significant dissonance between the official ideology and the reality. Moreover, they faced not only underestimation of their efforts but, paradoxically, many of them struggled with wide-spread contempt from society. They had to cope, during and after the war, with problems which were closely gender-related. These points allow me to make the conclusion that women are first-class icons, but second-class citizens. The perspective of the government and contemporary society towards the servicewomen is an example of gender discrimination. This dissertation examines the question of women in the Soviet army both during the war and, especially, in the subsequent peace conditions. The key question of my thesis asks: how is it possible that in the Soviet Union, in the country where full equality of men and women was announced, female soldiers were marginalized and stigmatized in society? In addition to this question, I examine the way in which the government uses women as a symbol for their own purposes. I aim to investigate the gap between the official state’s narrative and the real state of affairs. What is more, I closely trace the gender-related issues that the Soviet female soldiers encountered during and after the war.
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This research is situated on the intersection of anthropology, history and gender studies. I have chosen this kind of approach because the issue of discrimination of female combatants is a multifaceted issue and it demands a complex approach. My dissertation will be quite a unique attempt to analyze the above-mentioned issues. There are a lot of publications about female participation in the Great Patriotic War. However, they mostly just confirm already known issues and do not seek reasons for their occurrence. What is more, a lot of work is just from a one-sided point of view. They depict the Soviet female combatants as either romantic heroes or as victims. The existing patterns in the depiction of female participation in the war do not reflect the entire story of the problem under consideration. Nevertheless, there are scholars who tried to analyze the above-mentioned issues deeper, such as: Olga Nikonova, Roger D. Markwick, Euridice Charon Cardona, Kerstin Bisсhl. My research will be conducted by analysing primary sources, such as memoirs, interviews, biographies, a letter from the front and visual arts, as well as use of secondary sources, mostly from the above-mentioned scholars. For my research, especially valuable were also works of feminist scholars, such as Nira Yuval-Davis, Elizabeth A. Wood and Cynthia Enloe. I will also draw on Svetlana Aleksevič’s book The Unwomanly Face of War (U vojny ne ženskoe lico), in which she investigated the social exclusion of female combatants. In her non-fiction text, she collected the classic oral history of Soviet women's experiences in the Second World War and following years. I have chosen this literary position because it broke the silence about the experiences of female ex-combatants and, thereby, created a space for a public discussion. She brought the topic of these women to a central position. I consider Aleksevič’s book as a literary text situated between fiction and a historical account with a great cultural load. I have to admit that an analysis of collected primary materials will pose an analytical challenge and will require dismantling the pervasive communist propaganda. People were taught what to think and say. What is more, it was a ‘sacred duty’ to defend the Motherland and saying something about ‘the other side of the Victory’ might be seen as a betrayal. Furthermore strict censorship did not allow people to talk about it. Political incorrectness, in many cases, resulted in exposing oneself or one’s family to danger. Additionally, until nowadays, archives in Russia, to a large extent, have been closed. Primary sources under review also have extra methodological limitations in addition to those already mentioned, such as the impact of time, changes of political circumstances in the former Soviet Union, and the
7 unreliability of human memory which is under the influence of contemporary attitudes on the past. Also, scholars do not have the ability to check the correctness of oral history. In order to give an exhaustive answer for the questions posed in my dissertation, I have divided my work into five chapters, with a following conclusion. The order of these chapters is not random but is set out in this way to better understand the main issues analysed in this work. In the first chapter, “Social organization of sex: Gender in the pre-war and Soviet war society with a focus on female soldiers”, I will depict a genealogy of the ‘woman question’ in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union before the Great Patriotic War. I will do so in order to better understand the point of departure of Soviet female combatants into the military sphere. Afterwards, I will turn to the period of the Great Patriotic War in order to have general insight into the frontline social order and to see what women experienced there. Thereafter, in the second chapter “Image of the female soldier”, I will address the issue of the image of female Soviet soldiers in the community’s imagination. I will examine the initial presence and the subsequent absence of women from the Red Army and the partisan movement in the official discourse. I want to examine what was said or written about them and when, as well as where their participation in frontline tasks was omitted. These images, to different extents, were literally and significantly distorted images. The third chapter, “The first-class icon” aims to show that women in iconographic representation are always depicted as a first-class icon, using their image as a symbol for national and military discourse. My research in this chapter will be based on several different mediums, such as the textual portrayal of women in official Soviet propaganda, on examples of female partisan Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja and female sniper Lyudmila Pavličenko; visual representations of women, in the form of posters released during the Great Patriotic War, as well as monuments erected after the war to symbolize the nation. In the fourth chapter, “Case studies: excerpts from female soldiers lives during and after WW2”, using mainly memoirs and biographies of veterans, I will try to present the most common gender-related problems that female soldiers from the Soviet Army faced during WW2 and, especially, in the subsequent peace conditions. Their merit and deeds were often undeservedly challenged, and they were exposed to social exclusion.
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In the last chapter, based on feminist theories “The second-class citizen”, I name the reasons that might contribute to female ex-soldiers existing as ‘second-class citizens’ and try to explain it. Key notions in this chapter include: temporary empowerment of women; patriarchy; the male military domain; women as mothers and housekeepers; suppression of female sexuality; and ‘herstory’. I hope that this study will make a modest contribution to honor female soldiers and bring them to the center as part of the collective memory.
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1. Social organization of sex: Gender in the pre-war and Soviet war society with a focus on female soldiers
1.1 Women in the society before WW2
“I thought I saw two people, but it was only a man [muzhik](!) and a woman [baba]. A chicken is not a bird and a woman [baba] is not a person. Mariia is no comrade to Ivan.” (E.A. Wood 1997: 16)
In order to understand the position of women in Soviet society during the period of the Great Patriotic War, as well as in the subsequent peace conditions, it is necessary to briefly look back into the past on the “woman question”. The Russian pre-war society was visible based on traditional patriarchy principles. Women had a lower position in society than men. The Orthodox Church played a significant role in structuring society and kept women at home, claiming that it was her ‘kingdom’ (Wood 1997: 16). Women were excluded from the public sphere. Although, of course, we can see through the ages the evolution and slow progress of women’s empowerment, however, it was just the Bolsheviks who made a social revolution. When Bolshevik came to power, women were seen as “illiterate, superstitious, and generally ‘backward’” (Wood 1997: 1). Seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik government announced that it was going to make a ‘patriarchless’ society. However, the situation was ambivalent. On one hand, feminism was seen as chimer of bourgeoisie and did not conform with class theory. On the other hand, emancipation of women was, for them, a necessity (Wood 1997: 2-3). Quinn (2016) noticed, the Bolsheviks stressed the importance of the impact of the whole working class (including women) in order to change the status quo. They recognized that women undergo double oppression under capitalism and countryside patriarchy. Thus, the Bolsheviks resolved the liberation of women as it was crucial in the struggle for a socialist society. Lenin emphasized this when he stated in 1920 that the working class cannot achieve full victory without having fought the full emancipation of women (Quinn 1916: 4). The state then tried to build a new type of (Soviet) men and (Soviet) women and to change relations
10 between the sexes; their relations should not be traditional, they should be liberated. In order to reach these goals, they used different propaganda means and introduced new legislation (Wood 1997: 1-9). Seven weeks after the inception of a new regime, church marriages were abolished and a new simpler way of cohabiting was introduced. One month later, a new family law emerged. According to which, women had the same rights as men in the family sphere. The Bolsheviks agitated to stop the traditional family model and to emancipate women from ‘kitchen slavery’ (Quinn 2016: 6-7). Despite reluctance of the new authorities at first, female citizens in September 1917 received voice rights (Jukina 2013). Two years later, a special women’s section emerged (Zhenotdel) to propagate work for female workers and to enlighten them. In 1920, abortion was legalised, of which, Quinn (2016) calls this legislation the most progressive law in history. What is more, the Bolsheviks brought to the public discussion notions of sexuality and urged for free love (Quinn 2016: 6-9). Opinions about the Bolsheviks’ intentions are divided. However, whether the state enacted all these changes for the sake of women or used them for their own goals (for more, see: E.A. Wood, “The baba and the comrade. Gender and politics in revolutionary Russia”), the new social and gender order became a reality. Clements (2012) claims that the majority of Soviet women were influenced by the Soviet emancipatory program which included broad access to education and the labour market, social activism, and social services (Clements 2012: 211). However, not all the plans of the authorities could be realized. For example, the idea to replace traditional families with public service (kindergarten, canteen) was not completely realized due to financial reasons (Quinn 2016: 8-9). Liberated sexual relations brought more diseases and there was a lot of homeless children born out of wedlock. As a result, traditional relations and monogamy started to be promoted again (for example, see: “12 Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat”). Manayev and Chalyn (!) (2018) said: “For decades to come, sexuality and erotica would be completely shunned by Soviet culture and society (…). The next sexual revolution would take place only in the 1990s” (Manayev and Chalyn 2018). Despite opening professional paths for women, they received lower wages and did not have leading positions in the labour market, nor in the political arena (Clements 2012: 211). In the mid-20s, Stalin seized power and the ‘counter-revolution’ slowly began. In 1930, the Communist Party claimed that the ‘woman question’, i.e. the question of women’s unequal position in
11 society, had been solved (Wood 1997: 8). Thus, no more social revolution was needed. Moreover, in the mid-1930s, the government was seriously concerned about the birth-rate fall because it needed the manpower to develop the economy and to build a strong military leadership. Therefore, in 1936, a new family law emerged which supported traditional family units with a large number of children. The process of divorce became much more expensive and complicated. Mothers with many children received a lot of benefits. Abortion was criminalized, except in situations where there was a danger to the mother’s life or when the foetus was genetically damaged (Clements 2012: 211-212). Clements (2012) noticed that the ideal Soviet women were no longer (at least in theory) fully liberated women, but the ideal Soviet women were a combination of “Bolshevik feminism with an updated cult of domesticity. (...) free and equal participants in the society, supportive wives, and nurturing mothers who taught their children to be model Soviet citizens. She was an updated affirmation of the very old ideal of female self- sacrifice” (Clements 2012: 211-212). To sum up, the Red Revolution brought the full emancipation of women only in theory. Although women could enjoy many more opportunities than their grandmothers, there was still patriarchy in society. After the first years of the revolution, there was a step back in women’s emancipation, especially when Stalin seized power. The new Soviet women from the Stalin period needed to be a good worker, a loving wife and mother, and a housekeeper. Nevertheless, women were still active citizens and their positions in the public sphere was much stronger than in a lot of Western countries back then.
1.2 Women in society during WW2, with a focus on the war front
One of the features of the Second World War was the unprecedented involvement of the civilian population, including women, in armed conflict. The Soviet Union proved to be the undisputed leader in terms of the scale of women's participation in war (Nikonova 2005: 1). The number of women in the armed forces of the Soviet Union during WWII waivers depending on sources from 600 thousand to 1 million. There were around 10 million soldiers in total (Sakaida 2003: 3). The most common number is 800 thousand (for example according to Nikonova, Sakaida).
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In the beginning, it was not the intention of the government to recruit women to the army. Women in the USSR were not liable for military service, although the military legislation of the USSR provided, if necessary, mandatory involvement of women in the ranks of the Red Army for service in the auxiliary troops (Nikonova 2005: 3). However, when the Soviets failed after the first battles, suffered huge losses at the front and, at the same time, women had proven that they could be successful in military missions (the example of female unique air-force units under the leadership of Marina Raskova), the government decided to prepare some women for military missions and enlist them into the army. Female medical personnel, engineers, communications and demolition workers, paratroopers, and truck drivers were called upon from the beginning to join the military forces (Clements 2012: 238-239). Officially, the authorities confirmed a desire to engage women in military tasks by publishing, on 19 April 1942, the Order for the mobilization of 40,000 women in the Air-Force to replace the Red Army men: №0297 (Polozov and Nemova 2012). Notwithstanding, outside of the government’s order, a strong female involvement had started already just after the outbreak of the war where girls and women en masse voluntarily wanted to be sent to the frontline. The majority of female combatants in the army were young Slavic unmarried girls coming from Komsomol. They were mostly motivated by: - a wish to avenge loved ones killed by the German troops; - the fact that their friends were going; - that war was seen as a great adventure (due to the romantic image of the war in Soviet discourse and schools); - and, above all, they felt obligated to defend their motherland (Clements 2012: 239). There were also more mundane reasons like the opportunity to receive food (Gregoreva 2018) or earning extra money (Kulaeva 2018). Most female soldiers belonged to support services, such as medical personnel, truck drivers, translators, communications operators, clerks, and cooks. Some of them, however, were a part of strict combat units. Clements (2012) lists their roles as: “armorers, artillery and anti-aircraft personnel, machine and mortar gunners, pilots, and snipers” (Clements 2012: 240). The most famous women’s troops were three air-force regiments called, firstly by German, and subsequently, by the whole Soviet society, ‘Night Witches’ (for more, see, for example: Markwick and Cardona 2012: 84-90). On the
13 contrary to other fighting countries, separate units were not foreseen for women. Female units were incorporated as a part of the large command structure or in gender-integrated units (Clements 2012: 239). Except for the official army, the Soviets fought against the Nazis via partisan forces which consisted of 5-10 percent female fighters. Some of them fought shoulder to shoulder with men, but mostly they took care of housekeeping tasks. Some women did not want to accept this gendered task order and they protested against the state of affairs. Others were glad because they joined partisans in their camps not to fight with the occupiers directly, but in order to escape them (Clements 2012: 239-240). The need for cohabitation with men was not the only gender-related inconvenience for women at the front. They had military uniforms not suitable for their size and shape, there was a lack of general and special female hygiene products as well as medical and gynaecological care (Barsukova 2012: 12). A lot of male soldiers did not agree with the presence of women at the front. It was a common notion that women could not resist the stress of war, interfered with the comradeship of the men, and that they brought bad luck. Rather, men should protect women. What is more, men felt seriously affronted when women were in command positions. However, after some time, some male and female soldiers built comradery and faith (Clements 2012: 243). This happened when women stepped into a male sphere. At the beginning, they face hostility but, with time, once they have proven their skills, they could become accepted. This also happened in the labour market. Interestingly, wages of female soldiers were the same as those of their male counterparts and they also had opportunities for promotion and benefits during the war (Clements 2012: 239). Intimate relations at the front were prohibited between female and male soldiers. However, as soldiers reminisced, the longing for “love” was stronger. They could have a different character. Some soldiers fell in love, some relations were based on different types of benefits, and some were sexual harassment. In this regard, especially interesting is the phenomenon of a ‘field wife’ in which there were sexual relations between commanders and women assigned to their units (PPZHe; for more, see the chapter “Case studies: excerpts from female soldiers lives during and after WW2”). Rape could take place, but it was rather taboo (Clement 2012: 244). Despite these adversities, female soldiers contributed a lot to the victory just as the women at the home front did. Without the enormous
14 involvement of the female citizenship, it is highly possible that the Soviet Union would not have seen the victory so fast (Clement 2012: 251-252).
1.3 Conclusion
In this chapter, I wanted to briefly depict the shape of the society which was the point of departure for the Soviet female soldiers; whose fate is the topic of my investigation. They came from quite a liberated society, where women were visible in the public sphere. However, they did not hold leading positions and their task was also to be a good worker, a good wife and mother. This liberation and new social gender-order brought them into the military domain. The scale of their participation in the Second World War was unique. The female soldiers encountered different gender-relation problems but, at the same time, it was a step forward in a domain that was previously closed off to them. In the next chapter, I will analyse how the government showed, in the official discourse, the participation of women in the Great Patriotic War. It seems like their presence at the front was visible in the state narrative during the war, but once the war was finished, their presence at the front was omitted.
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2. Image of the female soldier
In this chapter, I aim to show how the images of female soldiers in the Red Army and female Soviet partisans were constructed on the official national level. The state controlled all mediums that influenced public opinion, such as newspapers, books and movies. Therefore, I will analyse the most influential of them in order to reach my goal. The way in which the authorities presented, or omitted, female combatants in their discourse shaped how they were perceived in society. I have divided the period under review in three main periods: during the war and after the war until 1985, and the period from 1985 when “The Unwomanly Face of the War” by Svetlana Aleksevič was published. My analysis is based on the few articles from the official state’s newspaper Truth (Pravda) and Red Star (Krasnaja zvezda), in which female soldiers were described; on four cult Soviets films with the female soldier’s plot and on secondary sources, mainly on a work of a scholar Anna Krylova “Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front”.
2.1 During the war
During the war, the state recognized the input of women in the war, although not in a consistent way. First, “en masse” volunteering of girls and young women was a surprise for the government. Even after enlisting them to the army, the female presence at the frontline was problematic for the authorities and they did not want to officially recognize women as combatants. However, a new situation at the front (failures and significant human losses), as well as the re-mechanization of the army, demanded changes from the past approaches of the state. The authorities started to even call on women to help at the front. The newspapers like Pravda, in the second part of the war, started to write more about already present frontline female soldiers and to publicize their pictures. For example, the pictures of a ground assault pilot, Anna Egorova (Krylova 2010: 216-217, 225). A key moment in the politics of recognition towards female soldiers, which I have found, is an article called “Famous Daughters of the Great Mother – Motherland” (“Slavnye dočeri velikoj materi – Rodiny”) which emerged on the eve of the Women’s International Day in 1943 in the official newspaper of the
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Ministry of Defence, Red Star (Krasnaja Zvezda, 1943). This article praised already present women at the front and underlined their great deeds.
Красная Армия вместе со всей советской страной еще раз воздает заслуженную славу героическим женщинам нашей Родины, женщинам-патриоткам, труженицам и воинам. (…)Не только в тылу — и на фронте советские женщины идут в передовой шеренге борцов против немецко- фашистского нашествия. Красная Армия заслуженно гордится своими патриотками-воинами, которые плечом к плечу с мужчинами доблестно бьются за Родину на фронтах Отечественной войны. (…) Отвага, проявленная советскими женщинами и девушками, сражающимися в рядах славной Красной Армии и в партизанских отрядах, превзошла всё, что когда-либо знала история.1 (in Red Star 1942: 1)
However, as I stated earlier, this picture of female combatants was incomplete. Krylova (2010) in her examination noticed eloquent silence. Information about female participation in military tasks was fragmented and incomplete. For example, the numbers of female combatants, gender-related issues, and the state’s role in the training of women were omitted. This resulted in a situation where women’s involvement was noticed, but its description was neither exhaustive nor clear for the public. According to Krylova (2010), this silence was common on all sides of public discourse. What is more, the way female soldiers were described in mass media always tried to show them from an angle where their ‘womanliness’ was seen. They were often depicted not so much as soldiers, but as fighting daughters – women (Krylova 2010: 223). It seems that the state used female combatants for their own propaganda goals and that there was a discrepancy between their portrayal in official discourse and the reality (more about them in the chapter “The First Class Icon”). There was only a place for positive and politically correct images of female soldiers – and of the war as a whole – in the official discussion. Konstantin Simonov, a war correspondent and famous Soviet author and prozaik, in one of his poems described heterosexual intimate relations between soldiers at the front in a gentle way. Simonov thanks female soldiers for helping their male comrades survive separation with their beloveds and warm them up with their bodies. Simonov because of this poem, plunged into danger. He could be expelled from the Communist Party, what was the equivalent to the end of any career
1 “The Red Army, along with the entire Soviet country, once again pays deserved fame to the heroic women of our Motherland, patriotic women, female toilers and female soldiers. (...) Not only at the home front, but also at the war front, Soviet women are in the front rank of fighters against the German-fascist invasion. The Red Army deservedly is proud of its patriotic warriors who, shoulder to shoulder, with men valiantly fighting for their Motherland on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. (...) Courage shown by Soviet women and girls fighting in the ranks of the glorious Red Army and in partisan units surpassed everything that history ever knew.” [my transl.].
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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1uT0ldwH6k; the whole poem to be seen at http://www.world- art.ru/lyric/lyric.php?id=15787).
2.2 After the war
After the war female soldiers practically disappeared from the official narratives (with the exception of a few chosen female icons – who are described in the chapter “The First Class Icon” – or briefly mentioning the Heroes of the Soviet Union in Pravda two times in 1945). On 24 June 1945, during the very first celebration of the Victory, women soldiers were practically omitted and attention was only put on the civilian women who were together with their triumphant husbands. The authorities, for example via Truth, pointed out women as mothers, women taking care of disabled men, and female workers (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 231). Female soldiers seemed to be invisible. In July 1945 the President of Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Michail Kalinin, on meeting with demobilized young women from the Red Army, praised women for their contribution to the Victory. However, he clearly highlighted that they had to turn into civilians to reconstruct the country and that the independence which they had gained at the front was finished. He said:
It is one thing … for a kolkhoznik [male collective farmer] to be demobilized … It is another matter for a young woman of 20 to 23 years of age … The majority of young women who have served in the forces did not stand on their own feet before the war, they studied and, except for a few isolated instances, came from under the wing of mothers, grandmothers or fathers, and only became independent at the front. This independent life lasted for three to four years and is now being cut short ... (Kalinin 1945; in Markwick and Cardona 2012: 233)
Kalinin cautioned that the new gender order which had place at the front was over, together with the front. What is more, this order should be forgotten!
Equality for women has existed in our country since the very first day of the October Revolution. But you have won equality for women in yet another sphere: in the defence of your country, arms in hand. (…) But allow me, as one grown wise with years, to say to you: do not give yourselves airs in your future practical work. Do not talk about the services you have rendered, let others do it for you. That will be better. (Kalinin 1945; in Markwick and Cardona 2012: 233)
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Thus, the government not only erased female soldiers from the official narration, but also advised them to stay in silence about their experience. In the Chruščёv Thaw, the strong censorship was dismantled but it did not help bring female soldiers out from the obscurity of the national discourse. A reason might be that Chruščёv’s demographic and family policies emphasised a predestination of a woman as a mother (for more on demographic policy during Chruščёv’s ruling, see: Selezneva 2017: 74-75). Paradoxically, the recognition came in Brežnev’s Era of Stagnation (from the mid-60s until the mid-80s of the last century). In this period, demographic and family policies did not pose as the main social concern of the authorities (Selezneva 2017: 75). What is more, Brežnev also found his big love at the front, although he did not get divorced with his wife because he was afraid of the social scandal and of being excluded from the party2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJaqiyYuVU4). For almost two Brežnev’s decades, Nikonova noticed, in Soviet cinema films that different genres have been emerged in which the theme of women in the war was central or developed in parallel with the main one, such as: Ženja, Ženečka, Katjuša (1967), Belorussian Train station (Beloruskij vokzal) (1970), The Dawns Here Are Quite (A zori zdes’ tichie) (1972), In Flight are the Night Witches (V nebe ‘Nočnye ved’my’) (1981) etc. Even in the conditions of Soviet censorship, these films left room for an informal, feminine view of the war. Thanks to the popularity of cinematography, this view gradually "weaved" into the canvas of collective Soviet memory of the Great Patriotic War (Nikonova 2005: 6). However, it was mostly just literary construction. The cult movie The Dawns Here Are Quite was an adaptation of a prose of Boris Vasilev with the same name. Movie image which was constructed on the grounds of this book played a crucial role in building an image of a front-line girl in the Soviet are. All generations have been raised on this book and movie. Nevertheless, it was a pure literary image. Vasilev has never seen women at the front. He admitted in 2000, that originally heroes of his novel were male, but in the process of writing he decided to transform them into female characters to make his work more interesting. What is more, he said that there were already 300 thousands women at the front but
2 The fate of his front love, Tamara, is tragical. Brezhev had promised to be with her after the war. At the front, she had an abortion a few times, counting on the possibility to undergo treatment after the war and then to bear children. However, after the war she was asked to dissapear from the Brezhnev’s and his family life. What is more, she could never have children again.
19 no one wrote about them (Oljuškin 2013). This case clearly shows how the Soviet mythology was build. Significantly, this mythology was offered to the public like reality (Kulaeva 2018).
2.3 “The Unwomanly Face of the War” by Svetlana Aleksevic
A breakthrough in women’s war memory came just in the 1985, when the pioneering The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Aleksevič was published. In the 1980s Aleksevič, a Belarusian journalist and writer, began working on a book The Unwomanly Face of War (Gessen 2015). It was first published in 1984 in abridged form in the newspaper Oktjabr’, and then in 1985 in a book form. The Aleksevič’s book is a collection of monologues of the Soviet female veterans and a few reflections of the writer self. This book strongly deviated from the dominant (especially back then) masculine patriotic and heroic style of war’s memory. “The Unwomanly Face of War” turned to be, as Nikonova called it, the first representation of alternative war memory (Nikonova 2005: 6). By the end of the ‘80s, 2 million pieces were sold in the Soviet Union (Gessen 2015). Aleksevič decided to re-write the history of the war, because she suspected that ‘children of the Vicotry’, as she called all post-war generations, did not know the full scope of the war. The writer had fairly noticed, that although the Great Patriotic War was widely present in Soviet literature and historiography, it focused just on facts, such as dates, places and battles. Aleksevič wanted to show the “human beings in war” instead of heroes. What is more, she had observed that the war was always shown from the male perspective. Therefore she was the first to give voice to women, who were silent for many years (Aleksevič 1985: XI- XIII, XVIII - XIV). The interviewed female soldiers shared not only their female view at this what had happened at the front, but at the same time for the first time they could share their post- war experience, which was cry far from the dream fate of the victor of the great war. However, this perspective was not acceptable for the authorities. Due to above-mentioned, while trying to publish her book, Aleksevič encountered a lot of problems and refusals. Censorship accused her in primitive naturalism, omitting of the great role of the Communist Party and writing not in line with the official point of view of the party on the war. Moreover, she was accused that she demotivated future potential soldiers; that she defamed red soldiers, did not love them and is against them (Aleksevič 1985: XXVI-XXVI, XXXI, XXXIII, XXXV). Summarizing, it did not belong to the official and the only allowed in the
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Soviet Union form of art, namely socialist realism (for more on social realism see: https://www.britannica.com/art/Socialist-Realism). An uncensored edition was published only six years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Gessen 2015). The role of Aleksevič in female war memory is crucial for Soviet and Post-Soviet imagination. It addresses unspoken, although well-known within society issues, thereby opening a place for a vivid public discussion. Interestingly, Aleksevič until nowadays has a leading position in this alternative memory. It is immediately visible after the first Internet research. Most of the non- scholars articles are based on her book. She is constantly mentioned on Internet forums. There are movies and theatrical performances based on her books. More than that, even some scholars by mentioning her book, they treat her work not like literary source, but primary. Aleksevič’s books are criticized for not clear genre. Critics debate: is it fiction or fact? Is Aleksevič an author or a narrator? (for more see: H. Boeykens Literature: an ideological tussle? How Svetlana Aleksevič’s work is used in the ideological struggle between Russia and the West) At this point I would like to accentuate that I acknowledge The Unwomanly Face of War not as a historical testimony, but rather as literary fiction sharing a general climate of these days. Sometimes particular fiction can brake the silence of the public discussion.
2.4 Conclusion
In this chapter, I aimed to present an evaluation of the Soviet female combatants representation in the war narrative. During the war, when the government needed women at the front, although not consistently, it recognized them in their discourse. However, as soon as the war was finished, 800 thousand-army of women who contribute to the great Victory became invisible. Only after 20 years, during the Brežnev’s era, the female soldiers started to emerge again in the official state narration. Notwithstanding, still in limited and one-dimensional form. The space for a valuable discussion was opened only by Aleksevič in 1984. It seems that the war and first post-war authorities recognized female soldiers only when it needed it for their own goals. Thereby in the next chapter I aim to investigate closer this phenomenon. I will examine when and how the government makes from women and female soldiers in particular, the first class icon.
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3. The first-class icon
In this chapter, I will examine the image of women as symbols by focusing on several different mediums, including the textual portrayal of women in official Soviet propaganda, such as from: newspapers; the visual representation of women in posters during the Great Patriotic War; monuments that symbolized the nation that were uplifted after the war; and works of different scholars who were already examining the topic of women as an embodiment of a notion, focusing primarily on works of Oleg Rjabov, Nira Yuval-Davis, Cynthia Enloe, Roger D. Markwick and Euridece Charon Cardona. My engagement with these different sources aims to show that the iconographic representation of women is always as a first-class icon. In contrast to this, the social position of women in society is as "second-class citizens" with limited rights and possibilities.
3.1 Matuŝka Rossija (Mother Russia)
3.1.1 Theory
In this subchapter, I am going to show how, in general, the image of women is used to portray the nation as a whole. Following this, I will show the evolution of the concept of Russia as a woman. An image of a woman is one of the most frequently used images to embody an idea or notion. The image of women is quite voluminous. It is said that the more a notion is abstractive, the more a female image will be used to symbolize it. Women symbolize abstract concepts such as the moral force in judicial systems or liberty. It is also often used as an allegory of a nation (Yuval- Davis 1998: 45). In contemporary discourse (except for the conservative scholar circles) a nation is, according to Benedict Anderson, seen as “the imagined community” (for more see: B. Anderson Imagined Communities, 1983). The most effective way to imagine it, is to visualize it (Rjabov 2008:28). "Humanizing" the nation brings it closer to the everyday experience of the individual. In this process, the idea of kinship plays an important role (explicated through images of kinship as blood as well as spiritual-cultural). E. Smith (1991) said that this sense of extended kinship, relatives and friends, connected with a certain "homeland", underlies the national identities and cohesion of many
22 modern nations and gives their representatives a living feeling of close bondage and long-standing continuity (Smith 1991: 22). An abstract public debt dons the face of a person and abstract social duties become understandable from a simple human point of view (Rjabov 2007: 55). It is also designed to make a single nation out of the sum of individuals (Rjabov 2008: 8). Therefore, national issues become symbolized as a part of family. Nation in itself is mostly embodied by woman – mother. Citizens are represented in the images of sons, brothers, etc. Nation then, can be a mother who brought sons up who now must clear a debt and devote (a part of) themselves to her. When the honor of mother is threatened, sons have to protect her (relations of mothers and daughters are not popular in the national discourse). As a result, countries such as Ireland, India or Russia are represented by Mother Ireland, Mother India or Mother Russia. The family topic plays an extremely important role in the legitimation of the nation; in postulating the "naturalness" of the national community. It appeals to gender metaphors as it removes all questions when reflecting on the national sentiment or international relations (Rjabov 2007: 47, 56; Yuval- Davis 1998: 45). Noteworthy, the rhetoric of inclusion is linked with the rhetoric of exclusion: the enemy is a very significant component of national discourse. In national discourse (like in many others, such as military, political, imperial, and gender), the symbol under study establishes the norm and deviation thereby defining Us and Them. In this context, ‘Us’ is the children of the homeland and ‘Them’ is anyone who wants to impair it (Rjabov 2008: 50-51). Therefore, as it will be shown in the further part of the chapter, if the national plan is to make citizens aware of forthcoming danger, the nation is shown as a woman harmed by a male enemy (often represented in a sexual context). It must be said that the nation is not only symbolized by women – mother. Among the most popular nation allegories in Europe are, for example, ‘warriors’ such as French Marianna (a culmination of ideas of the French Revolution), German Germania (the imperialistic aspiration of Germany), and Polish martyr Polonia (during a partition) (Hartwich 2007).
3.1.2 In Russia
The Russian nation, as it was mentioned in the beginning of this subchapter, is also personalized by a female personage, most commonly as mother. In ancient Russian culture, the image of Russian land was
23 depicted in the female image, most often a maternal appearance, and, in the XVIth century, it became the Holy Russian Motherland (Holy Russia). Although, in Peter the Great’s era, the designation used for the state was the term "Fatherland". After this epoch, the image of Mother Russia (Matuška Rossija) or Mother Motherland (Rodina-mat') became widespread, practically until today. The exception was during the October Revolution and the following years. In the ideology of Bolshevism, with the priority of class over the nation ("Proletarians do not have a homeland"), the image of Mother Russia was ignored or used as a symbol of the backwardness of tsarist Russia; its inertia and national oppression. The figure of the worker became the symbol of the collective identity that the Bolsheviks used instead of Mother Russia. In the mid-1930's, the maternal image of the country returned to Soviet propaganda in the image of the Soviet Mother – Motherland (Rodina-mat') – which became a key element of Soviet patriotism. Unlike the pre-revolutionary "Russia-Mother", the Soviet Motherland is represented as the mother of all the peoples of the USSR. Russia had become a mother for workers of all nationalities. Together with the goal to unify all nations of the Soviet Union, the reasons, according to Ryabov, were the geopolitical situation, the reconfiguration of the gender order, changes in the demographic policy of the 1930s, as well as the need for national mobilization on the eve of war (Ryabov 2008: 9-12, 17-27). The theme of Mother Russia in the Soviet period is inseparable from the military theme in which this symbol is most in demand precisely during wartime (Ryabov 2007: 28). In the next section of the chapter, I will turn my attention to the image of Mother Russia and other female characters presented on the war’s posters.
3.2 Women as an icon during the war
In this section, I examine the representation of women during the Great Patriotic War. Firstly, I will analyze visual representation of women through posters. I have sorted through dozens of posters available on the Internet of Soviet War period posters, printed in the period between 1941 and 1945. Subsequently, I selected the ten most typical and common posters where women are presented in different social roles. Afterwards I will also briefly describe omnipresent monuments which present Russia as a mother in order to commemorate World War Two. Having analyzed ‘war female icons’ in the
24 visual art, I will turn to two real women who were chosen by the state to be the icons of the war, namely Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja and Ljudmila Pavličenko.
3.2.1 Women in Soviet’s visuals arts during the WWII – posters (and monuments)
As Anatolevna and Vladimirovič have noticed, visual art has a significant power potential and allows a certain normative attitude to be introduced to the world and society. Totalitarian visual art fulfills a predetermined propaganda function. Soviet propaganda was one of the most effective in the twentieth century. Soviet posters that influenced people's consciousness and mood were effective means of Soviet agitation and propaganda. These propaganda elements were precisely composed to maintain the ideological position of the state. During the period under review, the effectiveness of the Soviet poster increased significantly – in comparison with the print media – in the conditions of the practical illiteracy of the majority of the population (Anatolevna and Vladimirovič 2015: 179; Morris 2017: 4). I cannot agree with some scholars who ascribe an enormous importance on posters influencing men to fight. It is important to take into account, for example, the fact that there was the presence of the special People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs soldiers (well-known as NKVD) who would shoot any soldier who wanted to back out from the battle. In this respect, a rifle has a bigger power than a poster, despite how convincing the poster might be. However, I assume too that the posters played an important role in forming the notion of the enemy and creating reasons for soldiers to fight. On the one hand, these posters, to a certain extent, showed Hitler or soldiers of Axis, especially Germans, as dangerous monsters and disgusting creatures. It was needed to simultaneously suppress any fear of the enemy in soldiers and also depersonalize their image in order to easier allow the killing of an enemy (see for instance А. V. Fateev (1999) — The image of enemy in the Soviet propaganda (Obraz vraga v sovetskoj propagande 1945—1954). On the other hand, they presented brave and proud young male soldiers from Allies, mostly from the Soviet Union, but with the typical appearance of an ethnic Russian. Between these men stood women. Basing on the study of dozens of posters, available in a web search engines, and study of the available literature, I have distinguished four main types of the image of women: (1) woman as a collective mother; (2) woman as a reason for men to fight; (3) woman as a
25 worker at the rear/backside; and (4) woman at the front – the best friend and the best helper of a male soldier. In the following section, I will try to analyze each type.
3.2.1.1 Women as a collective mother, a nation
As it was explained on the previous page, women can symbolize a nation and are represented as a collective mother. In military discourse, mother symbolizes national unity and calls her sons-soldiers – to fight. They need to protect her and clear an abstract social debt. One of the most famous examples of this kind allegory is a poster designed in 1941 by Soviet painter and poster designer, Irakli Toidze, called “The Motherland Calls!” (“Rodina- Mat’ zovёt”). It is a collective image of the mother who calls for the help of her sons. The poster depicts a middle-age women dressed wholly in red with a serious facial expression, concerned, but still self-confident, and holds in her right hand a text of the military oath which outlines the severe penalty for those who violate the oath to defend their Soviet homeland. In other words, as Rjabov in his paper “’Russia- Motherland’: history of visualization” [my transl.] (“’Rossija- Matuška’: istorija vizualizacii”) notices, Motherland-Mother in this case separates ‘real’ children from traitors, faithful children from infidels (Rjabov 2008: 28). Mother-Motherland also plays another role in the war’s propaganda: she is a warrior. She is not only calling her children to protect her, but she is also ready to protect them if it is needed (Rjabov 2008: 31). Soldiers should be sure that a Motherland is standing behind them so they can fight more bravely. This idea emerges on posters where women (mother) is standing behind her sons (soldiers) giving them motivation and inspiration – energy to fight. At the same time, she is always ready to react when they face problems. Mother-Motherland is always strong. She has a visible female shape (like visible breasts or a waistline), but at the same time she is heavily built. The masculinity of a woman is stressed. This kind of process is what N. Berjadev called “socialist titanism” (Berjadev 1990: 123). In Soviet society, physical strength plays a key role. Although this subchapter mostly is about posters, it is necessary to mention the monuments of Mother- Motherlands built in the Soviet Union in order to, among others, commemorate the Great Patriotic War. These monuments were constructed in every of republic of the Soviet Union. The most famous embodiment of this image is the monumental sculpture, "The Motherland Calls!” installed on
26 the Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, Russia. Mother-Motherland is represented here by shouting women stepping forward with a highly raised sword in the right hand and extending the left hand in a calling gesture. This 85 meter statue, at the time of opening (1967), was the highest statue in the world (Rjabov 2008:30-31; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPM5VnOjHY; https://www.culture.ru/materials/159169/rodina-mat-zovet-10-faktov-o-monumente). The other great example is the Motherland Monument in Kiev, Ukraine (1981). This massive figure at 62m high is placed on a hill, and like the one from Volgograd, looks at the whole city. The Motherland holds in her right hand a sword and in the left a shield (https://web.archive.org/web/20150504150947; http://www.warmuseum.kiev.ua/eng/skulp.shtml). Soldiers need to know that this cruelty which they are going to commit is justified. Therefore, a collective mother (or sometimes beloved) blesses a man, thus legitimizing his participation in the war (Rjabov 2007: 85- 86). Like in the poster where a lady in her 40-50’s who is at the background of burning houses and, typical for Russia's landscape, white birch trees, asks soldiers to “[r]evenge for the grief of the people!” (“Msti za gore naroda!”) (https://2ch.hk/ussr/src/29590/14696041943160.jpg). Another example is a poster of Yosif Aleksandrovič’s authorship, called “Beat harder, the little son!”. It was designed in 1941 and depicts the scene of sending a son to an army. The mother from the poster commands her son to beat the enemy hard (Galimullina 2014: 3).
3.2.1.2 Women as beloved or daughter; fighting for the sake of ‘womenandchildren’ [!]
Cynthia Enloe (1990) has named another important symbolical role of a woman during the war. For the sake of women and children, men are supposed to fight. As Enloe has pointed out, in the collective memory, women are associated with children, family and, consequently, with the future of an individual as well as a collectivity. Enloe called this phenomenon “in the sake of ‘womenandchildren’ [!]” (Enloe 1990; in Yuval-Davis 1998: 45). In this context, women are mostly beloveds of daughters. A man becomes a guardian of women in order to protect his own future and the future of the collectivity. I would also add that women are not only associated with future destiny, but also the past and the “waiting” present – home. Man wants to go back as soon as possible to his normal environment and a
27 waiting woman symbolizes it. So, he will do everything to destroy an enemy as soon as possible so to get back home. What is more, another mode of representations of women is associated with the creation of pictures depicting dishonor or sexual violence that ‘our’ women are exposed to from an enemy man. The enemy as a sexual aggressor is a perpetual character both in narratives about the fate of individual women and in the representations of a dishonored homeland (Rjabov 2007: 78). It is not only about dishonor, but also about symbolical borders of which women are an embodiment. Woman, as a reproducer of society (in a biological as well as a cultural dimension), carries the ‘burden of representation’ of the collective identity, as Yuval it calls. They need to be ‘proper’ and undefiled to be bearers of ‘the proper nation’. In this way women’s sexuality becomes politicized (Rjabov 2007: 63-64; Yuval-Davis 1998: 40-46). This issue is clearly summed up by Sita Ranchod-Nilsson and Mary Ann Tetreault in “Women, States, and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation?” which states:
[T]he rape of the body/nation not only violates frontiers but disrupts – by planting alien seed or destroying reproduce viability – the maintenance of the community through time. There is an additional “potent” message in this patriarchal metaphor: Men who cannot defend their woman/nation against rape/invasion have lost their proprietary claim to that body/nation, that land. (Ranchod-Nilsson and Tetreault 2000: 68)
Woman, who is placed on posters in a frame of the abovementioned notion, is not in her middle age like the first type mostly was, but rather looks like a very young woman (it looks like she is beloved or daughter). Often, she keeps in her hand a baby or small child. This tactic was also used widely by Soviet agitators during the Great Patriotic War. When the country started to become under occupation, posters where woman is pictured not as a mother/hero, but as a young girl/victim began to appear as well. Beautiful and innocent young women are portrayed, for example, as slaves of German soldiers under barbed wire. One of the famous posters in this stream is designed by Nina Vantolina (artist and graphic designer), namely “Fascism: The Most Evil Enemy of Women. Everyone to the Struggle against Fascism” (“Fašizm- zlejšij vrag ženščin. Vse na bor’bu c fašizmom”). A Slav looking girl, dressed wholly in red (a dress and a scarf on her head), looks at the viewer and shows a burning city/village behind her. She asks the viewer for a reaction. Behind her, there are not only burning houses, but there is also a women sitting who cries
28 and a dead woman with a small child lying on her (probably dead, too). It was published shortly after the Nazi attack during June 1941. The poster was later re-created according to the needs of the regime. After the German invasion in the Caucasus Mountains, the Slavic girl was transformed into a local Azerbaijan’s girl (Gale and Sidlina 2017: 84-85). Another perfect example is a poster by Viktor Koretski (1942) called “Red Army Soldier, Save Us!” (“Voin krasnoj armii, spasi!”). It illustrates a young woman with a boy, only a few years old, crying in her arms. She is looking at a German soldier who is treating her. Whilst the soldier is not visible, his sword bayonet with dripping blood is clearly depicted. Koretski’s design was widespread across the whole Soviet Union during war times (Gale and Sidlina 2017: 87). An example of a poster with a sexual context is a poster called “A soldier of the Red Army! You will not bring your beloved to shame and dishonor to Hitler’s soldiers!” [my transl.] (“Boec krasnoj armii! Ty ne daš ljubimuju na pozor i besčestie gitlerovskim soldatam!”). It pictures a young lady, in a destroyed white dress with one bare arm, bound (Galimullina 2014: 2). The second example is a poster called “Kill a fascist-fanatic!” [my transl.] (Ubej fašista- izuvera!) (https://babs71.livejournal.com/521481.html). It shows a dead young blonde woman with a rope on her neck in a white open shirt and a naked chest. The shape of one breast is visible, but the second looks like it is cut. Above her is a caricature of slobbering and smiling German soldier, an elder man. Such images do not just legitimize participation in the war, but they often impose the obligation to completely destroy the enemy. Therefore, the images of the suffering of ‘our’ women as an appeal to the gender identity of ‘his’ men are widely used in military discourse. As Rjabov noticed, based on many studies, there is a significant mobilizing effect of such paintings (Rjabov 2007: 78). Noteworthy, is that, in this type of representation, the role of woman is passive.
3.2.1.3 Woman as a worker at home front
With the outbreak of the war the Soviet government needed extra manpower. First of all, ‘someone’ needed to replace the men who went to combat. Secondly, modern warfare required a strong support from the industry. ‘Someone’ needed to fulfill constantly increasing demand for weapons. This ‘someone’ was the women and, to a certain extent, the children too. The war time was enormously exhausting for women at the back. They needed to make their previous job, take care of the children,
29 and also replace men at their workplace. What is more, the production norms from the party still needed to be fulfilled. In order to drive women to put in extraordinary effort, posters emerged depicting female workers, who, through their work in factories and kolkhoz, made victory closer. Men physically protected her and she, in the meantime, was supporting him by her work. In this way, they were winning the war together. An example is a poster titled “We replace” [my transl.] (“Zamenim”). In the front is a masculinized female factory worker with one glove on her hand (it looks like her work is really hard, physically) and in the background there are marching soldiers and flying planes with everything in red (Galimullina 2014: 1). A second example is a poster, authorship of F. Antonov, called “Comrades! We will execute the annual plan for the day of Stalin's constitution!” [my transl.] (“Toviarišči! Vypolnim godovoy plan ko dnju stalinskoj konstitucii!”) (https://inomoderator.livejournal.com/159145.html). On the poster, a woman is no more in a dress, but in the descent worker outfit and with her hand she calls others for action.
3.2.1.4 Woman at the front – “the best friend and the best helper of a male soldier”
Throughout the history of military propaganda emerged representations of women as warriors as well. Yuval-Davis (1998), describing the depiction of female warriors in whole, notices that:
These images usually have either enhanced the constructed unnaturalness of women fighters, or been made in such a way as to conclude with more generalized notions of the femininity and masculinity in the society from which the women fighters have come. […] [T]heir man function has usually been not to point out that women are capable of warfare heroism like men, but rather to construct them as unnatural if romantic women. (Yuval – Davis 1998: 94-95)
This romantic image of female military heroines became more popular from the last century when women started to officially serve in the army (in liberation movements or empire’s armies). This was also the case in Soviet military propaganda (Yuval-Davis 1998: 95). There is a noticeable formation of a women's focus on the struggle with the invader or as a combat comrade, for example as fighters or nurses. In this kind of representation women seem to “fight” shoulder to shoulder. However, she depicted as standing or marching often a bit after the soldiers, such as on: "Get in the ranks of front-line girlfriends. A nurse – soldier’s helper and friend!" [my transl.] (“Vstavay v rjady frontovych podrug.
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Družinnica- soldatu pomoščnik i drug!) (Galimullina 2014: 2). This type of female representation seems to be less common than the previous groups.
3.2.2 Icons of ‘Soviet hagiography’
The government via the influential broadsheet Truth – the Communist Party’s official newspaper whilst the Soviet Unions was in existence – admitted the great role that women played in the victory of the Great Patriotic War: “[...] красная Армия вместе со всей советской страной еще раз воздает заслуженную славу героическим женщинам нашей Родины, женщинам-патриоткам, труженицам и воинам.”3 (https://inomoderator.livejournal.com/159145.html). However, for dozens of years after the war the figures of female soldiers from the Red Army were not known in society. With the exception of a few female soldiers who were chosen by the government to be ‘the first-class icon’. Among them were, for example, fighter pilot Lidia Vladimirovna Litvjak and the ‘night witches’ (female military aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment), Ljudmila Michailovna Pavličenko, and Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja (Sakaida 2003: 13, 31, 48; https://defendingrussia.ru/a/nochnye_vedmy-3994/). Undoubtedly, these figures were heroic and brave. However, the way in which they were recognized contrasted to the fate of numerous female combats during the war, especially when talking about discrimination and gender- related issues. These problems were not welcomed back then and, indeed, are not welcome nowadays either (although, I am not sure if it ever was). In order to introduce the two characteristic ways (although it could be more) in which the Party used female combatants for their own propaganda goals, the case of cult of Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja and Ljudmila Pavličenko will be analyzed.
3.2.2.1 In the sake of “Our” Zoya
R. D. Markwick and E. Ch. Cardona, in their book “Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War”, focus on martyred female partisans who played a crucial role in building an icon in the Soviet narration. Namely, they represented the noble image of the Soviet struggle. They were examples of
3 “[…] the Red Army, along with the entire Soviet country, [...] pays deserved fame to the heroic women of our Motherland, patriotic women, female toilers and female soldiers.” [my transl.]
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“individual initiative” and they inspired all groups of society to defend the Motherland (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 117; see also Krylova 2010: 220-222). In the beginning of the war, the partisan movement experienced disastrous losses and was rather unsuccessful. According to Markwick and Cardona, the state, in order to mask this failure, began to create a cult of young martyred partisans who are an example of “heroic martyrdom”. Probably the most popular in the Soviet’s hagiography is Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja. The cult of ‘a Zoja’ was cautiously constructed. She was an 18 year old Komsomolka who was caught during her second sabotage mission in late November, 1941. After a few days of torture and delaying to provide information to German soldiers, she was publicly hung. Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja was the first women who received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union (Sakaida 2003: 48). What is more, she was posthumously awarded just two weeks after the investigation of her execution. This is significant because this process was normally very complicated (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 118 - 121). On 27 January 1942, under a name Tanja, Truth introduced the pitiless fate of Kosmodemjanskaja (her real identity was still unknown). Before execution, she did not lose her fighting spirit and faith in the victory of the Soviet Union. One of her last words were “victory will be ours” and “farewell comrades! Fight! Fear not! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!” Truth announced that:
Tanya had achieved immortality as a martyr for a sacred national cause: ‘She had endured an agonizing death as a heroine, as a true daughter of a great people, whom nobody would ever break. Her memory will live forever! (in Markwick and Cardona 2012: 120)
Next to her heroic suffering, Truth paid attention largely to her loyalty to the state and nation, especially in the light of Stalin’s shocking secret Order No. 270 of 16 August 1941, which has been indicated by scholars. According to the order, Red Army soldiers who ‘surrendered’ were equal to traitors. Yet Kosmodemjanskaja was not a traitor, she was a martyr (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 120). A process of a ‘beatification’ of Kosmodemjanskaja was opened by a shocking for reader article in Truth. Priceless, in building the cult of martyr of Kosmodemjanskaja, were pictures of her published in Komsomol’s Truth (Komsomolskaja Pravda). These were really drastic pictures where: her body was frozen and naked. The corpse was mutilated and one breast hacked off. More pictures and more publications devoted to Zoja followed (in all 25) and martyrdom of this young partisan became a call for action, for cruel revenge – “in the name of our Zoja”. A film directed by Lev Arnshtam in mid-1944
32 ultimately strengthened the cult of Kosmodemjanskaja with 22 million viewers just in 1944 (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 123-124). A big role in the process of the ‘beatification’ of Kosmodemjanskaja was also played by the radio broadcast which featured the mother of the martyred partisan on 17 February 1944 and was also published by Truth the next day. Like Markwick and Cardona noticed, the pain of mothers was again used in the warfare campaign. It was crying to call for revenge for the barbarity actioned on a pure daughter, who embodied the whole defenseless nation. This was not the end of “mother’s campaigns”. Five years after the war, Ljubov Kosmodemjanskaja toured schools to share the heroic life, and heroic death, of her children (a brother of Zoja, Aleksandr, also killed during the war, was awarded as a ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ as well) (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 121-122). The cult of Zoja is another example of the use of the Cynthia Enloe theory, described in the proceeding subchapter, by the Soviet geovernment: “in the sake of ‘womenandchildren’” (Yuval-Davis 1998: 45). Kosmodemjanskaja is portrayed not as a female warrior, but as an example of a defenseless female, self-sacrificed, “which the primary appeal was to masculine, martial values to defend an innocent, ravaged, feminized Motherland and people” (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 121-122). Markwick and Cardona, analyzing publications about this female partisan, drew the conclusion that “she was a perfect product of the Soviet system and female role model of ultimate patriotic sacrifice” (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 121). As the scholars noticed: “Whereas female soldiers and heroines were revered for their ‘spiritual’ and ‘feminine qualities’, male heroes were lauded for their ‘action’” (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 123). Kosmodemjanskaja was the symbol of the ultimate patriotism during the war and was well-known in every corner of society. In the subsequent peace conditions, she remained to be an embodiment of the love of the Motherland. She was even given as an example for the children and young people at school. The cult became even more forceful during the Brežnev’s era when the Great Patriotic War replaced the October Revolution as a national founding myth (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 119, 125). The cult of Zoja did not even stop when the Soviet Union collapsed. It is clearly visible, for example, from Internet websites and forums where people admire her and, in their eyes, every negative comment makes a big scandal.
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3.2.2.2 “She killed 309 Germans. How many have you killed?”
Another type of icon was Ljudmila Pavličenko who was a Soviet female sniper. Unlike the innocent martyred Zoja, she was portrayed by the state as merciless and calculated killer. According to Markwick and Cardona, this kind of popularization of female snipers as a lone vengeful warrior was some kind of a mask. In this way, the state wanted to hide the reality and common issues of female combatants and partisans – such as gendered subordination and discrimination – during the war (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 204). I would also add that such significant empowerment of just a few women is a way to show how modern the alleged society is. Men said, where women are more emancipated the more modern the society is. Picking a few women was kind of a way to promote the ‘supposed’ modernity of the state of affairs in the Soviet Union and as a means of hiding the gendered order of the society. Ljudmila Pavličenko, the Soviet Amazon, was a walking advertisement of the Red Army. She was praised for her ability to kill. Pavličenko was proud that she had officially killed 309 Nazi soldiers and that she could have killed even more if she would not have been put in hospital after being injured. This substantial number, ‘309’, always appears in all kinds of publications about Pavličenko. Pavličenko was presented as an example for female as well as male soldiers in frontline newspapers, party’s newspapers such as Truth or publications like The Red Army Agitator’s Notebook (Bloknot agitator Krasnoy Armii). Indeed, a lot of soldiers got inspired by her deeds. She was admired, not just for the fact that she was a good marksman, but also for her passionate hatred towards the enemy (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 206). She could lie for hours and hours without moving to be sure to capture some enemies. This is one reason, among others, why she was called ‘Lady Death’ by American journalists (https://vvvetohin.livejournal.com/19070.html). Regarding ‘the walking advertisement of the Red Army’, Pavličenko was not just used for mobilization at ‘home’, but she was also used in the propaganda of the Soviet state abroad. She was sent to the USA, Canada and Britain to agitate open the second Western front (August–November 1942) and to gain the United State's involvement in WW2. While speaking before a large crowd in Chicago, she called men for an action: "Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don't you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?" (King 2013). Her speech was a huge success. She was welcomed everywhere with enthusiasm from the public as well as the media. The New
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York Daily Mirror called her ‘The Russian Heroine’ (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 206-207). American country singer, Woody Guthrie, wrote about a song called “Miss Pavlichenko”[!] in 1976 in memory of the 60th anniversary of the birth of Pavličenko. Additionally, in the USSR, a postage stamp with her image also emerged. She is still one of the most famous women, along with Kosmodemjanskaja, who fought in the Great Patriotic War on the Soviet side (http://www.warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=261). In 2014, a movie was made about her heroic deeds and, still, new articles emerge about her (which do not provide any more information about her, but repeat praising slogans). On internet forums, there are a lot of positive comments from internet users and some of them still wish she was as an example of patriotism for young people.
3.3 Conclusion
To summarize, women embody abstract ideas as their image is often used in national discourse, as well as military discourse. Women then, serve as a ‘first-class icon’. However, unfortunately in real life they are often ‘second-class citizens’. P. Bourdieu described female existence as "being perceived" where women exist, first of all, through the eyes of others and for the sight of others. According to the researcher, masculine domination produces women as symbolic objects which keeps them in a state of permanent symbolic dependence (Bourdieu; in Rjabov 2007: 37-38). The same notion is excellently summarized by a polish scholar, Maria Janion (2007): “the allegory created by men – lending a symbolic value and meaning to a woman – denied the real influence at the same time” [my transl.] (Janion 2007; in Hartwich 2007). Having examined the visual representation of women in visual arts (especially posters) and highlighted the way in which the state has used two female soldiers to their own propaganda’s goal, I will turn my attention to excerpts from female soldier’s lives during the war and in the subsequent peace conditions. This will be done in order to analyze an issue which allows the deduction that women, in the shape of Soviet female soldiers, were ‘second-class citizens’.
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4. Case studies: excerpts from female soldiers lives during and after WW2
In her valuable article “Women, war and the figures of ommitment”, Olga Nikonova highlights the forced demobilization of female combatants that took place after the war. However, they did not take into account the personal plans and intentions of those women who served in the Red Army, by asking them whether they wanted to serve further or not. Following a new gender order on the frontline, the women found themselves in a peaceful post-war society in which they still lived in accordance with a traditional gender order where people were concerned with their own problems and had little time to consider the problems of female soldiers. Importantly, the Russian scholar notices that many ex-front-line female soldiers were now unwanted guests (Nikonova 2005: 5-6). They also had ‘a war luggage’ which did not allow them or, at least, hampered their ability to establish ‘a normal life’. After devoting the previous chapter to the analysis of the exclusion of female veterans from the official post-war discourse, in this chapter I aim to present the most common gender-related problems which female soldiers in the Soviet Army faced during WW2 and (especially) in the subsequent peace conditions. Despite the rich archival material I found, in this chapter my analysis will be based on memoirs of the veterans of the Great Patriotic War (from both female and male authorship). I will discuss only several case-studies to illustrate my argument about the gendered character in the treatment of the female soldiers. Hence, I selected those cases that I consider as the most illustrative and that offer most reoccurring issues. To begin, I will consider two unique, first-published cases studies of female veterans including Klavdia Kalašnikova and Nina Petrovna Borisova; an interview with a female soldier from the Leningrad front Susana Aronovna Brejdo (also a primary and unique material which is no longer available for public access). In addition, I will include the works of other scholars, such as Markwick, Cardona, Nikonova and Bischl, as well as an interview I did with a daughter of a male veteran, historian and human rights defender from the Anti-Discrimination Center “Memorial” Brussels Stefania Kulaeva. Understandably, I will also draw on Svetlana Aleksevič’s book “The Unwomanly Face of War”. I would like to highlight again that I consider Aleksevič’s book not as a historical document, but rather as a literary text situated between fiction and historical account with a great cultural load. It is a source that was the first to bring
36 to light some of the issues that affected women despite these issues being well-known within society at the time. It addresses unspoken issues thereby opening a place for a public discussion. Regarding memoirs, methodological limitations should be taken into account, such as impact of time or the variety of current political situations. Even more important, particularly during the period of the Soviet Union, veterans were under the influence of strong censorship. In this regard, as Markwick and Cardona notice, it is worthy to use post-Soviet memoirs which at least are not directly affected by official censorship (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 4-5). However, they are limited by self-censorship and they often stay in the romantic-heroic stream. A similar instance occurs with interviews of recollection about oneself or of a member of a family, such as the case studies featured in this chapter, which often contain elements of partial and personal views on the past, tendencies to embellish the recounted events and a willingness to present oneself or one’s own family in a good light.
4.1 Broken Trajectories: Outline of the situation of the Soviet (ex) female soldiers after the Great Patriotic War
The attitude towards female veterans varied and depended on different factors, such as the place they came from or the unit where they served (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 239). Country communities were, for example, much more traditional than inhabitants of big cities like Leningrad or Moscow. The women of Leningrad did not feel as much objectivization and stigma and there were many women in the defense of the city (as can be seen for example from Susana Brejdo’s memories). In villages a woman going to a city on her own was already an issue, let alone going the war front (Kulaeva 2018). Women who served in air units could expect more respect than for example corpswomen, although, this was not always the case. Irina Drjagina, a night-bomber pilot, recalled that sometimes men praised her for being “from that (air) regiment”, but at other times she faced “silent contempt” or insults from men as well as from the home front’s women (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 239). Women’s military service in the Red Army was subjected to much doubt and female soldiers encountered gender discrimination during the war as well in the subsequent peace conditions (Bischl 2017:122). Society had difficulties believing that women could really achieve something at the front and often it was believed that they were awarded not for ‘military deeds’ (voyennye zaslugi), but for ‘military-sexual deeds’
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(voyenno-polevye zaslugi). Whilst in some cases this could be true, it certainly was not a rule. There were truly brave and heroic women at the front (Kulaeva 2018), who, according to scholars such as Nikonova, Markwick, Cardon, Krylova, had to hide their military past for the sake of establishing a "normal" life. Front women were not always warmly welcomed in society. Rather, they were often stigmatized and thus preferred not to share their military experience, in contrast to the experience of men (Markwick and Cardona 239). Aleksevič noticed that there was an unspoken agreement between front women to remain silent in order to avoid insults and slander (Aleksevič 2017: 225). In the introduction to her book, she tells of the need of female veterans to ‘speak out’ about their military past. She claimed that, in a lot of cases, she was the first person who asked these women about their past and she had interviewed plenty of women. Although it was painful, they seemed to be surprised at their relief that they could finally speak out loud about their stories, specifically ‘their’ version and thoughts. Usually, people did not want to hear their story and preferred them to have a calm life (Aleksevič 2017: XXII, 77, 90, 114, 252).
4.1.1 Perception of the intimate relations at the front
From the beginning of female participation in WW2, young women were suspected of joining the army to find a partner (Markwick and Cardon 2012: 239). A lot of contemporary scholars notice that the military merit of front-line female soldiers was perceived in the collective imagination as “sexual service”. In this regard, they were called “military field wives” (vojenno- polevye ženy) or PPZHe (pochodno-polevaja žena) (Bischl 2017: 119; Markwick and Cardona 2012: 239- 240; Nikonova 2005: 5- 6). Female soldiers at the front-line were a concern especially for women who stayed at home, and who blamed them for seducing men (Aleksevič 2017: 76, 248). Sixty wives of Soviet generals, after the initiative of a general’s wife, Elizavieta Gagin, sent a petition to the party against ‘front girlfriends’ of their husbands (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJaqiyYuVU4). Condemnation of the female soldiers and the need to hide the past can be found in one of the veteran’s interviews on the website www.iremember.ru which tries to show the other face of the war. Olga Pavlovna Cibikovna, responsible for censoring The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), on a question posed by A. Drabkin, asked if she also encountered prejudice, which was a fate of the front-line women. She answered:
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- No. I heard that it was said about someone: "Oh, it's a front-line soldier" – as about a man of the second grade. But then I did not say that I was also at the front. I encountered a very good attitude towards me in the garrison where we lived because my husband was very respected. And in the house, on the contrary, because of me he was well treated. [my transl.] https://iremember.ru/memoirs/nkvd-i-smersh/tsibikova- olga-pavlovna/
Stronger insults than PPZHe also occurred, such as use of the term ‘whore’. As in the case of a frontline doctor, Vera Malachova, who admitted in the 1990s that: “I didn’t like to show myself [with my medals] because many people thought I was some kind of front- line ‘W’ [Whore] – unfortunately many called us that” (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 239- 240). Ekaterina Nikitična Sannikova, a hero from “The Unwomanly Face of War”, recalled how her neighbors from a communal apartment used to curse her and put vinegar into her dishes, saying things like: “Ha-ha-ha... tell us how you whored around there with the men...” (Aleksevič 2017:237). A story of another hero from Aleksevič’s book is very touching where a woman came back home after the war and on the fourth day she heard from her mother: “Daughter dear, I’ve prepared a bundle for you. Go away... Go away... You have two younger sisters growing up. Who will marry them? Everybody knows you spent four years at the front, with men...” (Aleksevič 2017: XXXVIII). There is also a story of a female army paramedic who tore up all her certificates confirming that she was wounded three times during the war because she was afraid she would not find a husband if her past was be known. However, later she needed these papers to obtain a medical assistance (Aleksevič 2017: 97). Although accusations of being soldier’s mistress were painful and often undeserved, the phenomenon of PPZHe is also not a pure fabrication or a myth. Intimate relations at the front had taken place. Sometimes it was a wish of a woman, sometimes it was a necessity. Women were just a small percentage of all soldiers at the front comprising thereby a vulnerable group and they were often subjected to sexual harassment. Sometimes being ‘a field campaign wife’ was the only way to feel safety among male comrades. Both female and male veterans confirm that women chose to be PPZHe because it was better to be with one man, even without love, than to be afraid of being attacked all the time. Sometimes if a woman at the front did not become a PPZHe of an officer, she would be (strongly) misused by soldiers (for example: Kulaeva 2018; http://oppps.ru/osobennosti-zhenskogo-uchastiya-v- vojne.html; Aleksevič 2017: 235). The situation was especially serious between partisan movements which were a far cry from the official pronouncements (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 148). The
39 government tried to solve the problem of sexual harassment. As the front-line worker Yu.P. Krymski notes, for the rape of front-line women, officers could be put under trial, sent to penal companies, and sometimes even shot. However, it appeared not to be effective (Rebrova 2018: 6). Some women had to become an officer’s mistress in order to avoid being strongly punished by their superiors. Lidja Terskaja, front medical personnel, recalled that she was treated very well in her battalion. However, once she was told to go to the commander and it was obvious that she was chosen to become PPZhe of the commander. She did not want to, but it was an order of a commander of the unit. Not following an order could result in a war tribunal. She then immediately recalled the story of a young boy who did not want to fight at the front. He was afraid. So, he shot his hand so that he would have to go to the hospital. Because of this, he was punished by the tribunal. All brigade had to watch when they killed him. So, Terskaja decided to go to the commander. They were living in dugout with other helpers of the commander. He offered her nice food and other things, but she kept refusing. He looked at her as an idiot. It went on for three weeks and she kept trying to ask him to send her back and after a long conversation he did it. She said that he did not do anything bad to her. She was lucky, but not everyone was (see: http://www.world-war.ru/vse-nado-pereterpet-vojna/). In closing, it is important to stress that becoming a military field wife was not always about being a victim. Sometimes women did so to receive some privileges, such as more food or as a means of avoiding taking part in a battle (Rebrova 2018: 6). The constant accusation and finger-pointing by the society however remained steady and persistent regardless of the behavior and choices of the female solider, which clearly reveals the prevalence of wider social preconceived attitude towards women fighters.
4.1.2 ‘Unwomanly’ female soldiers
Arguably, women even in the front were dreaming about marriage and a family life, and sometimes men were afraid of women from the front (Aleksevič 2017:14). Even if they were not considered as military field wives, it was believed that if a woman had spent too much time (at the front) among men, she lost her virtuosity, purity and sensitivity (Aleksevič 2017: 57) and she became vulgar and mannish (Bisch 2017: 118). Lilja Michailova Butko recalls her admirer: “I couldn’t imagine you had been in the army. You see a girl at the front...” (Aleksevič 2017:246). Women should be (or pretend to be) innocent women or
40 mothers. Alternatively, she can be an erotic fantasy, but not someone who participates in military operations. It was ‘forbidden’ for a woman – a potential wife – to have the ability to kill. Once she saw the front, she would not be innocent anymore. Men can kill because war is considered as a natural male domain (Yuval- Davis 1998: 94). Men can shoot, women cannot: “But to see a rifle in a woman's hands...” (Aleksevič 2017:74-75). It was considered strange for a significant part of the society that women could also have a willingness to fight. Former male combat, M. Kočetkov, said:
When I heard that our nurse, surrounded by them, fired back, protecting the wounded soldiers, because the wounded are helpless, like children, I understood this, but when two women crawl to kill someone with a "sniper" on the neutral strip - it's still a "hunt" ... Although I, myself, was a sniper and I shot... But I'm a man ... I could have gone to a mission with one of them, but I would not take her as a wife. [my transl.] (http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/Work/Konkurs/13/Kuznecova1/0.htm).
We can see that the cult of domesticity’s notion about female virtuosity did not disappear in the XXth century. Female combatants were often perceived in a negative way; they were seen as something abnormal, without a female soul (Aleksevič 2017: 197, 289). In this regard, an interesting case is that of a captain – company commander in the Moscow Fleet – Taissia Petrovna Rudenko-Ševeleva, a hero from Aleksevič’s book. Her mother was teased heavily by other village women: “What did you give birth to? A girl or a boy?” (Aleksevič 2017:202). Similarly, another story from Aleksevič’s work was about a former female sniper who reminisced about how her husband left her when she gave a birth to a sick child. He blamed her, saying that it was her fault and that she was something abnormal because normal women would not fight at the front (Aleksevič 2017: 250). The other issue was that men wanted to forget the cruelty of the war and, therefore, ‘their girls’ too. Men wanted someone ‘clean’, ‘nice’, ‘beautiful’. Someone who would be associated with ‘heart and home’ (Aleksevič 2017: 238). Their female comrades, or often wartime love, were automatically associated with the war. Therefore, as a male character of Aleksevič said, “We wanted to forget the war. And we forgot our girls too...” (Aleksevič 2017:77). A lot of women never found a husband post-war (although this problem touched non-combatant women too) (Gregoreva 2018; Kulaeva 2018). It is noteworthy that back then, being a single women or single mother was more difficult than nowadays, often due to social and economic problems.
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There are, fortunately, also stories with ‘happy endings.’ Irina Bogačeva, a front nurse, heard from her mother that she had volunteered at the front only because she wanted to find a husband. However, Bogačeva was proud of her service and did not bend under pressure. She would walk in her military uniform with the Order of the Red Star looking proud and fulfilled (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 239).
4.1.3 The Soviet (ex) female soldiers and their testimonies
As it was mentioned in the chapter Image of the female soldier, The Unwomanly Face of War was a breakthrough in showing the frontline women at the war, and actually, this work still remains to be a groundbreaking testimony. Many Russian and international scholars, as well as general public, have based their opinion on Aleksevič’s work. This is clearly visible already after the first research about the conditions of the Soviet female veterans during and after the war. It appears she is (one of) the first to try to change the state of affairs that promoted silence and absence of discussion on this topic. In preparing for her book, Aleksevič realized that although there are thousands of books about the war, and still more are being written, most of them, if not all, are told from the male perspective. She writes: “Everything we know about war we know with a man’s voice. We are all captives of men’s notions and men’s sense of the war. Men’s words. Women are silent” (Aleksevič 1985: XIII). When she started to interview female veterans, it turned out that sometimes she was the first to do so. Women seemed to be surprised that someone approached them and would often forward Aleksevič to their husbands, who knew the ‘right’ version of the war (Aleksevič 2017: 186). The male version of the war used to be perceived as the ‘correct one’. Female versions altogether were seen as inferior and containing ‘women’s fantasies’. The Belarusian author writes that some of her female interlocutors were ‘trained’ by their husband about what to say about the war as they wanted to be sure that they say the most important information like battles, weapons, names, and numbers of those killed (Aleksevič 2017: 91-95). Aleksevič heard from the bosses of one factory where she came to make interviews, who said: “Aren’t there enough men?” (Aleksevič: XXI-XXII). Stories told by women usually make the war less heroic or even not heroic at all. They spoke about feelings. They mentioned dirtiness, lice, blood, vodka …, fear, and sadness (see, for example: Aleksevič 2017: 47, 56, 64, 67, 146). They talk about things that “can’t be talked about” (Aleksevič 2017: 209).
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Kerstin Bischl in her article “Female Red Army Soldiers in World War II and Beyond” also noticed that women’s testimonies faced limitations and that there was prejudice towards their military service. She analyzed (ex) front women’s memoirs and observed that what the interviewees said depended on what the women felt they needed to defend themselves against or what they needed to prove during a particular period. During the war, while the state doubted their ability to participate in military missions, they were mostly talking about their capability to be good citizens and good soldiers. After their service, they faced accusations that they were “insane”, “unfeminine” and “vulgar” due to their willingness to fight and the fact that they were present at the front. Therefore, their memoirs started to stress their femininity. It was also the first time when gender related problems, like sexual harassment, were beginning to be mentioned. Unfortunately, it turned against female veterans and then they started to be blamed for this sexual exploitation. So, from the 2000s, the main ‘strategy’ of ex-front women was to show that they have nothing in common with the appearance of PPZHe (Bishl 2017: 121-122).
4.1.4 Invisible ‘backstage’
Some units, like 588th Night Bomber Regiment, called The Night Witches, were highly praised by people at the war front as well as at the home front (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 234). However, the war could not have taken place without the ‘backstage’ – not only at the home front, but also, in the shape of women who served by the front. Soldiers needed to eat, have their clothes washed, or holes mended, and so on. These needs were mostly filled by women. These washerwomen, seamstresses and chefs do not refer to themselves as heroes despite the importance of their role and exhausting tasks. For example, characters from Aleksevič’s work recall how they needed to cook the whole day, to sew during the evening, and to keep sentry during the night; how they needed to keep baking bread even during bombardment; how laundry girls got ruptures, eczema, and lost finger nails due to the environment where they needed to work. They were sometimes laughed at by male soldiers who taunted that they were dirty and in old clothes (Aleksevič 2017: 159 -171). By serving soldiers like these, they were in danger too. Cibikova, who has already been mentioned in the previous section, remembers the attack on the hospital when the entire bath-laundry squad where the girls worked was cut out (https://iremember.ru/memoirs/nkvd-i-smersh/tsibikova-olga-pavlovna/)
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4.1.5 Education, employment and position in the society of (ex) female soldiers
Female soldiers, like all citizens, felt the joy when the vicious war was over. However, they also felt fear. Most female combatants were very young when they went to the front and as they were serving, their peers after the war had already obtained some education. Whilst male combatants could use their experience in war to further their careers, military careers for female veterans from the Red Army as well as for female partisans who had known just the war, with a small exception, was closed (Nikonova 2005: 5-6; Aleksevič 2017: 155). Their military service did not even help to stimulate women’s careers in other fields or help to improve their social position (Markwick and Cardona 2012:235). They were pressured to end their military tasks and pushed to female civilian life where they were not always warmly welcomed (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 148). This is in contrast to male veterans, who encountered a preferential approach in the educational system, labor market, and the party’s recruitment after the war. In this regard, it is important to stress that during the war women took over all male positions even at a high level. Their skills were praised in national discourse (for example: in the state’s newspaper Red Star, on the 7th of March 1943 – “Famous daughter of the great Motherland” [my transl.]). However, when men came back from the front, the higher positions were given back to them and women went back to the lower positions (Clements 2012: 250). There was preferential treatment of male veterans not only in education and employment, but they also held a better position in society. They were more praised as they became a ‘desirable good’. Due to immense losses at the front, the male population had decreased significantly, so the number of women within the marriageable age was higher than the number of men by about 18 million (Bischl 2017: 118). Women in the country had to take all duties on their self and become “(…) the cow, and the bull, and the women, and the ‘muzhik’[!].” (Aleksevič 2017: 266). Men were therefore strongly awaited in the country. It was not so important in which condition they came, what was important was that they were a man. This situation was also confirmed by Kulaeva, who described how men were ‘red-hot’ after the war: “Да, хорошо известно, что в деревню мог вернуться какой-то один инвалид, многие женщины остались без мужей или никогда не смогли создать семью. Те, кто выжил (из мужчин) были очень популярны и востребованы.” 4 (Kulaeva 2014)
4 “It is well known that one disabled men could return to the village; many women were left without husbands or never could create a family. Those who survived (from men) were very popular and in demand” [my transl.].
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4.1.6 Disfigured soldiers
Female veterans were not ‘desirable goods’, especially if they came back from the front disfigured. There were enough ‘proper’ women from the home front. Kulaeva, during questions about her fighting father claims:
Мой отец изменил свое отношение к советсткой власти на фронте - до того, хоть и не любил Сталина за культ его, отец был все же патриотичен, но во время войны он понял, что жизнь человека в СССР - ничто. Он всю жизнь ненавидел потом Жукова и других, говоря, что войну выиграли, просто кидая людей под танки, без всякого смысла и сожаления.5 (Kulaeva 2018)
Markwick and Cardona similarly maintain that “the Stalinist state was a ruthless consumer of human resources, in war and peace” (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 236). Alongside the large numbers of fatalities, there were plenty of invalids after the war who faced major difficulties in their subsequent lives. The state, in whose name they had won the war, did not provide due help. As Markwick and Cardona explain: “Impoverishment, inadequate accommodation, lack of work or retraining opportunities and a shortage of prosthetic devices were the lot of the 1,139,669 invalids in Soviet Russia alone, 80 percent of whom were working at the start of 1945.” (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 236- 237) This kind of approach towards disabled veterans could explain by solely stressing the limited financial sources, but there is one more “sophisticated” reason behind it. The fate of the disabled seems to be conditioned by the ideology of the Soviet era with the glorification of a strong body and work capacity. The state tried to hide the disabled veterans that tainted the reputation of the Soviet Union as a nation free from social problems. In 1947, two years after the famous victorious war, Soviet cities were full of beggars (most of them veterans). The authorities “cleaned” the cities by sending the Samovary – men without legs and arms – to Valaam Island and they passed away in terrible conditions in the course of the forthcoming winter (Gregoreva 2018). While the fate of disabled men was terrible, it still appeared easier to be a male than a female invalid. Men, as someone in demand, could find a partner more easily. And then, having someone to
5 “My father changed his attitude to Soviet power at the front - before, although he did not like Stalin for his cult, my father was still patriotic. But during the war he realized that the life of a man in the USSR is nothing. He hated Zhukov and others all his life, saying that the war was won by simply throwing people under tanks, without any sense and regret” [my transl.].
45 support him, he could try to have quite a normal life (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 236). There were a lot of disfigured men after the war, so it was not an exception to be a man without a limb. In this vein, disfigured women were still a rarity and they were aware of it. Aleksevič’s book mentions several times that if a woman was disfigured, it was better for her not to live. For many women, the biggest fear during battle was to have a mutilated face or legs (Aleksevič 2017: 11, 107,187, 244). As an illustration of this situation, I rely on a letter from a blind female veteran. In October 1945, A. Anisimovaja, a former anti-tank division commander, wrote a letter to Marshal Kliment Vorošilov:
Dear Kliment Efremevič! (…) I commanded an anti-tank division in Poland and Germany … where I was badly injured and lost my sight … (…)It was very difficult for me even to be granted invalid rations, but I have not even received those and there is nothing in the shops … It was also very difficult to get a passport or to see a specialist. He simply looked at me and my medical notes and wrote ‘second group – for one year’. (…) he said not a word about treatment or recuperation. (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 238)
The female invalids did not only face difficulties with obtaining help from the government, such as invalid rations or visit a specialist, which was a fate of male veterans too. These women also could not raise a family. Being an invalid without having the support from either the authorities or from a partner made life extremely difficult.
“I have spoken with many women war invalids. Their situation is always the same … I think that a special approach should be taken towards women invalids; they gave everything defending the Motherland. Most of us, due to our ill health, cannot even dream of family life or of motherhood – so fundamental in a woman’s life. It is terrible if young women, who heroically fought throughout the entire war on the frontline, equally with men, now rue their wonderful deeds and their extraordinary patriotism. I raise this issue now because the war is over and the time has come to look after people, especially those who suffered most … (Markwick and Cardona 2012: 238).
This letter clearly illustrates the desperate situation of female war invalids and the hardship they were forced to endure.
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4.2 The case study of Nina Petrovna Borisova
The case study of a front-line woman, Nina Petrovna Borisova from Leningrad, is virtue of the recollection of her daughter, Larisa Vladimirovna Gregoreva. Thanks to abovementioned Stefania Kulaeva, I got in contact with Ms Gregoreva and this case study is a result of our personal conversation. It demonstrates the state of affairs before, during and after the war, including one of the motivations to join the army, the lack of men and its consequences for the society, and the treatment of ordinary soldiers by the state. Nina Petrovna met the father of Larisa Vladimirovna at the front. Although they were not together after the war, the man gave his name to the daughter. Larisa Vladimirovna longed for his return to her mother. During the blockade of Leningrad, the factory where Nina Petrovna was working was closed and she went to the recruiting station as a volunteer since there was nothing to eat: members of the army were fed. Since Nina Petrovna had an absolute musical ear, she was immediately taken to the "elite" part of the government communications troops (a unit of the NKVD). After the war, Nina Petrovna lived alone with her daughter in a large communal apartment (seven families, twenty-something people). Like most women of her age and era, she lamented that there was no ‘real family’. She has tried several times to ‘arrange a personal life’, but she did not succeed. Larisa Vladimirovna mentioned that after the war, there were so few men that there was no one to have relations with. According to her, it was clear that most of the men had two families, some with several mistresses. And the women agreed to this. But, of course, all this was secret. As her daughter recalled, Nina Petrovna worked hard and earned little. Larisa Vladimirovna was given to a 24-hour nursery. As we can see, some women enlisted to the army because of ‘mundane reasons’, like lack of food. Life was neither easy before the war nor after the great Victory. Everyone faced post-war hardship, but women and (sometimes their children) especially. I have asked Larisa Vladimirovna how people looked at her mother when they had known that she was a front-line women and how they look at front- children. “Мама была фронтовичкой. Но что говорили «за глаза», я не знаю. Может быть и осуждали за что-
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нибудь. Насколько я помню, ко всем сиротам относились сочувственно. О детях репрессированных говорили шепотом, не договаривая, кивая головами...“6 (Gregoreva 2018) Larisa Vladimirovna did not remember being proud, because all the surrounding people either fought themselves or their close relatives died in the war. However, she did not have to hide the fact that her mother had fought either because, she said, no one had ever wondered whether her mother served somewhere or not – was fighting or not. Larisa Vladimirovna did not notice any special marginalization or condemnation of front-women. It could be because she was still a child or because, as it was mentioned before, in big cities like Leningrad people were more ‘open-minded’ and tolerant. I was also interested if Larisa Vladimirovna remembered any governmental help towards veterans. Surprisingly for me, she said that back then there was no concept of the "veteran of war". There were war invalids - heavy cripples. She recalled sending war invalids to Solovetsky Islands. What is more, Larisa Vladimirovna did not remember any governmental help. On the contrary, she remembered that there was a mandatory loan. That is, people, already living in poverty, were required to give the government money in the amount of a monthly salary for a "domestic loan". The government often defaulted on this ‘loan’. What is more, according to Larisa Vladimirovna, after the war there was the same terror in the country as during the Revolution. The state indulged citizens in denunciation. Her mother was also being reported by neighbors. Larisa suspected that having learned that her father continued to serve in the government communications troops (NKVD), her mother was released from the interrogation. These memories of Larisa Vladimirovna Gregoreva give an intimate glimpse into the life of the former female soldier, and also the struggles encountered by her daughter whose life was also affected by the prevailing social post-war context (Gregoreva 2018).
4.3 The case study of Boris Stepanovič Kulaev and Klavida Kalašnikova
The second case study refers to Boris Stepanovič Kulaev and Klavdia Kalašnikov in virtue of a daughter of B.S. Kulaev, Stefania Kulaeva. Specifically, from her testimony, the funeral letter of B.S. Kulaev, and a
6 “My mother was a front-line soldier. But what they said "for the eyes", I do not know. Maybe she was condemned for something. (…) As far as I remember, all orphans were treated sympathetically. Talk of the children of the repressed people was whispered, not finishing their thoughts, shaking their heads ...” [my transl.]
48 veteran’s database of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. This unique, never before published account is further evidence of the inferior position of women at the front and potential for sexual harassment at the frontline. Boris Stepanovič Kulaev was a young lieutenant. As far as his daughter understood, he was respected by soldiers, although they treated him ironically for his idealism – he did not smoke, did not drink even "front 100 grams", despite receiving much more alcohol than this. He believed that it was necessary to fight bravely and without vodka. After the battle on the Luchesa River in Belarus he was thought to be dead. But Kulaev survived despite an extremely serious wound. When the hospital where Kulaev laid started to be transferred from Smolensk to the east, the father decided to fall behind the train and go to Moscow. He successfully, although with great adventures, got himself to Moscow where he found his parents. There he was put in a hospital again. In the meantime, while he was already in Moscow, his parents had received a funeral letter from the front.
Здравствуйте, многоуважаемые Кулаевы! Я товарищ Вашего сына Бориса Кулаева хочу сообщить Вам о его смерти. Ваш сын героически погиб в боях за Родину в ночь на 13 февраля 1944 под ..... (это зачеркнуто цензором, место боев - секрет военный, на самом деле это была река Лучеса под Витебском) БССР. Мы отомстим за смерить Вашего сына - сына героя. С автоматом в руках он шел в атаку со своими товарищами и не вернулся назад. Мечтал он учиться, увидеть Москву, но не пришлось. Не грустите о нем, он погиб как герой.
С приветом от всех бойцов подразделения,
Сержант Калашников7 (a photography of the letter in appendix)
The letter was signed by his comrade "Sergeant Kalašnikov", however, in fact, this letter was written by a woman - Klavida Kalašnikova. Kalašnikova did not take part in the battle. She was observing the war together with the senior officer from the hill. Kulaev was touched when he saw this letter, but he also found it funny that she had used the man's name. He believed that she did this to "not defame the reputation of the deceased." Kalašnikova was called PPZhe of Kulaev. Although he did not have a real romance with Kalashnikova when they served together (Kulaev was a young idealist back then), at her
7 "Dear family Kulaev, I am a comrade of your son Boris Kulaev and I want to inform you about his death. Your son died heroically in the battles for his Motherland on the night of February 13, 1944 under ..... [this is crossed out by the censor, the place of fighting is a military secret] of the BSSR. We will revenge for the death of your son: the son – hero. With an automatic weapon in his hands, he went on an attack with his comrades and did not return. He dreamed of learning, seeing Moscow, but this did not happen. Don’t be sad about him, he died as a hero. With greetings from all the unit soldiers, Sergeant Kalašnikov.” [my transl.]
49 request, he decided to call her his PPZhe in order to save her from being molested by soldiers (by virtue of being the "wife" of the officer, the soldiers did not molest her, otherwise she would have been sexually misused). Later, she was asked by Kulaev’s captain, the senior officer, to be his mistress. Kulaev thought she needed to agree. He felt sorry for her. As a daughter of Kulaev mentioned in our interview, apparently Kalašnikova respected lieutenant Kulaev because to write such a letter to his parents was, of course, a rare act – people died every day there in battle. After the death of Kulaev many years later, the Defense Ministry's base appeared where S. Kulaeva with her relatives had found B.S. Kulaev (his part, division, the place of the last battle) and Klavida Kalašnikova. Kalašnikova was subsequently awarded for the capture of Suwalki in Poland. As S. Kulaeva mentioned, her father did not even knew if she survived the war, he did not meet any of those with whom he fought. What is more, Kulaev had not seen a lot of women at the front. He emphasized that their fate there was rather sad. Interestingly, two years ago (10.05.2016) a city’s information portal Saint-petersburg.ru publicized an article authored by Ekaterina Apalej that announced the death of a veteran of WW2, Klavdia Kalašnikova (http://saint-petersburg.ru/m/accidents/apaley/348349/). Whilst it is not certain that it is the same person from the story of Kulaev, the age would be correct (91 years old). However, later, I found articles with a similar context, but with different names, posing a dilemma whether it is the same person or not. Her fate confirmed again a discrepancy between the real life and the official politics of the state. Although they were adored in official discourse and during parades on the occasion of Victory Day, veterans often stayed vulnerable in everyday life. As Apalej writes, Klavdia Kalašnikova died exactly on May 9th (Victory Day!) in the Volchov District Hospital in Saint Petersburg. She was rescued from her apartment and transported to the intensive care unit after her neighbors intervened when they heard the groan of the women. It turned out that she was abandoned by her granddaughter for three days in her apartment without food and water. Social services were not aware of the problems in her family. However, three postcards with wishes on the occasion of Victory Day were found in her post box. This situation begs the question: official commemoration is important, but is the real care and interest not more important? Would it not be more efficient to spend more money on the material help for old and sick veterans and to hire new clerks to help rather than to spend it on the show of strength of the state? Especially, if we take into account how many millions of rubles is spent every year on the military parade for the occasion of Victory Day.
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Alexander Tverskoj, in the article published in New News (Novye Izvestiya) “The shame of the nation: How war veterans die” [my transl.] (Pozor nacii. Kak umirajut veterany vojny”), named an amount of 10 000 000 rubles for the parade in 2017. He does so when he names the new stories about veterans who stay without help (although they have, according to law, some privilege), like in the case of Evgenja Korykova, a 90 year old veteran of the Great Patriotic War. She was living in a ‘house’ with rotten floors and holes in the walls. For four years she tried to use a benefit for veterans to live in better living conditions, however she was always asked to wait. In 2016, there was a documentary about her, but it did not help. In the winter of 2017, like in the other previous winters, the author said there was a lot of snow, and the old lady froze to death (https://newizv.ru/news/society/27-04-2017/pozor-natsii-kak- umirayut-veterany-voyny). As one women commented under the documentary, it is not [only] about the government - where were the ‘normal’ people? The neighbors?
4.4 The case study of Susana Aronovna Brejdo
I would like to avoid excessive victimization of women. This is something that has sometimes been seen in the contemporary feminist discourse, also regarding Soviet female soldiers (for more see Bischl 2016: 113-121). There are also ex-front women who are proud of their military service and like to recall this period their whole life. In 2011, the already mentioned historian Stefania Kulaeva interviewed one of them and shared the results with me. The woman’s name was Susana Aronovna Brejdo. In the following pages I draw on the interview and the life of Brejdo. Susana Aronovna Brejdo was a volunteer nurse in sieged Leningrad and later she served in a unit that was responsible for raising barrage balloons at the Leningrad front. Kulaeva knew Brejdo since she was a child. According to Kulaeva, Brejdo is an example of a very patriotic veteran. However, at the same time, she was friendly with dissidents, such as the mother of Kulaeva and she was sometimes critical of the authorities. Susana Brejdo was the only one of the whole family who was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Brejdo’s sister, Rosa, who was a medic rescuing people in a blockade, was hit by a bomb (they fell asleep under a fallen home). She survived, but was subsequently mentally ill for the rest of her life.
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While recalling the beginning of her service (July 1941), Brejdo mentioned that 6-7 people died in the ward per night. In their last moments they used to ask her to give them her hand and to live for them; to see how it will be later. About the later period, when she was already in the barrage balloons’ unit (1943- 1944), she said that none of serving women were complaining about hardship at the front. According to her, they were just doing what they had to do.
[В] аэростатные части из тыла по Ладоге стали прибывать вологодские девчонки, и когда меня спрашивают: неужели они не жаловались, что их обманули, что они шли на фронт и не рассчитывали на блокадную жизнь, — я говорю: никогда! В 43 –44 годах никаких разговоров о том, что здесь голод, обстрелы, бомбежки, тяжелейшая работа, ни у кого из них не было, не могло быть. Они шли на фронт. И куда бы ни послали человека на фронте, он был на фронте, был одинаков со всеми, и смешно было жаловаться на то, что мешок тяжлый и т. п. Такого никогда никто не слышал.8 (Kulaeva 2011)
It seems that Brejdo did not face insults ‘typical’ for front-women. In Leningrad, after the war, there was not such a significant stigmatization of women served in the army. Brejdo also did not encounter sexual harassment in sieged Leningrad (her unit was mostly female and, what is more, famine did not conduce to think about sex). Susanna Brejdo lived heroically after the war – she worked in a school (until today, opinions about her written by her pupils can be found in social networks) and nursed her sick sister and niece. She lived in significant poverty and all the accumulated money she had, she donated to the monument to the Holocaust victims in the Leningrad region (Kulaeva 2011). Excerpts from the interview with Susana Breydo point out that we cannot excessively victimize the Soviet female soldiers. They were often brave and strong women, conscious about their heroic deeds. Moreover, some of them, living in more open communities, did not face stigmatization. Still, these women were rather exceptions than majority… Lack of due gratitude, marginalization and issues where gender played the main role were well-known for most of the female soldiers.
8 Vologda girls began to arrive to barrage balloons’ units from the rear via the Ladoga river. When people ask me: did they not complain that they were deceived, that they were sent to the front and did not count on the blockade life? I say: never! In 43- 44 years, no one talked about the fact that there was a famine, shelling, bombing, hard work. None of them did. It was impossible. They went to the front and whenever a person was sent to the front, he was at the front. It was the same for everyone and it was ridiculous to complain that the bag was heavy, etc. That, nobody had ever heard.” [my transl.]
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4.5 Conclusions
War is a difficult experience for everyone, regardless if one is at the front or struggling at the home front. There are, however, differences in this experience. In this chapter, I focused on gender-related issues that were common for female soldiers from the Soviet Army and female Soviet partisans who served during the Great Patriotic War and whose merit and deeds were often undeservedly challenged. They faced insults and abuse in connection to relations with male comrades at the front, even though they were the victims. Their experiences and stories about the war when treated as inferior, along with the silence of the state about their existence for many years, resulted in situations where the women faced hostility in society and had to hide their military experience. Therefore, they were often unable to deal with their psychological trauma of wartime. This underestimation of female soldiers’ suffering is especially distressing as it dismisses the main reason for which they went to fight, namely for the freedom of the citizens of the Soviet Union. Thus, also for the freedom of all the people who later abused them. What is even more disturbing are the consequences of the military service when soldiers became handicapped and disfigured. This caused incomparably more serious complications in the case of female veterans. They were often less awaited members of society than their male counterparts and did not receive as many privileges. By the case-studies and the personal narratives used in this chapter I tried to show the negative circumstances that followed the female soldiers during the war in the ensuing peace period. Having said this, in closing this section I would also like to stress that not every front girl necessarily had bad gender-related war/post-war experience, and that we should be cognizant about portraying women as victims who are inevitably abused and have no possibility to exercise their own agency. In the next chapter, I will try to examine closely the reasons behind the (ex) Soviet female soldiers’ determination to cope with the above-mentioned gender-related issues.
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5. The second-class citizen
In the chapter “Image of the female soldier”, I have shown how the state uses women for their own (propaganda) purposes and made from them a ‘first-class icon’. In the chapter “Broken Trajectories: Outline of the situation of the Soviet (ex) female soldiers after the Great Patriotic War”, I have shown that although women are ‘first-class icons’, they are ‘second-class citizens’, especially in the context of Soviet female soldiers. In this chapter, I would like to examine what the reasons are that caused female soldiers to be second-class citizens. I would like to check why the position of women is ‘ambivalent’, as Nira Yuval-Daivs (1998) calls it. Why is it that, on the one hand, women serve as a symbol of the collective’s unity and dignity and, in sake of them, particular collective’s programs are realized (such as sending men to war). But, on the other hand, instead of being active subjects in the collective narrative, they became passive objects and are, therefore, excluded from the “collective ‘we’ of the body politic” (Yuval-Davis 1998: 47). By analysing the history of the Soviet Union by reading works of anthropological and sociological scholars and studying gender theories, I have found a few reasons that I think might contribute to making (ex)female soldiers ‘second class citizens’. As it was mentioned in the Introduction, since the 90’s of the last century, there was a lot of work on female soldiers, but they tend to reassure the reader on gender inequality rather than try to find a reason for this state of affairs. I have identified some reasons and will describe them in the following paragraphs.
5.1 Empowerment of women in crisis situations
‘Fraternity of people’ (‘družba narodov’) is one of the essential ideological USSR term, declaring the principle of the existence of the Soviet state on the basis of all-round brotherly cooperation and mutual assistance of people and nations that have embarked on the socialist path of development (Il’yačev 1983: 177-178). In this fraternity, there is no clause: “except of women”. But, in fact, this fraternity was not visible. Following Paterman (1989), who while examining the social contract, describes her understanding of ‘fraternity’ (using the French Revolution example), recognises that fraternity just has a place in the public/political sphere (in this context both spheres are equal). Declaring fraternity, men and women get rid of the hegemonic power in the public sphere (for example, the power of a king); but men
54 still rule women in the private sphere (Paterman 1989; in Yuval-Davis 1998: 79). Furthermore, women fight shoulder to shoulder with men, in order to dispose the hegemonic power, however, as soon as new structures are institutionalized they are mostly removed from the public scene. The theory of Paterman can easily be transferred to the Russian Revolution in 1917 and to the Great Patriotic War. The first years after the revolution, Soviet women in the public sphere were clearly visible and seemed to become a new type of Soviet women. However, men still wanted to rule over them in the private sphere and wanted women to take care of the household. Eventually, when the new government became stronger, women started to disappear from the political arena (Wood 1997: 8-9). In the case of Great Patriotic War, women were mobilized on two fronts: the home front and the war front. As it was already explained, during the war the government needed extra manpower to run the national economy, especially the weaponry industry. Although women took over males, often leading positions, and were praised for their fast adaptation and skills (for example in newspapers such as Truth and Red Star), after the war they were kicked out easily from these positions. Female soldiers were strongly affected by this phenomenon too. They were mobilized to fight the enemy during the war – thereby gaining new skills and reaching a new gender social order. However, the male soldiers still tended to rule over them and tried to put them on lower, serving positions. After the war, women were simply asked to forget their experience and come back to their fixed ‘female’ position in society (Clement 2012: 244-250). They were ‘comrades’ and ‘sisters’ at the front (sometimes in reality, sometimes only in theory), but after the war their fraternity was forgotten. They were put again on the inferior position in social hierarchy. This situation had place due to underlying patriarchy in Soviet society.
5.2 Underlying patriarchy in society
According to ‘The Dictionary of Feminist Theory’, patriarchy is “a system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political and economical institutions” (Humm 2003: 200). Although the Soviet state declared that the ‘woman question’ had been solved and that full equality of women had been reached in Soviet society (in 1930, the Zhenotdel- women’s department within the Russian Communist party, was closed) (Wood 1997: 212-213), there was still underlying patriarchy in society.
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Considering the economic dimension of Soviet patriarchy, the salaries were not equal. There was a list of (often well-paid) forbidden professions for women which were ‘justified’ by care for their reproductive health (for more, see the report of ADC Memorial Brussels “Gender Discrimination – Jobs Banned for Women - https://adcmemorial.org/www/publications/gender-discrimination-jobs-banned- for-women?lang=en). Society was characterized by ‘double standards’ – namely that many sexual practices are improper for women but, at the same time, are tolerable for men (I will talk more about this in the following subchapter: “Suppression of female sexuality and victim blaming”). What is more, features which were considered female were seen as negative and peripheral and those that were determined as masculine were placed in the centre and seen as positive (Rjabov 2007: 41; for more, see: “The Baba and the Comrade. Gender politics in revolutionary Russia” of E. A. Wood). Women as a whole – including Soviet female soldiers – were oppressed and not fully recognized for their contribution to society. They were simply lower in the social hierarchy. Women needed constantly to prove their skills because, as females, they were seen as inferior (especially in warfare).
5.3 Empowerment of few chosen women to show state modernity and in order to mask gender discrimination
As was mentioned in chapter “Image of the female soldier”, a just few female combatants were empowered and recognized by the state (like Lyudmila Pavličenko). What is more, it was not a temporary process, it continued after the war. In this situation, another common process in state discourse can be noticed, namely, the empowerment of women to mask problems of discrimination in the public sphere and to show modernity of a state. As Canova (1996) noticed, “women have been expected to mediate between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ (Canova 1996; in Vicker 2017: 5-6). Women are recruited by ‘modernizers’ in order to use their presence to symbolically ‘modernize’ the public sphere. The modernizers believe that if they want to be identified as reflecting modern culture, the presence of women in public sphere is required. However, at the same time, they want to keep the family in traditional shape (Vicker 2017: 3). I have observed this process in the Soviet Union as well. The Soviet Union government wanted to show their citizens, as well as foreign countries, how modern they were. This is why the authorities sent not only male soldiers, but also female soldier Pavličenko to the USA
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(together with the goal of agitating for opening the West Front). What is more, by empowering this one woman they could try to show how much power women in general had in the Soviet Union. However, it was not true. There were practically no women on leading position in the party, as well as in the labour market during the Soviet Union (Clements 2012: 211-212). From the later period – but still an extremely interesting example of empowerment to demonstrate modernity and gender equality – is an example of the first woman in space, Valentina Terešnikova. The USSR wanted to score some points in the space race against the USA. Therefore, they decided to send the first female cosmonaut in history to space. Her mission took place in 1963. As Clements comments on it: “The Soviet press hailed her mission as a demonstration of gender equality in the USSR. (…) Terešnikova became a high-profile Soviet representative, praising her country’s progressive programs for women at international meetings and pressing the case for similar social services everywhere” (Clements 256-258). However, Terešnikova could never fly again (the next woman in space appeared twenty years later, sent by the United States). As she recalled: “They forbade for flying, despite all my protest and arguments.” Although she had proven her capabilities she was not allowed to fly again. Most men in the space establishment thought that women’s nature did not allow her to be a good astronaut (Clements 2012: 256-258). The same fate touched a few female soldiers, who were also empowered by the authorities. They had proven their skills but could not make further military careers (with few exceptions). However, they were willingly presented to the domestic and foreign public as a symbol of a modern nation with gender equality.
5.4 War as a male domain
War, until today, has been considered as a male domain. Krylova (2017) noticed, men are seen as “a natural participant in combat” and women as “alien to it” (Krylowa 2010: 17-18). What is more, the appearance of women in combat is seen as a destabilizing process and is full of prejudice and stereotypes (Krylowa 2010: 17-18). Yuval-Davis (1998) writes:
[T]he formal incorporation of women into the military as soldiers has encountered a lot of prejudice and male fear, although the overwhelming majority of women soldiers are positioned in roles which largely
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reflect the gendered civil labour market – that is, they are usually secretaries, nurses and teachers. Only very few (…) fulfil roles which are specifically military and/which directly relate to the military’s main ‘business’ – that is, fighting and killing. (Yuval-Davis 1998: 100- 101)
What is more, weak soldiers are called by comrades with names associated with women, such as ‘wimps’ or ‘pussies’ (Yuval- Davis 1998: 103- 104). The situation looked the same in Imperialistic and then Soviet culture. Women and their features were considered inferior. The prevailing gender models prescribed to female roles include things such as bearing and bringing up children, being a good hostess, and a faithful wife. Women in a “male role”, such as a soldier, were perceived by the public as an anomaly – like during the Second World War – despite the fact that women already have taken part in military service, for example, in the Patriotic War of 1812 and in World War I (Zaveršinskaja 2016: 88-89; see also the chapter “Broken Trajectories: Outline of the situation of the Soviet (ex) female soldiers after the Great Patriotic War”). Not only it was the perception of society, but the Soviet Union and the Russian historiography as such played a role in contributing to shaping this peculiar percetion. For a long time, those decribed female participation in the Great Patriotic War which proceeded from the traditionalist ideas about the relationship of the sexes, characteristic of late Stalinism and post-Stalinist USSR. Women were considered inadequate for war, primarily because of her psychobiological features imagined by the collective as weakness, less resistance to stress and motherhood. The official Soviet state’s discourse had difficulties recognizing female soldiers as combatants – female roles in warfare were always set in frame of gender roles. Sometimes the newspapers showed them in military tasks, but, at the same time, tried not to call them combatants. This process of picturing female soldiers in detail was analysed by A. Krylova in her book, “Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front”. This was a case in the process of portraying nurses. In mass media and visual arts, these women were presented in clean aprons and skirts, which was not at all the case at the frontline where blood was spouting everywhere (Aleksevič 2017: 59). What is more, women at the front were saving soldiers under fire and not killing the enemy which, in the military discourse, has smaller significance (Krylowa 2010: 182-183). The fact that the state did not fully recognize female soldiers as combatants is a problem on its own, but it is also a reason why society had difficulties accepting female soldiers. Especially bearing in mind the fact that the Soviet government had such a big influence on their citizens thanks to strong propaganda. A Russian scholar, O.
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Nikonova (2005), noticed that a similar approach – that a war is not a place for women – was formulated in the book "The Unwomanly Face of War" (Nikonova 2005: 2-3). I think this notion might be supported by a significant part of Soviet society. This approach belongs to feminist theory – that women are, by nature, linked to peace (for more, see: Yuval-Davis 1998: 111-113). Another feminist activist claimed that men do not want women to fight because they do not want to share their civil rights. Men expose themselves to danger for a nation, thereby, in some national discourses, obtain full citizenship (Yuval-Davis 1998: 93). Therefore, shifting the position of women during the war is seen by some feminist movements as an opportunity to share equal citizenship rights with men by performing ‘the ultimate duty’ – fighting for the nation. Accordingly, Soviet women took part during the time of the biggest crisis in the official combat task during WW2, but after the war they were quickly moved away from the military domain, which again became purely the male sphere. Military careers were closed for women, so they could not demand to have full citizenship thanks to being ready to perform the ‘ultimate duty’. Some men would not allow women to make moves or argue to stop being seen as passive, weak and to be closer to be seen as a full citizen. It was even easier for women to enter the labour market (although it was already very difficult and took years) than to enter the army (Yuval-Davis 1998: 93). However, Yuval-Davis (1998) noticed that even if sometimes women are allowed to join the army their service would not be seen automatically as the empowerment of women. Men continued, to a large extent, to dominate and abuse women (Yuval-Davis 1998: 89). Although both of the above mentioned approaches differ, both claim that women should not take part in the military service, and even if, for some reason, she did, the best option is to stop that mission as soon as possible
5.5 Women as the womb of a nation and a resourceful housekeeper
Anthropologists and experts in feminist theories identify a certain permanent phenomenon accompanying nations in a state of emergency – which strongly inhibited the fight for gender equality – namely, that women are treated as a biological reproducer of society. The issue of fertility increases during armed conflicts to become a matter of national rank. A woman's reproductive forces become an
59 extremely important and even deified feature which belongs to everyone except her (for instance, Dimova 2006). A similar phenomenon occurred in the Soviet Union during and after WW2. In the pre-war Stalin state, an imaginary construction of womanhood was already present, whereby the biggest dream of women was to be a mother and a wife (read: a housekeeper). This construct was not a new idea; it was practically present from the beginning of Russian society, with the exception of the first years after the October Revolution in 1917 (for example, see: Kardapolceva 2005). During the demographic crisis in the war period, and especially after the war, the state came back to this idea and even intensified it. In the process of restoring society, the authorities emphasized that woman need to be not only a good worker (what was the most important feature of a Soviet citizen in the beginning of the existence of the Soviet Union), but she should be also a very fertile mother, and a resourceful housekeeper. The authorities were afraid about the condition of the family unit. Zdravomyslova and Tyemkina, in their article “State construction of gender in Soviet society” [my transl.] (“Gosudarstvennoe konstruirovanie gendera v sovetskom obschestve”), name the measures that can change the situation of social and demographic crises, for example, the influence on public opinion, the undesirability of divorce, the increase in the size of families, and the economic support of motherhood (Zdravomyslova and Tyemkina 2003: 316). The Soviet government had chosen these means exactly to improve the demographical and social situation of the country. In 1943, once they realized that the end of the war is close, they started to emphasise in official discourse the priority for women to give a child, serve at home, and perform household tasks (Clements 2012: 248- 250). In 1944, in order to popularize the representation of woman as a mother (of several children) and as a main housekeeper, the “Mother Heroine” campaign was introduced. Women were given awards for bearing a large number of children. Ekaterina Selezevna, in her article “Population Policies in Soviet and Modern Russia”, listed new established medals: - The Motherhood Medal: The first degree for six children and the second degree for five children. - The Order of Maternal Glory: The first class for nine children, the second class for eight children, and the third class for seven children. - The Order of Mother Heroine: certified by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, for ten or more children.
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Women who were awarded by the Order of Mother Heroine had many privileges (Selezevna 2017: 71- 72). The role of fathers in raising children was ignored. Probably the only domain where a man was evaluated for his fatherhood and was ‘enhanced’ encouraged to have children was in the taxes field. An income tax on people (both women and men) of childbearing age who did not have children was introduced (Clements 2012: 248; also, see: Selezevna 2017: 73). Nevertheless, due to a “shortage” of men, many women would never marry. In order to solve this issue on the way to demographic increase, the state tried to propagate a notion of a single mother and promised benefits for them, such as pregnancy leave of 77 days, extra food rations to pregnant and nursing mothers, and a few more (Clements 2012: 248). It is important to emphasize that the Soviet mother was different from the image of ‘a Western mother’. This is something that sometimes Western scholars, unfortunately, do not take into account. An exemplary Soviet women should not be as German ‘Kinder, Kuche, (Kirche)’ of British ‘barefoot and pregnant’ (Wilde 2017). Women should not sit at home and spend too much time with a child like a bourgeoisie mother. They need to be good citizens and good workers (Kulaeva 2018). This notion comes from Marxist ideas, but it was also a current necessity. Due to so many male losses at the front, having women in the labour market was especially important. It is because of this that, for many years, and even nowadays, women suffer a double workload both outside the home as well as being responsible for most of the housework (Clements 2012: 250). Double mobilization of women had been legitimized in terms of civil duty and feminine predestination (Zdravomyslova and Tyemkina 2003: 313-314; also, see: Selezevna 2017: 64). To sum up, the government after the war needed women to be mothers, caregivers and workers. There was no place for a new emancipation campaign and introduction of women to the professional military sphere. What is more, at the very moment the war was over, the authorities claimed that women who were at front should forget about their military deeds, and thereby, about the new gender order. Although relations at the front were gendered, they were more emancipated than in civil society. Afterwards, women should go back to their old positions and serve the state by serving the family. In 1945, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council Michail Kalinin, recommended demobilized women not to boast about their military achievements. Selzenova (2017) noted in the concluding remarks of her already above-mentioned article, that the Soviet state concentrated on women’s
61 reproductive function all the time because of a constant lack of manpower in the military and labour spheres (Selezevna 2017: 100).
5.6 Suppression of female sexuality and victim blaming
Different types of societies sometimes seek to control and suppress human sexuality. Baumeister and Twenge (2002), in their publication “Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality”, said: “we understand the suppression of female sexuality as a pattern of cultural influence by which girls and women are induced to avoid feeling sexual desire and to refrain from sexual behaviour” (Baumeister and Twenge 2002: 166). The level of suppression depends on the stage in history in which the society resides, the type of culture, their religion, etc. However, although male sexuality is sometimes limited too, female sexual practices are especially subjected to the most suppression. Female sexuality belongs not so much to women as it does to society and their traditional tendency to stifle it, for example, by enforced modesty or chastity. We do not have to cast back too far to find an example. The Russian Federation has just finished hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2018. The society was not only interested in the football competition, but the sexuality of Russian women was a point of interest too. On Russian social networks and blogs, the issue of ‘shall “our” Russian women sleep with foreign males’ was keenly discussed. Moreover, this idea was not only active with Internet users, but also emerged in the Russian political arena before the championship had even started. Urging Russian girls not to enter into intimate relations with foreign football fans, Tamara Pletneva, chairwoman of the State Duma Committee for Family, Women and Children Affairs, said: “We should give birth to our own children. I'm not a nationalist, but nonetheless” (https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/328651-world-cup-russian-women-slut-shaming; for more about the notion of woman as a boundary of the nation, see: Yuval 1989: 46-53). Another way of suppressing female sexuality is using the double standard patterns of sexual practice. Many sexual practices are seen as improper for women but, at the same time, are tolerable for men (Baumeister and Twenge 2002: 167). Evaluation of intimate relations at the Soviet front during the Great Patriotic War in an example of the social phenomenon of double moral standards. In Russia, the idea about the importance of the virtuosity and purity of women dates back to the Middle Ages and was supported by the Orthodox church. Although Soviet society declined religion, some notions from the
62 preceding era remained. Especially in Stalin’s period, reverting back to the old morality is visible. Therefore, women who were so close to men (as women at the front were) were suspected of lacking virtue and being promiscuous, especially when it was clear that they had an intimate relationship with a man (although any evidence was not needed to call a front-woman PPZhe). An ‘unvirtuous’ woman could face difficulty in gaining social respect or even to be accepted in the local community (see chapter “Broken Trajectories: Outline of the situation of the Soviet (ex) female soldiers after the Great Patriotic War”). At the same time, what needs to be emphasized is that men who had relations with ‘PPZhe’ were not condemned in the community’s perception! What is more, their sexual behaviour was often justified (Aleksevič 2017: 236; also, see: http://www.southernct.edu/sexual-misconduct/facts.html). There is a ‘myth’ in the community’s consciousness about the endless sexual desire of men which has to be fulfilled. This myth was, and still is, popular in Eastern European societies. Women also have sexual needs and there is nothing wrong with her trying to satisfy them. However, as we could see from the preceding chapter, intimate relations between male and female soldiers at the front was not only ‘a choice’, but was often ‘a necessity’ to avoid sexual harassment. Still, Soviet (ex)front soldiers were blamed for any abusive male sexual behaviour towards them (Bischl 2016: 120; also, see: Aleksevič 2017: 235-236). In this regard, we can observe another social occurrence, ‘victim blaming’. The notion of victim blaming assumes, as we can read on the website of Southern Connecticut State University in the article “Rape culture, victim blaming, and the facts”, that “the victim is equally to blame for the abuse, when in reality, abuse is a conscious choice made by the abuser”. A few paragraphs later, the authors write “Sexual assault is NEVER [!] the victim’s fault. Sexual assault is a violent attack on an individual, not a spontaneous crime of sexual passion. For a victim, it is a humiliating and degrading act. No one ‘asks’ for or deserves this type of attack” (http://www.southernct.edu/sexual- misconduct/facts.html). Thereupon, women were afraid to speak out, not only about men misusing their position, but they were also afraid to talk about their military service at all, let alone fight for recognition of their deeds so as to not be connected with being an ‘improper’ woman (see, for example: Bischl 2016: 119-121).
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5.7 Herstory
The term ‘herstory’ assumes that women have lowly position in historiography, which is actually dominated by men (Mills 1992: 38), and names “all that has been left out of his story” (Maggio 1992: 130). Miller and Swift (1976) write that women's experience and presence in human affairs is ignored or underestimate in standard historiography (Miller and Swift in Maggio 1992: 130). Therefore, it is needed as a means of re-writing history from the female perspective, taking into account the role of women in history and showing their point of view (Mills 1992: 38). As it is a worldwide notion, it also touches the Soviet historiography, which is written from a male perspective and praises men and undervalued the role of women. It is the case in describing the October Revolution and building the new Soviet society by female workers (for more, see: Pushkaryeva 2017: 22), as well as in the case of WW2. The government did not fully acknowledge the women who helped win the war, because it departed too from the male- centred perspective. Women’s participation in the war, for a long period, was omitted or passed over in silence. Not only their contribution was omitted but also problems which they faced during the war and in the subsequent peace conditions. This is why Svetlana Aleksjevič’s book “The Unwomanly Face of the War” is so important. She has opened a place for a public discussion about female soldiers point of view on the war and for an analysis what happed with them after the War. Zaveršinskaja (2016) noticed that modern Russia, like other Western countries, is engaged with the "internal decolonization” of different types of minor communities. On their path of integration with the majority community, this minorities demand to be recognized, together with their uniqueness. This “internal decolonization” touches sexual, social, religious or local minorities, but also includes women. In this process, women's memory of the war occupies an important place. There are works which try to rethink, in a gender context, the Great Patriotic War. However, as Zaveršinskaja noticed, still not enough publications have emerged (Zaveršinskaja 2016: 86). Puškareva (2017) claims, no writing of women into history has led in Russia to redefine the tasks of reconstruction of historical processes and little has affected the dominant theoretical concepts. Moreover, summing up the review of publications on women's history of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and during the war shows that women's history is something illustrative, complementary to the "big", traditional and "male" history (Puškareva 2017: 22-24). Nikonova indicated that “Женские воспоминания о войне пока что остаются именно
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отдельными воспоминаниями, не превращаясь в групповую, коллективную память”9 (Nikonova 2005: 5-9).
5.8 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have tried to investigate the reasons of prerceiving women, in particular female soldiers, as first-class icons, but at the same time, as second-class citizens. I have found seven main reasons, including: the process of the empowerment of women in crisis situations and thereafter putting them back to their previous inferior position; the process of the empowerment of a few chosen women in order to show the modernity of the state and to mask gender discrimination; the presence of the underlying patriarchy in Soviet society; the fact that the military sphere is perceived as male spheres; the fact that women are seen as a reproducer of the nation and a resourceful housekeeper; the occurrence of the suppression of female sexuality and victim blaming and the fact that history is written from a male perspective. In the next section of my dissertation, the last one, I will try to draw conclusions from the notions from all the preceding chapters.
9 Women's memories of the war so far remain just separate memories- not turning into a group, collective memory. [my transl.]
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6. End Conclusion
This dissertation examined the issue of Soviet female soldiers fighting during the Great Patriotic War, who being the first-class icon, are the second class citizen. I attempted to illustrate the reasons behind the dissonance between the official national discourse and the experience of the female combatants. In the first chapter I have shown the social gender organization of the pre-war and war Soviet society. Subsequently, in the second and third chapter, I have described the evolution of female soldier images in the collective memory. The frontline women were present in the state’s narration during the Great Patriotic War. The authorities used them, as well as women in general, in the discourse in order to embody via their image their ideas of reach their own goals. Nevertheless, as soon as these goals were reached and the war was won, almost 800 thousands army of women disappeared from the state discourse for 20 years. Forty years after the war, thanks to Aleksevič’s pioneering book “The Unwomanly Face of the War” unspoken problems became public, and I have investigated them in chapter four. It turned out that after the war the female soldiers encountered gender-related problems, such as marginalization, stigmatization, underestimation and challenging their deeds, exclusion of their alternative war memory, being treated worse than male veterans and facing problems in setting up a private life. This observation indicates the huge discrepancy between the official narrative and the reality. In the last chapter, I draw the conclusion that female soldiers were the second class citizen due to a phenomenon of temporary empowerment of women in crisis situation; due to appearance of empowerment of few chosen women in order to show the subject’s modernity or to mask gender discrimination; due to predominant in Soviet society patriarchy; due to the fact that the military domain is perceived as purely male domain; due to the fact that women’s destination was seen as to being mothers and housekeepers; due to the common phenomenon of suppression of female sexuality; and due to the fact that history is written from the male perspective. Men make from women the first class icon, at the same time deny them the real influence and make of them second class citizens. I have to admit that in my dissertation I have encountered some limitations, namely analytical limitations of available primary sources, such as memoirs or interviews. During analyses, I needed to dismantle the pervasive propaganda and censorship of the state, as well as the self-censorship of
66 veterans or other interlocutors. Moreover, there is still a lot of questions which should be raised directly to the veterans, but unfortunately veterans of WW2 belong already to the minority. Another serious limitation of my research was lack of time: complexity of the issue under review demands a lot of time and can serve as a topic for a PhD dissertation as well. Still, my dissertation is a unique attempt to analyse the problem of gender discrimination towards the Soviet female soldiers. I did not just show the status quo, as a lot of works do, but I have tried to show the reasons behind it. In order to do that I was working on the intersection of anthropology, history and gender studies. I hope this research brought female soldiers closer to the collective memory and I wish that my dissertation will be a modest contribution to honor of women who participated in the war at the frontline on the Soviet side.
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Annexes
The funeral letter from Klavdia Kalašnikova
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