Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front

by Anna Krylova

Soviet Women in Combat explores the unprecedented historical phenomenon of Soviet young women s en masse volunteering for World War II combat in 1941 and writes it into the twentieth-century history of women, war, and violence. The book narrates a story about a cohort of Soviet young women who came to think about themselves as women soldiers in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and who shared modern combat, its machines, and commanding positions with men on the Eastern front between 1941 and 1945. The author asks how a largely patriarchal society with traditional gender values such as Stalinist Russia in the 1930s managed to merge notions of violence and womanhood into a first conceivable and then realizable agenda for the cohort of young female volunteers and for its armed forces. Pursuing the question, Krylova s approach and research reveals a more complex conception of gender identities.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, 20th Century, War, Feminism, European History, Gender

338 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2010

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Impressive use of discourse analysis and sources, but major concerns about the lack of discussion regarding violence towards women in the military. Krylova's depiction is just too rosey.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, good info, too boring tho

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though the language is clunky and loaded with ponderous terminology, Krylova's "non-oppositional but binary" gender category is always impressive, and alternatively frustrating and enlightening. What this basically means is that Krylova came to understand the Soviet women combatants as individuals who were able to simultaneously claim the title of soldier (which they viewed as a neural or mutually-accessible role) while maintaining (and asserting!) their femininity, thus their frequent descriptions of themselves as women-soldiers, women-machinegunners, women-pilots, etc. It's a fascinating approach which bears some similarities to third-wave feminism that I eagerly await someone taking as a departure point for studies of women and gender in the post-Vietnam volunteer military.

One unfortunate choice Krylova makes is a decision to not engage with much radical femininity before the Stalinist period, which leaves out women who fought in the Russian Civil War, as well as women who were political radicals à la Chernyshevsky's Vera Pavlova or the very real Alexandra Kollontai.

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Krylova traces an alternative gender discourse that emerged in the utopian post-Bolshevik moment and was forged by technologies of war that allowed Soviet women to become snipers, combat pilots. I found particularly useful her questioning of the "de-radicalizing" narrative of the 1930s in the USSR - once a revolutionary ideal of a post- or anti-bourgeois femininity entered the education system (and was facilitated by modern mechanized total war) a complete undoing of that was impossible. Earlier experimentations left their mark in how women, and particularly women veterans, interpreted their lives in a time of rapidly changing technologies of the body, of combat, and of representation.

[Gerad Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but the language is pretty dry and academic. Seems like it was adapted from a dissertation project. Also, be forewarned that the book takes a long time to actually get to "Soviet women in combat" and spends a lot of time on cultural discourses of gender in the early to Stalinist Soviet Union