Roger D. Markwick

A Discipline in transition?: From sovietology to ‘Transitology’

The collapse of the Soviet system and its partners in the ‘communist’ world poses problems of theory for scholars, as well as practical problems of managing a transition to a new social, political and economic system on the part of the peoples and governments concerned. Previous understanding of the nature of the ‘communist’ system has come under fresh scrutiny, with ‘totalitarianism’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’ and other concepts in the established literature of sovietology giving way to fresh analysis, as scholars attempt to come to terms with the collapse and the transition. There are limits to the value of studies of ‘comparative democratization’: in fact, the proximity of the system undergoing transition to the core of the capitalist and liberal‐democratic world is a critical variable in the transition. The role of the state in the transition is likewise crucial, and needs to be carefully studied. These features require the substitution of comparative study for the ghetto style of research that charact...

Stalinism at War

Nazism was vanquished by the Red Army. The Eastern Front in World War II was by any measure – scale, intensity, brutality – the decisive theater in the struggle against Nazism in power. It has rightly been called the “war of the century.” Soviet victory came at a terrible price: 26.6 million Soviet dead. The “Great Patriotic War,” as Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov declared it in June 1941, has been a forgotten Holocaust in the West, the consequence of 40 years of Cold War reinforced by the demise of the Soviet Union. Yet it left an indelible imprint on post-war Soviet society, which has survived the demise of the USSR. The Great Patriotic War was clearly a watershed in Soviet history. It forged the Soviet Union as nation-state rather than revolutionary citadel. During the Brezhnev years a “cult” of the war eclipsed the “Great October Socialist Revolution” itself as regime-legitimating mythology. Yet the war years have been largely neglected in Western historiography on Stalinism. Even the most recent studies of the Stalin period generally stop short at the war. This focus, as Amir

‘The Motherland Calls’: Soviet Women in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945

Women played a pivotal role in the Soviet victory over Nazism in the ‘Great Patriotic War, 1941–45’. In contrast to most other combatant countries in the Second World War, Soviet women took on roles in the military, industry and agriculture that elsewhere were generally regarded as the exclusive domain of males. This chapter narrates the roles of Soviet women on the front lines and on the home and domestic fronts. It analyses the mechanisms employed by the draconian Stalinist regime at a critical moment to mobilise millions of women for the war effort. It also considers to what degree, if at all, mass female participation in the Soviet war effort was emancipatory.

Sisters of Mercy: Nurses

Women nurses and doctors were the acceptable feminine face of the Soviet Union at war. Civilian nurses affirmed the role of women as mothers and family makers that was increasingly the preferred model for Soviet women in the 1930s, notwithstanding elite, gender challenging heroines, such as aviators, beloved of Stalinist propaganda. In the Soviet Union, as in almost all mid-twentieth century industrial states, the image of the civilian nurse in particular, as opposed to the woman doctor, deeply inscribed as it was with assumptions about womanhood, femininity and family, represented at once a caring profession and a powerful cultural affirmation of the nurturing nature that supposedly defined women biologically.2 However, military nurses, once incorporated into male dominated militaries as non-combatant ‘soldiers’, unsettled the supposed binary opposition between masculine war-making and feminine caring; they also straddled the ‘porous boundaries’ between the home and fighting fronts.3 In the Soviet Union, as the Great Patriotic War raged, the image of the heroic woman military nurse, rescuing the wounded Red Army soldier from the field under fire or tending to defenceless, shattered, male bodies in hospitals, dovetailed perfectly with the intensely female gendered discourse and iconography of defending the Motherland against the onslaught of a barbaric, misogynist Nazi enemy.

The Making of the frontovichki

The young Soviet women who went to the frontline in the 1940s—the frontovichki—were essentially products of the peacetime Stalin era of the 1930s. Stalin’s abandonment of socialist internationalism in good part repudiated the genderless citizen of the earlier Bolshevik period whereby women were firstly workers wedded to the world revolution, alongside their male comrades.2 In the 1930s a pro-natalist ‘triumphal rehabilitation’, as Trotsky put it, of ‘the joys of motherhood’ and ‘the family’ reinforced by the outlawing of divorce and abortion in 1936, necessarily re-emphasized distinct social roles for the sexes.3 Nevertheless, Stalinism did not simply force women out of the public domain back into the family. Quite the opposite; as part of Stalin’s drive for industrial accumulation, millions of women were forced by hunger and poverty, or driven by enthusiasm, into the factories while still carrying the burdens of domesticity. In the 1930s a veritable ‘regendering’ of the workforce took place as women took on previously male-dominated occupations, including heavy industry.4 But continued mass female participation in the Soviet industrialization drive, and commitment to the Soviet nation, family and Stalin, generated hybrid self-conceptions of Soviet womanhood: pre-revolutionary and Soviet values of family, marriage and nation coupled with a fervent post-revolutionary commitment to industrialization, education, and an increasingly patriotic and gendered ‘socialism in one country’.

‘Falcons’ and ‘Witches’: Flyers

The singular exception to the initial prohibition on women combatants in the Red Army was Stalin’s secret Order No. 0099 of 8 October 1941 authorizing the formation of three women’s air regiments by 1 December 1941.2 The initiative to do so may well have come from the Komsomol central committee (CC). But the record-breaking navigator and Hero of the Soviet Union (HSU), Marina Raskova, had also personally lobbied Stalin, who, like his air force commanders, opposed women fighting with the army, to form the three regiments. These included the all-female night bomber regiment, which became known by the contemptuous sobriquet German soldiers gave it, ‘night witches’ (Nachthexen); a nickname these female flyers themselves embraced with ironic pride. A unique phenomenon in the annals of warfare — no other belligerent state allowed women to fly in combat — these predominantly female regiments produced an extraordinary 30 out of the 86 women HSUs, the highest Soviet military award.3 More has been written on these gender-defying heroines than any other Soviet women soldiers, above all on the exclusively female ‘night witches’ bomber regiment, the legendary stature of which has only grown with the passage of time. The ‘night witches’ are the protagonists in this chapter too. It focuses on the social and political profile, and the motivations, mindset and emotional world, of the most successful women’s unit in the Red Army. The undoubted success of the night-bomber regiment fits neatly into the heroic-patriotic master narrative of the war, for which reason, it seems, its archival record is the most accessible. Accordingly, the ‘night witches’ have overshadowed not only the achievements and shortcomings of the other women’s air regiments but also the horrific experiences faced by less feted women in the military.

Behind Enemy Lines: Partisans

The Soviet state sacralized the woman partizanka; more precisely, the martyred partizanka. Female partisan martyrs became the heroic image of the Soviet resistance. Although women were a tiny percentage of the partisan movement, at most 3 per cent, heroine- martyrs were pivotal to what has been called a female ‘“counter-narrative” of individual initiative and private motives, as opposed to party discipline and devotion to Joseph Stalin’, invoked to mobilize the nation as a whole in defence of Motherland, ‘hearth and home’.2 While in 1941 women were largely being denied service in the Red Army, in one arena at least a few women could take up arms from the first phase of the war: as partisans or more precisely, saboteurs [diversanty] and underground agents behind enemy lines. As early as February 1942, some publicity was being given to women partisans, notably in the rural journal Krestyanka (Woman Peasant).3 By late 1943, women partisans were being urged to take their place alongside men as full participants in the ‘all-people’s war’, thereby representing the nation rather than their sex, without challenging gender roles.4 Thousands of women were involved in the resistance to the German occupation; although many of them actually bore arms, in the main they still remained the domestic wing of the armed movement. Some were women who were assigned to partisan activity by the Communist Party, the Komsomol or the NKVD.

Epilogue: Half-hidden from history

The Red Army’s victory over fascism, formally proclaimed by Moscow Radio at 2.10 a.m. on 9 May 1945, was greeted with elation by Soviet civilians and military alike. An estimated two to three million citizens spontaneously flocked into Moscow’s Red Square on what would become henceforth ‘Victory Day’ (Den pobedy).2 Far from Red Square, Red Army women and men, many still on the march, were ecstatic. A Red Army woman political officer, A. V. Nikulina, was among those who hoisted a victory banner over Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.3 Sniper Yulya Zhukova on the Baltic coast was awoken by a whisper: ‘Junior sergeant Yulya, get up. Victory!’ It was a miracle: a mere whisper awoke everybody in the room. They could sleep through artillery fire but now woke as one. Seizing our weapons, we leapt into the street. The unimaginable erupted: bear hugs, tears, laughter, indiscriminate shooting into the air. The artillery unleashed several mighty salvoes seawards. An accordion began playing from somewhere, music rang out, dances began spontaneously. Victory! The long awaited victory!4 Meanwhile, ‘anarchic frenzy’ seized Vera Galaninskaya’s Medsanbat, deployed nearby in Latvia. Awaking to cries of ‘Ura! Ura! Pobeda!’ (Hooray! Hooray! Victory!), elated nurses laughed, cried, kissed, embraced, and fired off ‘pistols, rifles and machine guns’ which ‘chattered out “personal salutes” in honour of the Victory’. Elation was not the only feeling that engulfed medsestra Galaninskaya:

The Women’s Volunteer Rifle Brigade

The Red Army was haemorrhaging male soldiers in the spring and summer of 1942 when the People’s Commissariat of Defence (NKO) was recruiting women en masse. In this desperate situation, the NKO also proposed the formation of all-women’s infantry units, for the first time since the secret formation of the women’s air regiments in October 1941. However, unlike the air regiments, notably the ‘night witches’ regiment, which since the demise of the Soviet Union have come to be celebrated as exemplars of women warriors, the all-women’s infantry units have remained virtually unknown, with the partial exception of two of them: the 1st Separate Women’s Reserve Rifle Regiment and the 1st Separate Women’s Volunteer Rifle Brigade (Otdelnaya zhenskaya dobrovolcheskaya strelkovaya brigada – OZhDSB). There are no official histories of these two units. The Reserve Rifle Regiment gets a passing mention in V. S. Murmantseva’s 1974 study of Soviet Women in the Great Patriotic War,2 from which we learn that the Rifle Regiment trained hundreds of skilled women shooters, machine-gunners and mortar- gunners for fighting in the regular Red Army. Even less is known about the Women’s Volunteer Rifle Brigade which, apart from a cursory reference in the Encyclopaedia of the Great Patriotic War, has practically disappeared from the historical record.3

‘Not Women’s Business’: Volunteers

Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union came at 4 a.m., Sunday 22 June 1941. Nearly four million Axis soldiers poured over the borders, routing a Red Army that had been lulled into a false sense of security by Stalin and his September 1939 non- aggression pact with Hitler. War shattered the lives of the Stalin generation of young women, just as it seemed that they had everything to look forward to; a mid- summer night’s nightmare that would be immortalized in the words of the female frontline bard Yulya Drunina: No it’s not the huts that are burning/It is my youth in the fire.