Soviet Women in Combat
Cambridge University Press, 5/13/2010
EAN 9780521197342, ISBN10: 0521197341
Hardcover, 338 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
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.
Introduction
the woman veteran as a World War II memoirist
Part I. Before the Front, 1930s
1. A portrait of a young woman as the citizen soldier
the 'prewar generation' in popular culture, in school, and at the shooting range
Part II. On the Way to the Front, 1941–5
2. 'And this is exactly who we are - soldiers!'
Women volunteers, local authorities, and the Stalinist government in 1941
3. The exceptional mobilization of 1941
the making of a female combat collective by state order
4. New gender landscapes for the army
from grassroots enlistments to the state-run mobilizations of 1942–5
Part III. At the Front, 1941–5
5. Partners in violence
the woman soldier and the machine in the 1941 trenches
6. 'To be a woman-commander - that was great!
remechanizing and regendering in the Red Army, 1942–5
7. Bonded by combat
women and men sharing violence, authority, and romance in mechanized warfare, 1942–5
Conclusion
Appendix.
'In this brilliant book, Anna Krylova rediscovers a cohort of heroic Soviet Nazi fighting women, reconstructs the documentable yet obscure Stalinist policy that shaped and fulfilled the female fighters' desires to become mechanized warriors, and establishes the role Stalinist culture - what she terms the 'ambiguous cultural and institutional terrain of Stalinism' - played in creating an internally contradictory Communist modern, statist gendered order. Krylova ... opens this book to a nonspecialist reader like me and points in the direction of a truly global history of the longest revolution.' Tani Barlow, Rice University