Description
Soviet women in combat fought in World War II alongside men, and Krylova's book explores the history and motivations behind this phenomenon. Krylova's research reveals that Soviet society was in a transitional period in regards to gender roles and that the women who volunteered for combat were motivated by a desire to be seen as equal to men. Despite the challenges posed by this transition, Soviet women were able to create a new identity for themselves as soldiers and contribute to the war effort in unique and powerful ways.
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. Review: Reviews of the hardback: '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 'Soviet women played an extraordinary role in World War II. Their counterparts in other countries served as military auxiliaries; in the USSR many women fought in the front lines of the ground war or took a direct part in the air fighting, and many of them were killed in action. Anna Krylova's book is the first to systematically study this, and her scope extends to the prewar social and gender context and to the postwar telling of the story. Soviet Women in Combat makes an important contribution to the social history of the war and is also a milestone in the gender history of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia.' Evan Mawdsley, University of Glasgow 'Anna Krylova has already established herself as one of the most important voices among a new generation of Soviet historians. Now her Soviet Women in Combat offers a pathbreaking interpretation of perhaps the formative era in modern Russian/Soviet history - the Second World War. Krylova is not the first scholar to note that women fought with the Red Army, but she asks new questions about them, combining military, cultural, and gender history in novel and even unsettling ways. The book focuses on the experiences of (and stories about) roughly 120,000 Soviet women combatants - snipers and pilots, anti-tank fighters, and others - to show how, amid this crucible of combat, they created a range of possibilities for thinking differently about gender, about personal identities and social roles, and about the place of violence in a modern and mechanized world.' Douglas Northrop, University of Michigan 'In this extraordinary study of Soviet women in combat, Anna Krylova has with great sensitivity taken a myriad of varied sources (letters, diaries, fiction, films) to produce striking insights into the discourse of gender, war, and women ... This book is pathbreaking - rich and textured in its depiction of the various incidents and episodes of women's experiences and male-female contacts. Krylova gives us women as warriors who are still women.' Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan 'The combat performances of Soviet women during the war were so extraordinary that they actually have posed problems for historians. The literature so far has done little more than enthusiastically champion their courage. Krylova's achievement is to approach these women's military careers from the perspective of highly sophisticated questions concerning identity, gender, and change ... Despite the theoretical sophistication of Soviet Women in Combat, she is a masterful s
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