For none of the other belligerent powers was World War II fought on such a scale of intensity, destruction, and suffering as for the Soviet Union. Its experience, more so than any other nation's, can accurately be described as total war. The massive number of casualties and the devastation resulting from nearly four years of continuous and large-scale warfare, and the exceptional degree of mobilization of its human and material resources, were both unprecedented and unmatched by either its allies or its enemies. So also was the extent and nature of Soviet women's involvement in the war. Russian tradition, Soviet policies, and the desperate character of their country's struggle for survival all contributed to this; but the central fact is that in no society before or since have women been so centrally engaged in their country's war effort as in the USSR between 1941 and 1945. Their contribution to Soviet victory was huge, and so too was its cost. At least seven million Soviet women died premature deaths in World War II, and the lives of many more were ruined or permanently impaired. And their reward when the war was over, with some well-publicized exceptions, was to be largely forgotten.

before the war

Even before the October Revolution, Russian women had displayed a marked capacity for breaking with gender stereotypes in war. Nadezhda Durova’s exploits as a cavalry officer and Vasilisa Kozhina’s as a partisan were celebrated in histories of the Napoleonic Wars. Mariya Bochkareva and her women’s “battalion of death” were much publicized in World War One, as was the Provisional Government’s formation of women’s battalions to prop up the crumbling Russian army in 1917. But it was in the Civil War of 1918–20 that women first enlisted in large numbers, tens of thousands joining the Red Army to defend Soviet power. This was the precedent their successors would follow two decades later.