This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Introduction
The Woman Veteran as a World War II Memoirist
Summary
“Mother, I cannot explain it to you,” Tania said, “but…if, they assign me to a hospital behind the lines I will ask them to send me to the front.…I am not afraid of the front.…When I was in the resistance, I lived with an elderly woman who also was a doctor: she and I would go to sleep at night but could not sleep, so we would lie and not sleep and I would tell her: ‘Sofia Leonidovna, what would I not give right now in order to be at the front?! What happiness it is to work at some frontline medical station among your own!’ We talked about the front like about happiness, do you understand? Because we lived among the Germans who could take us away every minute.”
Tania Ovchinnikova's monologue from The Living and the Dead – Part Two, by Konstantin Simonov, Soviet wartime journalist, poet, writer“If she is here, let her come in,” I heard the [lieutenant's] voice. “Listen,” the company commander began, “we have decided that you will stay temporarily here, at the headquarters, together with medical instructor Mariia.” The blood rushed to my face: “Comrade Lieutenant, allow me!…I cannot be a medical orderly. I do not know how to attend to the wounds. I was trained to fire from the machine gun.…I am a woman machine gunner, comrade Lieutenant!”
The Youth Burned by Fire (Military Memoirs), by Zoia Medvedeva, Soviet machine gunner, senior lieutenant, female commander of a male machine-gun company during World War II- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Soviet Women in CombatA History of Violence on the Eastern Front, pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
References
, Zhivye I mertvye. Kniga Vtoraia. Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia (Moskva: Prosveshchenie, 1982), 20Google Scholar
, The Living and the Dead. The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994)Google Scholar
, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture From Revolution to Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995. Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), Chapters 5, 6, 7Google Scholar
, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War. A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society 1941–1991 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapters 7 and 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , eds., Nas nazyvali nochnymi vedmami (Moskva: Izdatelstvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 2002), 129
, ed., Grif sekretnosti sniat: poteri Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviiakh i voennykh konfliktakh. Statisticheskoe issledovanie (Moskva: Voenizdat, 1993), 130–31
; “Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet ‘Women Combatants’ and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting In Soviet Russia, 1940s–1980s,” and , eds., Histories of the Aftermath: The European Postwar in Comparative Perspective (Berghahn Books, forthcoming, 2010)Google Scholar
, The World Within War. America's Combat Experience in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1997), 1Google Scholar
, Letter (9 February 1942) in Srazhalas za rodinu…. Pisma I dokumenty geroin Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moskva: Mysl, 1964), 28Google Scholar
, Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), xi–xii
, “Out of their Orbit: Celebrities and Eccentrics in Nineteenth-Century France,” and , eds., Charisma, Fame, and Celebrity during the Long 19th Century (New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2010)Google Scholar
, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar
, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , eds., I Myself am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)
, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in et al., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
et al., “Gender History/Women's History: Is Feminist Scholarship Losing its Critical Edge?” Journal of Women's History, 5:1 (1990)Google Scholar
, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar
, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism (1860–1930) (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
, Women, the State, and Revolution. Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Women at the Gates. Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , eds., Russia, Women, Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)
, The Baba and the Comrade. Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)Google Scholar
, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar
, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women's Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922–1953 (London: Macmillan, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar
, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Soviet Heroines and Public Identities, 1930–1939 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
and , eds., A History of Women's Writing in Russia (Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
, Veiled Empire. Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
, “‘My Death for the Motherland is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldeiring in Russia's Great War, 1914–1917,” American Historial Review 109:1 (February 2004)Google Scholar
, They Fought for the Motherland: Russia's Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006)Google Scholar
and , eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)
, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russian,” Journal of Modern History 65: 4 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53:2 (1994)Google Scholar
, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar
and , eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar
, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Other Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)Google Scholar
, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
and , The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
, Work Engendered: Towards a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, “Under Western Eyes;” , City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity,” Critical Inquiry 27: 2 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in fin-de-siècle France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar
, Thinking Through the Body, Gender and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999)Google Scholar
, Wings, Women, and War. Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (University Press of Kansas, 2001)Google Scholar
, “‘The Womanly Face of War:’ Soviet Women Remember World War II,” in , ed., Women and War in the 20th Century: Enlisted With or Without Consent (New York: Garland Press, 1999)Google Scholar
and , “Soviet Women as Comrades-in-Arms: A Blind Spot in the History of the War,” in and , ed., The People's War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, “Soviet Women at War,” and , eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)Google Scholar
, “Soviet Women in Combat in World War II: The Ground/Air Defense Forces,” in Women in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. (New York, 1980)Google Scholar
and , “Russia: Revolution and War,” in , ed., Female Soldiers – Combatants or Non-Combatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982)Google Scholar
, “‘A Sacred Duty’: Red Army Women Veterans Remembering the Great Fatherland War, 1941–1945,” in and , eds., Recalling the Past – Reconstructing the Past: Collective and Individual Memory of World War II in Russia and Germany (Jyvaeskylae, Finland: Aleksanteri Institute, 2008), 321Google Scholar
, “Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Social History 34:1 (Fall 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Motherhood, Patriotism, and Ethnicity: Soviet Kazakhstan and the 1936 Abortion Ban,” Feminist Studies 27:2 (Summer 2001)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1979)Google Scholar
, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades. Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, “Women Workers at Play: The Portrayal of Leisure in the Magazine Rabotnitsa in the First Two Decades of Soviet Power,” in , ed., Women in the Stalin Era (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001)Google Scholar
, “The Untold Story of Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s,” Europe-Asia Studies 48:4 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire. Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar
, Stalinist Values. The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2003)Google Scholar
, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 55:4 (2006)Google Scholar
, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar
and , eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)CrossRef
, Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar
, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review, 67:4 (Winter 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Two Faces of Anastasia: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Identity in Stalinist Everyday Life,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, and , eds., (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)Google Scholar
, “Identity, Agency, and the ‘First Soviet Generation,’” , ed., Generations in 20th Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar
, Women's Works in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
, “Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity,” in Language and Revolution. Making Modern Political Identities, ed., (London, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002)Google Scholar
, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
, Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (London: Imperial College Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar
, Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar
, The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and its Legacy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester, UK, New York: Manchester University Press, 2007)Google Scholar
, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar
and , eds., A Soldier and a Woman. Sexual Integration in the Military (Harlow, England; New York: Longman, 2000)
, ed., Women and War in the 20th Century: Enlisted With or Without Consent (New York: Garland Press, 1999)
, ed., Female Soldiers – Combatants or Non-Combatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982)
, et al., Behind the Lines: Gender and The Two World Wars, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
and , Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1987)Google Scholar
, Colossus Reborn. The Red Army at War, 1941–1943 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005)Google Scholar
, Red Commanders. A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005)Google Scholar
, Ivan's War. Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006)Google Scholar
, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, American Samurai. Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, Frontsoldaten. The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995)Google Scholar
, “Comradeship: Gender Confusion and Gender Order in the German Military, 1918–1945,” in , ed., Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in 20th Germany (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2002)Google Scholar
, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar
, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar
and , eds., Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 2002)
and , eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)
and , “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in , , eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar