In my earlier education when the government used anecdotes of Communist heroes to train the youth to become future revolutionists, I frequently read stories of Zoia and Shura. In the texts, on one hand, Zoia extended kinds of womanly care to her brother Shura; on the other hand, she was a determined anti-Fascist fighter. However, I took it for granted that Zoia could easily reconcile killing enemies with her womanhood until I read Anna Krylova’s Soviet Women in Combat.
Krylova’s cultural and military history contributes to the Western bloc’s historiography of the Soviet Army in the Great Patriotic War, which usually analyze its military strategies or war crimes. She explores a selected group of servicewomen who were shadowed by the dominant narratives of male soldiers or female soldiers playing their stereotypically auxiliary roles in wars. Based on soldiers’ memoirs published decades after the Stalin’s era and augmented by articles from official newspapers, interviews, letters diaries, and official documents in Russian archives, Krylova first traces the historical background of which highly
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Upon the outbreak of the war, thousands of women lined up at the recruitment post to volunteer for service. However, the state had no policy to regulate their enlistment. The female volunteers’ success was usually contingent upon the personal discretion of the recruiting officers. The volunteering Soviet women were placed vis-à-vis their sisters in Britain, the U.S., or Germany, who were prohibited from joining battles. The author suggests that the state took a “discouraged without prohibition” attitude to the enlistment of female volunteers, which was derived from the intense conflicts among the Soviet leaders and the male military officers who were unable to accept women as combatants other than home front fighters or medics