Many Soviet women who served in the Red Army were ready to commit suicide to avoid being captured. Violence, bullying, painful executions - this was the fate that awaited most of the captured nurses, signalmen, and intelligence officers. Only a few ended up in prisoner of war camps, but even there their situation was often even worse than that of the male Red Army soldiers.
During the Great Patriotic War, more than 800 thousand women fought in the ranks of the Red Army. The Germans equated Soviet nurses, intelligence officers, and snipers with partisans and did not consider them military personnel. Therefore, the German command did not apply to them even those few international rules for the treatment of prisoners of war that applied to Soviet male soldiers.
The materials of the Nuremberg trials preserved the order that was in effect throughout the war: to shoot all “commissars who can be recognized by the Soviet star on their sleeve and Russian women in uniform.”
The execution most often completed a series of abuses: women were beaten, brutally raped, and curses were carved into their bodies. Bodies were often stripped and abandoned without even thinking about burial. Aron Schneer’s book provides the testimony of a German soldier, Hans Rudhoff, who saw dead Soviet nurses in 1942: “They were shot and thrown onto the road. They were lying naked."
Svetlana Alexievich in her book “War Doesn’t Have a Woman’s Face” quotes the memoirs of one of the female soldiers. According to her, they always kept two cartridges for themselves so that they could shoot themselves and not be captured. The second cartridge is in case of misfire. The same war participant recalled what happened to the captured nineteen-year-old nurse. When they found her, her breast was cut off and her eyes were gouged out: “They put her on a stake... It’s frosty, and she’s white, white, and her hair is all gray.” The deceased girl had letters from home and a children's toy in her backpack.
Known for his cruelty, SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln equated women with commissars and Jews. All of them, according to his orders, were to be interrogated with passion and then shot.
Women soldiers in the camps
Those women who managed to avoid execution were sent to camps. Almost constant violence awaited them there. Particularly cruel were the policemen and those male prisoners of war who agreed to work for the Nazis and became camp guards. Women were often given to them as a “reward” for their service.
The camps often lacked basic living conditions. The prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp tried to make their existence as easy as possible: they washed their hair with the ersatz coffee provided for breakfast, and secretly sharpened their own combs.
According to international law, prisoners of war could not be recruited to work in military factories. But this was not applied to women. In 1943, Elizaveta Klemm, who was captured, tried on behalf of a group of prisoners to protest the Germans’ decision to send Soviet women to the factory. In response to this, the authorities first beat everyone, and then drove them into a cramped room where it was impossible to even move.
In Ravensbrück, female prisoners of war sewed uniforms for German troops and worked in the infirmary. In April 1943, the famous “protest march” took place there: the camp authorities wanted to punish the recalcitrants who referred to the Geneva Convention and demanded that they be treated as captured military personnel. Women had to march around the camp. And they marched. But not doomedly, but taking a step, as if in a parade, in a slender column, with the song “Holy War”. The effect of the punishment was the opposite: they wanted to humiliate the women, but instead they received evidence of inflexibility and fortitude.
In 1942, nurse Elena Zaitseva was captured near Kharkov. She was pregnant, but hid it from the Germans. She was selected to work at a military factory in the city of Neusen. The working day lasted 12 hours; we spent the night in the workshop on wooden planks. The prisoners were fed rutabaga and potatoes. Zaitseva worked until she gave birth; nuns from a nearby monastery helped deliver them. The newborn was given to the nuns, and the mother returned to work. After the end of the war, mother and daughter were able to reunite. But there are few such stories with a happy ending.
Only in 1944 was a special circular issued by the Chief of the Security Police and SD on the treatment of female prisoners of war. They, like other Soviet prisoners, were to be subjected to police checks. If it turned out that a woman was “politically unreliable,” then her prisoner of war status was removed and she was handed over to the security police. All the rest were sent to concentration camps. In fact, this was the first document in which women who served in the Soviet army were equated with male prisoners of war.
The “unreliable” ones were sent to execution after interrogation. In 1944, a female major was taken to the Stutthof concentration camp. Even in the crematorium they continued to mock her until she spat in the German’s face. After that, she was pushed alive into the firebox.
There were cases when women were released from the camp and transferred to the status of civilian workers. But it is difficult to say what the percentage of those actually released was. Aron Schneer notes that on the cards of many Jewish prisoners of war, the entry “released and sent to the labor exchange” actually meant something completely different. They were formally released, but in reality they were transferred from Stalags to concentration camps, where they were executed.
After captivity
Some women managed to escape from captivity and even return to the unit. But being in captivity irreversibly changed them. Valentina Kostromitina, who served as a medical instructor, recalled her friend Musa, who was captured. She was “terribly afraid to go on the landing because she was in captivity.” She never managed to “cross the bridge on the pier and board the boat.” The friend’s stories made such an impression that Kostromitina was afraid of captivity even more than of bombing.
A considerable number of Soviet women prisoners of war could not have children after the camps. They were often experimented on and subjected to forced sterilization.
Those who survived to the end of the war found themselves under pressure from their own people: women were often reproached for surviving captivity. They were expected to commit suicide but not give up. At the same time, it was not even taken into account that many did not have any weapons with them at the time of captivity.
During the Great Patriotic War, the phenomenon of collaboration was also widespread.
The question of this is still a subject of study for historians today.
Women in the USSR were not liable for military service, but there were about a million of them on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. There were entire women's units and units. Many of us have heard of the "night witches" - a women's aviation regiment. Representatives of the fairer sex became mortar and machine gunners, signalmen and even tank crews.
On the initiative of the Komsomol Central Committee, more than 102 thousand female snipers were trained in the first years of the war. The name of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most famous wartime sniper, is still remembered. She has 309 killed, including 36 snipers. After being wounded, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was sent on a “tour” to Canada, America and England. She attended a reception with the President of the United States, met with Eleanor Roosevelt, who, as if by the way, asked the Russian guest: what is it like to kill?
The psychology of war has long been a subject of study. What pushed women to take up arms? In front of me is an archival note from fighter Alexandra Okunaeva: “I went to the front to defend my Motherland. I wanted to take revenge on the Nazis for the immeasurable grief, suffering and evil that they brought to our land.” Surely the same motives motivated other women who found themselves at the front and smashed the enemy along with men. They returned home as heroines, wearing orders and medals, confident that they would be given their due. But already in July 1945, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin, recommended demobilized women not to boast about their military merits. Almost immediately after the war, a twenty-year period of calm begins, as if there were no front-line soldiers. Politicians claim that there were reasons for this. Society was divided into two camps - those who fought and those who did not fight. In the camp of women, the “post-war war” began to take on a threatening character. After the front-line soldiers they said: we know how you fought there, wandered from bed to bed... The label “VPZh” - military wife - began to be hung on everyone indiscriminately. The situation was aggravated by male front-line soldiers who returned from the war with new wives, because of whom they divorced those who had been waiting for them all these years. That’s why the front-line soldiers were advised to forget that they were at war and try to quickly integrate into peaceful life, not as heroines, but as ordinary women with simple everyday concerns. In an effort to push the women who fought into the background, they overdid it: they were not just pushed aside - they were forgotten and not remembered for a long time.
The year 1965 was significant in terms of restoring justice. They say that Leonid Brezhnev was involved in this - a man who himself fought and knew the services of women to the country, although he also had a military wife. Yes, and they fell in love at the front - life is life! But could this seriously influence the dedication of the fair sex during the war? Rather, it aggravated the already difficult situation of women, who also had to fight off the annoying attention of men. Svetlana Alexievich, the author of the book “War Doesn’t Have a Woman’s Face,” which was sensational in the 1980s, recalls that most of her respondents did not want to talk about it. Moreover, falling in love had no effect on the “everyday reality of war.” And in fact, let us remember the well-known Lydia Litvyak - Hero of the Soviet Union, the most successful fighter pilot of World War II and a very beautiful girl.
She has 11 enemy aircraft shot down. When the battles for Donbass were going on in 1943, she destroyed two German planes in four sorties in one day, but did not return from the last one. They intended to nominate Lydia for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. But rumors spread that she had been captured, and according to an unspoken policy, those captured or missing could not be offered such a high reward. Justice prevailed many years later. Fellow soldiers learned that Litvyak was buried in a mass grave in the village of Dmitrievka, Donetsk region. Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree awarding her the title of Hero posthumously.
Although years later, women at the front were paid tribute. Along with men, they began to proudly wear medals and orders, stopped hiding their heroic past, but 20 years of post-war silence cost many dearly: the fragile female nature withstood years of need, deprivation, everything that the war brought with it, but oblivion, humiliation, belittlement Sometimes I couldn’t bear the dignity.
Photo from the archive
The female part of our multinational people, together with men, children and old people, bore on their shoulders all the hardships of the Great War. Women wrote many glorious pages in the chronicle of the war.
Women were on the front line: doctors, pilots, snipers, in air defense units, signalmen, intelligence officers, drivers, topographers, reporters, even tank crews, artillerymen and served in the infantry. Women actively participated in the underground, in the partisan movement.
Women took on many “purely male” professions in the rear, since men went to war, and someone had to stand behind a machine, drive a tractor, become a railway lineman, master the profession of a metallurgist, etc.
Figures and facts
Military service in the USSR is an honorable duty not only for men, but also for women. This is their right written in Art. 13th Law on General Military Duty, adopted by the IV session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on September 1, 1939. It states that the People's Commissariats of Defense and Navy are given the right to recruit women into the army and navy who have medical, veterinary and special - technical training, as well as attracting them to training camps. In wartime, women who have the specified training may be drafted into the army and navy to perform auxiliary and special service. The feeling of pride and gratitude of Soviet women to the party and government regarding the decision of the session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was expressed by Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR E.M. Kozhushina from the Vinnitsa region: “All of us, young patriots,” she said, “are ready to speak out in defense of our beautiful Motherland. We women are proud that we are given the right to protect it on an equal basis with men. And if our party, our government calls, then we will all come to the defense of our wonderful country and give a crushing rebuff to the enemy.”
Already the first news of Germany’s treacherous attack on the USSR aroused boundless anger and burning hatred of their enemies among women. At meetings and rallies held throughout the country, they declared their readiness to defend their Motherland. Women and girls went to party and Komsomol organizations, to military commissariats and there they persistently sought to be sent to the front. Among the volunteers who applied to be sent to the active army, up to 50% of the applications were from women.
During the first week of the war, applications to be sent to the front were received from 20 thousand Muscovites, and after three months, 8,360 women and girls of Moscow were enrolled in the ranks of the defenders of the Motherland. Among the Leningrad Komsomol members who submitted applications in the first days of the war with a request to be sent to the active army, 27 thousand applications were from girls. More than 5 thousand girls from the Moskovsky district of Leningrad were sent to the front. 2 thousand of them became fighters of the Leningrad Front and selflessly fought on the outskirts of their hometown.
Rosa Shanina. Destroyed 54 enemies.
Created on June 30, 1941, the State Defense Committee (GKO) adopted a number of resolutions on the mobilization of women to serve in the air defense forces, communications, internal security, on military roads... Several Komsomol mobilizations were carried out, in particular the mobilization of Komsomol members in the Military Navy, Air Force and Signal Corps.
In July 1941, over 4 thousand women of the Krasnodar Territory asked to be sent to the active army. In the first days of the war, 4 thousand women of the Ivanovo region volunteered. About 4 thousand girls from the Chita region, over 10 thousand from the Karaganda region became Red Army soldiers using Komsomol vouchers.
From 600 thousand to 1 million women fought at the front at different times, 80 thousand of them were Soviet officers.
The Central Women's Sniper Training School provided the front with 1,061 snipers and 407 sniper instructors. Graduates of the school destroyed over 11,280 enemy soldiers and officers during the war.
At the end of 1942, the Ryazan Infantry School was given an order to train about 1,500 officers from female volunteers. By January 1943, over 2 thousand women arrived at the school.
For the first time during the Patriotic War, female combat formations appeared in the Armed Forces of our country.
3 aviation regiments were formed from female volunteers: 46th Guards Night Bomber, 125th Guards Bomber, 586th Air Defense Fighter Regiment; Separate women's volunteer rifle brigade, Separate women's reserve rifle regiment, Central women's sniper school, Separate women's company of sailors.
Snipers Faina Yakimova, Roza Shanina, Lidiya Volodina.
While near Moscow, the 1st Separate Women's Reserve Regiment also trained motorists and snipers, machine gunners and junior commanders of combat units. There were 2899 women on staff.
20 thousand women served in the Special Moscow Air Defense Army.
The head of the ammunition department of the artillery department of the Polish Army was engineer-colonel Antonina Pristavko. She ended the war near Berlin. Among her awards are the orders: "Renaissance of Poland" IV class, "Cross of Grunwald" III class, "Golden Cross of Merit" and others.
In the first war year of 1941, 19 million women were employed in agricultural work, mainly on collective farms. This means that almost all the burdens of providing food for the army and the country fell on their shoulders, on their working hands.
5 million women were employed in industry, and many of them were entrusted with command posts - directors, shop managers, foremen.
Culture, education, and health care have become a matter of concern mainly for women.
Ninety-five women in our country have the high title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Our cosmonauts are among them.
The largest representation of participants in the Great Patriotic War among other specialties were female doctors.
Of the total number of doctors, of whom there were about 700 thousand in the active army, 42% were women, and among surgeons - 43.4%.
More than 2 million people served as middle and junior medical workers at the fronts. Women (paramedics, nurses, medical instructors) made up the majority - over 80 percent.
During the war years, a coherent system of medical and sanitary services for the fighting army was created. There was a so-called doctrine of military field medicine. At all stages of the evacuation of the wounded - from the company (battalion) to hospitals in the rear - female doctors selflessly carried out the noble mission of mercy.
Glorious patriots served in all branches of the military - in aviation and the marine corps, on warships of the Black Sea Fleet, the Northern Fleet, the Caspian and Dnieper flotillas, in floating naval hospitals and ambulance trains. Together with horsemen, they went on deep raids behind enemy lines and were in partisan detachments. With the infantry we reached Berlin. And everywhere doctors provided specialized assistance to those injured in battle.
It is estimated that female medical instructors of rifle companies, medical battalions, and artillery batteries helped seventy percent of wounded soldiers return to duty.
For special courage and heroism, 15 female doctors were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
A sculptural monument in Kaluga reminds of the feat of women military doctors. In the park on Kirov Street, a front-line nurse in a raincoat, with a sanitary bag over her shoulder, stands at full height on a high pedestal. During the war, the city of Kaluga was the center of numerous hospitals that treated and returned tens of thousands of soldiers and commanders to duty. That is why they built a monument in a holy place, which always has flowers.
History has never known such massive participation of women in the armed struggle for the Motherland as Soviet women showed during the Great Patriotic War. Having achieved enrollment in the ranks of the soldiers of the Red Army, women and girls mastered almost all military specialties and, together with their husbands, fathers and brothers, carried out military service in all branches of the Soviet Armed Forces.
Unidentified Soviet private girls from an anti-tank artillery unit.
11:20 , 14.07.2017
Rape during armed conflicts has always had military-psychological significance as a means of intimidating and demoralizing the enemy.
At the same time, violence against women acted as a manifestation of sexist (that is, purely male) and racist syndromes, which gains particular strength in large-scale stressful situations.
War rapes are different from rapes committed in peacetime. Sexual violence during war or armed conflict can have a double meaning if it occurs on a large scale. It serves not only to humiliate the individual who experiences it, but also to demonstrate to the people of the enemy state that its political leaders and army are unable to protect them. Therefore, such acts of violence, unlike those carried out in everyday life, do not occur secretly, but publicly, often even with the forced presence of other people.
In general, there are three features that distinguish military sexual violence from rape committed in peacetime. The first is a public act. The enemy must see what is happening to his “property,” which is why rapists often rape women in front of their own home. This is an act against the husband (symbolically the father of the nation or the leader of the enemy), and not an act against the woman. The second is gang rape. Comrades in arms perform it in one team: everyone must be like the others. This reflects the constant group need to strengthen and reproduce solidarity. In other words, drink together, hang out together, rape together. The third is the murder of a woman after sexual assault.
Documents available to researchers indicate mass rapes of women in the occupied territories by Wehrmacht soldiers. However, it is difficult to determine the real scale of sexual crime during the war caused by the occupiers on the territory of the USSR: primarily due to the lack of generalizing sources. In addition, during Soviet times, no attention was paid to this problem and no records were kept of such victims. Certain statistical data could be provided by women's visits to doctors, but they did not seek help from doctors, fearing the condemnation of society.
Back in January 1942, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. Molotov noted: “There are no boundaries to the people’s anger and indignation, which are caused throughout the entire Soviet population and in the Red Army by countless facts of vile violence, vile mockery of women’s honor and mass murders of Soviet citizens and women, which are committed by fascist German officers and soldiers... Everywhere, brutal German bandits break into houses, rape women and girls in front of their relatives and their children, mock the raped... ".
On the Eastern Front, group sexual violence against women was quite common among Wehrmacht soldiers. But not only German soldiers did this during the years of occupation; their allies did not disdain such behavior. The Hungarian military especially “distinguished itself” in this, according to witnesses of the occupation. The Soviet partisans did not remain aloof from such crimes.
In Lvov in 1941, 32 garment factory workers were raped and then killed by German stormtroopers. Drunk soldiers dragged Lviv girls and young women into the park named after. Kosciuszko was raped. Jewish women had to endure terrible scenes of sexual humiliation during the pogrom on July 1, 1941 in Lvov.
The angry crowd stopped at nothing; women and girls were stripped and driven in their underwear through the streets of the city, which, of course, humiliated their dignity and caused, in addition to physical, psychological trauma. For example, eyewitnesses recounted the following incident: participants in the pogroms stripped a twenty-year-old Jewish girl, stuck a baton in her vagina, and forced her to march past the post office to the prison on Lontskogo Street, where “prison work” was being carried out at that time.
The mass rape of women and girls in the villages of Galicia is mentioned in the report of the Ukrainian rebels in October 1943:
“Zhovtnya 21, 1943. pacification began in the Valley. The pacification was transferred by the Sondereinsat SD with a force of 100 people, crimes including from the Uzbeks themselves under the wire of a Security Police officer in the Valley of the Pole Yarosh. A group of Uzbeks arrived in 2016. in the evening to the village of Pogorilets and, having committed a terrible shooting, wanted to catch people. People began to move wherever they could. All the men flowed into the forest. The Uzbeks rushed across the dominions and began to shoot and catch chicken and geese, and scrambled around the huts for butter, cheese, eggs, meat, and into the devil for moonshine, so they forcefully urged the women to cook and adjust their food. Having eaten well and sprinkled themselves with moonshine, the girls and youth climbed in. They raped and abused there. There were seven episodes of rape in the presence of relatives, who were sterorized and distributed, and the daughters, in the most refined ways, calmed their bestial instincts. There are so many cases of rape over the years that people who have been raped are hesitant to confess. A similar pacification has now been translated in the villages: Ilemnya, Grabiv and Lopyanka.”
The rebels cited the reason for such actions as the small number of people willing to travel to Germany from these villages and the actions of partisans in the region.
Soviet partisans committed no lesser scenes of sexual violence in Western Ukraine. This is evidenced by many reports of UPA detachments, however, to illustrate the rape of women by Red partisans, it is still worth citing Soviet sources - they are more reliable and, most importantly, objective, because UPA reports and the memories of witnesses to a certain extent could “go too far” in this aspect. Documents from the “Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement” indicate sexual violence against civilians by the “people's avengers.”
An interesting point: in the reports of partisan formations stationed in the Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kiev regions there are few references to the rape of women; they begin to appear with rare frequency during raids in Western Ukraine. This is explained by the attitude of Soviet partisans towards this politically “unreliable” region and the unfriendly perception of the advice on the part of the local population.
The vast majority of Galicians considered them enemies and supported the Ukrainian rebels. One should not discount the fact that the partisans during the raid were not too worried about their reputation; they understood that, apparently, they would not soon return to the places of their crimes. Being in the same territory, it is worth thinking about establishing normal relations with the population in order to be able to receive food or clothing from them. During the raid, all this could have been taken by force.
Sexual violence is described quite thoroughly in a report by former partisans of the formation named after. Budyonny V. Buslaev and N. Sidorenko addressed to the head of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR S. Savchenko.
The document states, in particular:
“In the village of Dubovka, near Tarnopol, a woman aged 40-45 was raped by partisans Gardonov, Panasyuk, Mezentsev, detachment commander Bubnov and others. The victim's last name is unknown. In the village of Verkhobuzh, near Brody, sergeant major Mezentsev tried to rape a 65-year-old girl and her mother, took her out into the street at night and demanded consent at gunpoint. He put me against the wall and fired a machine gun over their heads, after which he raped me...
In one village, I don’t remember the name, near Snyatin, foreman Mezentsev, getting drunk, took out a pistol and tried to rape a girl who ran away, then he raped her grandmother, who was 60-65 years old... The platoon commander Bublik Pavel himself personally and he incited the fighters, was engaged in selling vodka horses, which he took back before leaving...
He drank systematically, carried out illegal searches on his own, and demanded vodka from the population. He always did this with weapons in his hands, shooting in apartments, intimidating the population. In the village of Biskov (in the Carpathian Mountains) in the apartment of the formation headquarters, the headquarters cook fired at the windows, kitchen utensils and ceiling because he wanted to rape the owner, but she ran away. After which he relieved himself on the table...
The robberies were usually carried out during searches under the pretext of whether there were “spies” or “Bandera members”, and the searches, as a rule, were carried out in places where there could be watches and other valuables. Things like watches, razors, rings, expensive suits were simply taken away without appeal. The population usually knew about the approach of the Soviet partisan unit 30-40 km away. And in recent days one could come across villages left with only grandfathers, or even empty houses.”
Of course, the leadership of the NKVD demanded an explanation from the command of the Budennovsky formation. In the report, the commander of the “For Kyiv” detachment, Captain Makarov, explained everything simply. He denied all the facts, and accused the partisans who wrote the note of treason (the complainants left the detachment and went to the rear of the Red Army) and connections with Bandera. By the way, this is a fairly common type of response from commanders of partisan detachments if they are accused of looting, drunkenness or sexual violence. (It’s a paradox - it turned out that Makarov did not suspect that there were two Banderaites in his detachment, and “he saw the light” only when they wrote a memo about violations in the unit). The matter was probably hushed up. At least, it was not possible to trace its further course due to the lack of documents indicating the punishments imposed on the defendants.
As we can see, during the war, women often became victims of rape by soldiers of the opposing sides. In the post-war period, it was very difficult for them to return to a full life. After all, in the USSR they did not receive proper medical care; in cases of pregnancy, they could not get rid of the fetus - in the Soviet Union, abortion was prohibited by law. Many, unable to bear it, committed suicide; some moved to another place of residence, thus trying to protect themselves from gossip or people’s sympathy and try to forget what they had experienced.
NOTES
Kjopp G. Why was I born a girl?: the sexual “exploits” of Soviet liberators. - M. 2011. - pp. 138-139.
Meshcherkina E. Mass rape as part of the military ethos // Gender studies of the military ethos. - 2001. - No. 6. - With. 258.
The most important thing we need to know about women in the Red Army is that there were quite a lot of them, and they played a very important role in the defeat of fascism. Let us note that not only in the USSR women were drafted into the army, in other countries too, but only in our country did representatives of the fair sex participate in hostilities and serve in combat units.
Researchers note that at different periods, from 500 thousand to 1 million women served in the ranks of the Red Army. That's quite a lot. Why did women begin to be drafted into the army? Firstly, among the representatives of the fair sex there were initially women liable for military service: doctors, first of all, civil aviation pilots (not so many, but still). And so, when the war began, thousands of women began to voluntarily join the people's militia. True, they were sent back quite quickly, since there was no directive to conscript women into the army. That is, let us clarify once again, in the 1920s and 1930s women did not serve in units of the Red Army.
Only in the USSR during the war did women take part in hostilities
Actually, the conscription of women into the army began in the spring of 1942. Why at this time? There weren't enough people. In 1941 - early 1942, the Soviet army suffered colossal losses. In addition, there were tens of millions of people in German-occupied territory, including men of military age. And when at the beginning of 1942 they drew up a plan for the formation of new military formations, it turned out that there were not enough people.
Women from a militia unit during military training, 1943
What was the idea behind recruiting women? The idea is for women to replace men in those positions where they could actually replace them, and for men to go to combat units. In Soviet times it was called very simply - voluntary mobilization of women. That is, theoretically, women joined the army voluntarily, in practice it was, of course, different.
The parameters were described for which women should be drafted: age - 18-25 years, education of at least seven classes, preferably to be Komsomol members, healthy, and so on.
To be honest, the statistics on women who were drafted into the army are very scarce. Moreover, for a long time it was classified as secret. Only in 1993 did something become clearer. Here are some data: about 177 thousand women served in the air defense forces; in the local air defense forces (NKVD department) - 70 thousand; there were almost 42 thousand signalmen (this, by the way, is 12% of all signal troops in the Red Army); doctors - over 41 thousand; women who served in the Air Force (mostly as support personnel) - over 40 thousand; 28.5 thousand women are cooks; almost 19 thousand are drivers; Almost 21 thousand served in the Navy; in the Railways - 7.5 thousand and about 30 thousand women served in a variety of guises: say, from librarians, for example, to snipers, tank commanders, intelligence officers, pilots, military pilots and so on (by the way, about them, most of all both written and known).
Age and education were the main selection criteria
It must be said that the mobilization of women took place through the Komsomol (unlike male conscripts, who were registered with the military registration and enlistment offices). But, of course, it wasn’t just Komsomol members who were called up: there simply wouldn’t be enough of them.
As for organizing the life of women in the army, no new decisions were made. Gradually (not immediately) they were provided with uniforms, shoes, and some items of women's clothing. Everyone lived together: simple peasant girls, “many of whom sought to get pregnant as soon as possible and go home alive,” and intellectuals who read Chateaubriand before bed and regretted that there was no way to get the original books of the French writer.
Soviet female pilots discussing a past combat mission, 1942
It is impossible not to say about the motives that guided women when they went to serve. We have already mentioned that mobilization was considered voluntary. Indeed, many women themselves were eager to join the army; they were annoyed that they did not end up in combat units. For example, Elena Rzhevskaya, a famous writer, wife of the poet Pavel Kogan, even before conscription, in 1941, leaving her daughter to her husband’s parents, she achieved that she was taken to the front as a translator. And Elena went through the entire war, right up to the storming of Berlin, where she participated in the search for Hitler, in conducting identification and investigating the circumstances of his suicide.
Another example is squadron navigator Galina Dzhunkovskaya, later Hero of the Soviet Union. As a child, Galina managed to stick a cherry pit into her ear, so she couldn’t hear in one ear. For medical reasons, she should not have been taken into the army, but she insisted. She served valiantly throughout the war and was wounded.
However, the other half of the women found themselves in the service, as they say, under pressure. There are a lot of complaints about violations of the principle of voluntariness in the documents of political bodies.
Even some representatives of the high command had camp wives
Let's touch on a rather sensitive issue - the issue of intimate relationships. It is known that during the war the Germans created a whole network of military brothels, most of which were located on the Eastern Front. For ideological reasons, nothing like this could happen in the Red Army. However, Soviet officers and soldiers, separated from their families, still took so-called field wives from among the female military personnel. Even some representatives of the high command had such concubines. For example, Marshals Zhukov, Eremenko, Konev. The last two, by the way, married their fighting friends during the war. That is, it happened in different ways: romantic relationships, love, and forced cohabitation.
Soviet women partisans
In this context, it is best to quote the letter of Elena Deichman, a nurse, a student at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, who volunteered for the army even before being drafted. Here is what she writes to her father in the camp at the beginning of 1944: “Most of the girls - and among them there are good people and workers - here in the unit married officers who live with them and take care of them, and yet, these are temporary , unstable and fragile marriages, because each of them has a family and children at home and is not going to leave them; It’s just difficult for a person to live at the front without affection and alone. I am an exception in this regard, and for this I feel I am especially respected and distinguished.” And he continues: “Many men here say that after the war they will not come up and talk to a military girl. If she has medals, then they supposedly know for what “combat merits” the medal was received. It is very difficult to realize that many girls deserve such an attitude through their behavior. In units, in war, we need to be especially strict with ourselves. I have nothing to reproach myself with, but sometimes I think with a heavy heart that maybe someone who didn’t know me here, seeing me in a tunic with a medal, will also talk about me with an ambiguous laugh.”
About a hundred women were awarded the highest awards for their exploits
As for pregnancy, this topic was perceived in the army as a completely normal phenomenon. Already in September 1942, a special resolution was adopted to supply pregnant female military personnel with everything (if possible, of course) necessary. That is, everyone understood perfectly well that the country needs people, it is necessary to somehow replace all these gigantic losses. By the way, in the first post-war decade, 8 million children were born out of wedlock. And it was the choice of women.
There is one very curious, but at the same time tragic story related to this topic. Vera Belik, a navigator, served in the famous Taman Guards Aviation Regiment. She married a pilot from a neighboring regiment and became pregnant. And now she was faced with a choice: either finish fighting, or move on with her fighting friends. And she had an abortion (abortion, of course, was prohibited in the USSR, but, in general, during the war they turned a blind eye to it) secretly from her husband. There was a terrible quarrel. And in one of the subsequent combat missions, Vera Belik died along with Tatyana Makarova. The pilots burned alive.
“Lady Death”, sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, 1942
Speaking about the mobilization of women into the Red Army, the question involuntarily arises: did the country’s leadership manage to achieve the assigned tasks? Yes, sure. Just think: for their exploits during the Great Patriotic War, about a hundred women were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union (mostly they were pilots and snipers). Unfortunately, most of them are posthumous... At the same time, we must not forget about women partisans, underground fighters, doctors, intelligence officers, those who did not receive a great award, but accomplished a real feat - they went through the war and contributed to the victory.