WOMEN IN THE ARMED FORCES

More than 1 million women served in the Soviet military during World War II. At their greatest participation in 1943, they were 800,000 to 1,000,000 strong, 8 percent of the regular army. This was by far the largest enlistment of women by any of the combatant nations. By contrast, the U.S. and German militaries contained 400,000 women each and the British 450,000.⁴⁵

Before the war, the government had not intended to recruit women. In the late 1930s, planners decided that, should war come, women would remain on the home front, where they would fill in for men who had been drafted. Women would also participate in civil defense. To that end, the government encouraged them to take courses in first aid, marksmanship, demolitions, and radio communications and invited them to learn to fly at aviation clubs. Immediately after the German invasion, the government called on female doctors and nurses, communications and demolition experts, truck drivers, paratroopers, and engineers to join the army. It turned away tens of thousands of other women who volunteered for service. Some of these then found their way into the service by talking low‑ranking officers into accepting them or joining the “people’s corps,” hastily assembled to defend the major cities.⁴⁶

A few female aviators also refused to take no for an answer. Chief among them was Marina Raskova, who had made a series of record‑setting long‑distance flights in the 1930s and had afterward received a commission in the Soviet army. In the late summer of 1941, Raskova began working her connections to party bosses, perhaps including Stalin himself. In the fall she received permission to recruit women for three all‑female air‑corps regiments. Anna Krylova argues that the top leadership saw the women’s regiments as a worthwhile experiment; they were proved correct. By the spring of 1942, the graduates were flying combat missions.⁴⁷

As the several hundred female pilots trained, huge losses at the front and women’s continuing efforts to join the military were forcing the Soviet government to reconsider its decision to limit women’s service. In the spring of 1942, it ordered the Komsomol to recruit female volunteers. Recruitment drives continued periodically through 1944.

The majority of the women in the Soviet army were unmarried, Slavic, and young, as were the men. The women, many of them Komsomol members, were also better educated than rank‑and‑file infantrymen, most of whom had been conscripted from the peasantry. The women’s motives for volunteering were very similar to those of the female soldiers of World War I: they wanted to avenge loved ones killed by the Germans; their friends were going; they thought of war as a great adventure. Above all, female veterans later remembered that they went because they felt they had the same obligation as men to defend their country. Vera Malakhova was a medical student who enlisted with some of her classmates right after the German invasion. “What was there to talk about?” she remembered years later. “We had graduated, they had given us our diplomas. Naturally, it was our duty to go to the front.”⁴⁸

The Soviet high command did not assign women to a separate army corps, as did the British and U.S. militaries. Soviet women served in all‑female units within the larger command structure or in units that were gender‑integrated. They received the same pay as men of their rank and were equally eligible for promotion and benefits. Most female soldiers worked in support services, as they had done during the civil war. That is, they were medical personnel, truck drivers, translators, communications operators, clerks, and cooks. Women constituted about 70 percent of the personnel in some communications and transport units. By 1945, some anti‑aircraft regiments were entirely composed of women. They were 41 percent of physicians and 43 percent of feldshers at the front. Women also served as political officers. Officially these were non‑combat assignments, but those stationed close to the front often came under fire.⁴⁹

Women also made up 5 to 10 percent of the partisan forces operating behind enemy lines in Belarus and Ukraine. Some fought alongside men, sabotaging communications, sniping at German patrols, carrying messages, and collecting intelligence. Others were double agents, working for the German occupiers while reporting to the anti‑German underground. Most partisan women did housekeeping chores, that is, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. Some protested against this state of affairs, as did some male officers, and the central command of the partisan forces, headquartered in Moscow, periodically issued orders to involve women as men’s equals in operations. The orders and the complaints were usually disregarded. Local commanders, operating far from Moscow, could not be forced to take women on dangerous missions. This arrangement was probably fine with many women, who had fled with their children to the partisans’ forest camps to escape from the occupiers, not to fight them.⁵⁰

One hundred and twenty thousand women served in combat units in the regular army. They were armorers, artillery and anti‑aircraft personnel, machine and mortar gunners, pilots, and snipers. The 1,885 graduates of the Women’s Sniper Training School proved particularly skilled at the cruel arts of their trade. In the summer of 1942, two snipers, Maria Polivanova and Natalia Kovshova, Komsomol members and fast friends, received the Order of the Red Star, the highest Soviet military medal, for killing more than three hundred enemy soldiers. Soon afterward, their platoon was surrounded. Although wounded, Polivanova and Kovshova kept firing until they ran out of ammunition. When German troops closed in, they blew up themselves and some of their captors with hand grenades. Posthumously they were declared Heroes of the Soviet Union, an award equivalent to the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor. Many other women in the Soviet military performed heroically; by the end of the war, more than a hundred thousand had received medals.⁵¹

THE FLYERS

The most famous women’s units in the Soviet military were the three air‑force regiments–the 46th Guards Night Bomber, the 125th Guards Bomber, and the 586th Fighter–founded as a result of Raskova’s lobbying in 1941. The female pilots in the British and American armies during World War II flew transport missions; only the Soviet army sent women into air combat. Furthermore, almost all the personnel of the three combat regiments, from the ground crews that kept the planes flying to the officers, were women. The 125th and 586th had male commanders during some of their service; the 46th was led by Lieutenant‑Colonel Evdokia Bershanskaia throughout the war. The regiments received no special treatment; they were assigned the same types of aircraft as male units, flew the same missions, and dealt with the same anguish and danger. Polina Gelman, a pilot in the 46th, remembered “a night when I flew with tears on my face. We were pushed back from the Ukraine to the Caucasus. We were bombing the advancing columns of German tanks. They were advancing so fast that we had no time to change bases. We didn’t even have maps. It was August and September, we could not harvest grain, so they burned it. And so I was crying. Because it was my country and it was burning.”⁵²

Much has been written about the 46th Night Bomber Regiment, perhaps because its equipment was antiquated and its missions so dangerous. Its plane was the Po‑2, a plywood and fabric biplane that carried the pilot in the forward cockpit and the navigator‑bombardier in the rear. Pilots affectionately nicknamed the Po‑2 “little farmer,” because it could land in small fields and was very maneuverable, able to fly low and dodge away from fighter fire. The women of the 46th flew it at night, navigating with maps when they had them and the aid of whatever landmarks they could see. When they were near their targets, the pilots cut the engines and swooped in low. The navigators released the bombs, the pilots fired up the engines and the Po‑2 climbed as fast as it could away from enemy fire and shrapnel rocketing up from the blasts. Crews routinely flew five to ten of these missions per night. The Germans called them “the Night Witches,” which the women took as a compliment. By the end of the war, thirty‑one of these flyers, 27 percent of flight‑crew members in the regiment, had died. Given the conditions in which they fought, it is surprising that casualties were not higher.⁵³

The women of the three air regiments, eager to prove their competence, pushed themselves, as did other women assigned to combat units. By 1945, the 46th had flown 24,000 missions and the 125th had dropped 980,000 tons of bombs; each received the honorific “guards regiment” in recognition of their achievements. The pilots of the 586th Fighter Regiment also went beyond the call of duty. Their most celebrated member was Lilia Litviiak, who was reassigned to a male regiment during the battle of Stalingrad. Litviiak was a small, pretty blonde who wore polka‑dot scarves over her leather flight jacket, dyed her hair blonde, and painted flowers on her plane. She scored eleven solo kills in sixty‑eight combat flights in eleven months, a record that earned her a series of promotions. In June 1943, Litviiak became a flight commander and on August 1, leading her fourth mission of the day, she was shot down. Her remains were not found until 1979.⁵⁴

ANNA TIMOFEEVA‑EGOROVA (1918–)

One of the most accomplished fighter pilots who flew in a male unit was Anna Egorova, the young woman who had worked as a steel‑fitter on the Moscow metro, learned to fly at a flying club, and then been refused further training in 1938 because her brother was in the Gulag. When she got that news, Egorova endured a few weeks of despair and a long, aimless train ride. Then she pulled herself together, got off the train at Smolensk, and found a sympathetic local Komsomol head, who signed her up to teach at a flying club. He also advised her, she remembered, “If they ask you to write a resume, don’t waste too much paper on brothers. Got it?”⁵⁵ With talent, determination, and the support of male mentors, Egorova taught novices and improved her own flying skills. When the war began, she and three friends volunteered for the military, but were turned down.

Refusing to take no for an answer, Egorova went to Moscow. She talked a colonel into assigning her to a flying club in Ukraine, then made the long, dangerous journey south. Once there, she found an air‑corps major who was willing to take her as a replacement for pilots lost at the front. She began her military career flying communications and reconnaissance missions in Po‑2s and later moved on to the Ilushin‑2 fighter‑bomber, which provided air support to troops at the front. In 1944 Egorova was promoted to the position of chief navigator of the 805th Attack Aviation Regiment. By then she had flown hundreds of missions through heavy enemy fire, had been wounded often, and had crashed several times. Once she enlisted a Cossack and his horse to pull her battered Po‑2 to safety. In August of 1944, Egorova’s luck ran out. Leading an attack on German forces near Warsaw, she was shot down, captured, and, close to death, was taken to a prisoner‑of‑war camp.

Egorova survived, due to the ministrations of the prison doctors, themselves prisoners, and the tender care given her by other inmates. When Soviet troops entered the camp in 1945, she came into the custody of SMERSH, the police agency charged with investigating returned prisoners of war, all of whom Stalin had condemned as traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured. She was freed after ten days, because her friends from the camp had written letters on her behalf attesting to the fact that she had been shot down, rather than surrendering voluntarily. Still recuperating from her injuries, Egorova went back to Moscow.

Soon thereafter, she retired from the military with the rank of lieutenant and a pocket full of honors, including the For Bravery medal and two Order of the Red Banner medals. She accepted the marriage proposal of the commander of her former division, Colonel Viacheslav Timofeev, and settled down to a quiet life raising two sons. Her brother survived the Gulag; other brothers and nephews died in the war.

The stain of having been a POW hung over Egorova. “There’s always some vigilant flunky politician,” she wrote in the early 1990s, “who feels the need to remind you that you are ‘marked,’ and you’d better keep a low profile.” She refused to submit, fighting instead to have her reputation restored. She prevailed in the 1960s when the government began to acknowledge the injustices done to POWs. In 1965, she was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest award, the title Hero of the Soviet Union. When she received the news, Egorova, like many veterans so honored, thought of those who had perished. “As I read the words of this solemn document,” she remembered, “I saw the faces of my regimental comrades, who had ascended into the flaming heights, never to return. I heard the formations of Shturmoviks [Il‑2s], roaring evermore into the troubled skies of my youth.”⁵⁶

GENDER RELATIONS

Soviet soldiers lived with boredom, terror, injuries, death, disease, and dirt. They slept in tents, huts, or dugouts in the earth, went for weeks with little food and sleep, and were dirty most of the time. To keep down the lice, they shaved their heads and picked the bugs out of the seams in their clothes. Women learned to make do with uniforms and boots that were sized for men. They fashioned menstrual cloths from old clothing and adjusted to dropping out of the line of march to relieve themselves. Some women tried to keep in touch with their feminine side by decorating tents with flowers or pictures cut from magazines. Some decorated themselves as well: Lilia Litviiak wore a polka‑dot scarf, Anna Egorova a blue one.

Many male soldiers did not want women at the front. They believed the age‑old ideas that women could not handle the stresses of war, that they disrupted the camaraderie of the men, and that they brought bad luck. Women in command positions were a still greater affront. These convictions coexisted with shame born of the equally ancient notion that men should protect women from war, not send them into it. “We men had a guilty feeling about girls having to fight; and that feeling is still with me,” declared Nikolai Borisovich, the commander of an engineering battalion. Years later he was still haunted by the memory of a female medic lying dead by the side of the road. “A lovely girl with a long braid; she was all covered with mud. The girl’s presence among us and her death amidst all that horror, mud, and chaos, it was all so unnatural.”⁵⁷

Female veterans wrote in their memoirs that male soldiers accepted them once they proved their competence, that feelings of comradeship developed, and that some of the men, in Egorova’s words, “protected” and “helped” the women. This had also been the experience of female soldiers in World War I, the Revolution, and the civil war. In all these wars, working together knit bonds of trust and comradeship. Lelia Novikova, a medic, told journalist Vasili Grossmann in 1942 that before her unit was moved forward into the battle of Stalingrad, the female medics and male soldiers had argued a lot, but once they went into combat, the friction disappeared. “And now the soldiers are saying, ‘We are very grateful to our girls,’” Novikova told Grossmann. “We have gone on the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers; we even used to urge them on.” The women’s courage engendered respect, as did the very significant facts that they were volunteers who had chosen to subject themselves to the horrors of the front and who were there with the support of the authorities.⁵⁸

Although military regulations prohibited sexual relations between male and female soldiers, people found a way. “I was young,” remembered Lidia Kravits, a partisan in Belarus, “and like many young women I thirsted for love.” Death was ever‑present and pleasures were few, making sex that much more appealing. Some of the couples that met at the front stayed together after the war, and veterans remembered such marriages as particularly close, enduring ones.⁵⁹

Sex in the military was also sometimes predatory. In their memoirs, female veterans report incidents of sexual harassment, most of which they say they successfully rebuffed. Rape, which undoubtedly occurred, is not discussed in the sources. Veterans did talk about “front marriages” between officers, particularly commanders, and women assigned to their units. Military regulations outlawed such liaisons, but many officers declined to enforce the rules. As a result, commanders often took “field wives,” much to the disgust of lower‑ranking soldiers, female as well as male. Women resented the fact that the “wives” got better rations and lighter work loads than women not so well connected, and they denounced them as little better than prostitutes. This criticism was not always justified, for some of the wives had been coerced into living with their commanding officers. Others, no doubt, had not.