WOMEN ON THE HOME FRONT

The great majority of Soviet women contributed to the war effort on the home front. There they worked alongside men in civil defense, maintaining barrage balloons, watching for enemy aircraft, and operating searchlights and anti‑aircraft batteries during bombing raids. Anna Ostroumova‑Lebedeva, a Leningrad artist, wrote in her diary in August 1941, “In our building an around‑the‑clock watch has been organized…. Each person keeps watch two hours on the stairs leading to the attic. It’s light there, and one can sew, darn and read.” Meanwhile, 150,000 women in Moscow were digging a labyrinth of anti‑tank trenches around the city.⁶⁰ After the German bombers flew away, women and men fought fires and removed unexploded munitions. They also searched for survivors in the rubble. Most of these workers were volunteers serving during time off from their regular jobs.

In those regular jobs, women were more important to the Soviet economy than ever before, because so many men had been sent to the military and because women who had not been employed before joined the paid‑labor force during the war. Such women were not all volunteers; beginning in February 1942, the government drafted unemployed women aged sixteen to fifty into jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and transportation. The feminization of the workforce that followed was substantial. The percentage of women among non‑agricultural workers climbed from 39 percent in 1940 to 57 percent in 1943. In the same period, the percentage of women in the American paid‑labor force increased from 25 to 37 percent. There were still more women working in certain geographic regions and economic sectors. In Moscow, women had been 46.6 percent of the labor force in 1939; they were 63 percent in 1945. In Leningrad in December 1942, 80 percent of all factory workers were women. Occupations and manufacturing sectors with predominantly female workforces before the war became even more feminized: by 1945, 80 to 90 percent of the workers in light industry were women. Women were 52 percent of collective farmers in 1941, 80 percent in 1945. Even in occupations in which men had previously been in great majority, the numbers of women grew. By 1943, the majority of tractor drivers were female; by 1944, 41 percent of coal miners in the Donets Basin of southern Ukraine were women.⁶¹

Female workers moved from one type of employment to another to meet war needs. Clerks became lathe operators and teachers learned to drive trolleys. Women also moved geographically, fleeing the front in the first years of the war for towns in the rear to which factories were relocated, and then returning to the liberated west as the Soviet army drove the Germans out. Women moved upward in the labor force as well, into skilled blue‑collar jobs and managerial positions vacated by men. This was especially true on the collective farms, where women in large numbers became mechanics and brigade leaders.

Promotions into positions once held by men brought higher wages, but no raise in pay could compensate for the enormous hardships of life during the war. Like the soldatki of World War I, Soviet wives suffered financially because they lost the support of their husbands’ incomes when the men were drafted. As in the past, the government promised to help; as in the past, the allotments were lower than most husbands’ peacetime pay and were often late in coming. The government also cruelly removed from the rolls of military dependents the wives of the millions of Soviet POWs held by the Germans.

Women coped with worsening working conditions as well. Insistent on maximizing production, the government suspended health and safety regulations and increased penalties for absenteeism. Women worked ten‑to twelve‑hour days for weeks on end. They also took physically taxing jobs once reserved for men, such as lumbering, steel‑making, and manufacturing heavy equipment. Valentina Bushueva remembered loading logs onto trains bound for Leningrad: “You lift the log on your shoulders and carry it along the ladder to the cars. And don’t even dream of looking around! The commander of our group would be watching…. We worked that way for twelve hours at a stretch. Fifty minutes work, ten minutes rest. One month–day shift; the next–night shift. We lived in a dugout; inside there were communal bunk beds that slept sixty people…. No holidays, no days off, nothing of the sort, no let up.”⁶²

Peasant women endured equally grueling conditions because so many male peasants were drafted into the army and the industrial labor force. Between 1941 and 1944 the number of able‑bodied men working on the collective farms dropped from 16.9 million to 3.6 million.⁶³ Women, older men, and children took their places; those too old or young to work in the sprawling grain and potato fields tended family gardens. In Siberia, native women cared for the reindeer herds and took the fishing boats out to sea. All this work was made more taxing by the fact that the army had requisitioned trucks, tractors, and horses. Growing shortages of spare parts and fuel then made it difficult to keep the equipment that was left running.

The women least affected by the war were the wives of top party officials and generals, many of whom were evacuated to places far from the invaders where they received the best housing and consumer goods available. The millions of less privileged women mended again oft‑mended clothes, got by with little soap and water, coped with power outages, and heated their homes with firewood they gathered themselves. Peasant women made difficult journeys to the towns to sell or trade their produce for manufactured goods. Still more challenging was the crisis in the food supply.

Because the war was fought on the best Soviet farmland, because so many peasants were drafted and so many farm machines sat idle for lack of spare parts, and because the government gave first priority to feeding the troops, food supplies for civilians dwindled. Most urban women subsisted on bread; rural women lived on potatoes. City dwellers turned vacant lots into kitchen gardens and traded food with people from the countryside. These efforts and the government’s rationing system beat back starvation in most of the Soviet Union, but they could not prevent chronic malnutrition and the diseases that accompanied it–influenza, malaria, pneumonia, scurvy, typhus, and tuberculosis. Nor could they save the most vulnerable–children, the infirm, and the old–who died by the millions.

Women closest to the front suffered the most. In Leningrad, under siege from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944, 3 million people perished from the bombardment and from starvation. Millions died in areas under German occupation as well. In the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine, the invaders rounded up millions of Jews for immediate execution or shipment to the death camps. Included were children plucked from the orphanages. They also raided the orphanages for teenagers who could be sent, along with millions of adults, to be slave laborers in Germany. Most of the deported women became factory workers, but Hitler also wanted to help out German housewives, so in 1942 he ordered his commissars to deport half a million Ukrainian women, aged eighteen to thirty‑five, to work as servants in German homes.⁶⁴

Those people they did not execute or deport, the occupiers terrorized. They seized peasants’ crops and animals, kept rations at starvation levels, and, in reprisal for partisan attacks, destroyed entire villages. In the time‑honored tradition of armies, they raped captive women and forced some to become their lovers. Karel Berkhoff has found that the Germans and their allies fathered ten thousand children in Ukraine alone. Some of these babies were born of consensual relationships, for local women, desperate for food and willing to make the best deal available to them, became collaborators. In retaliation for the depredations visited on their people, Soviet soldiers driving toward Berlin in the last months of the war gang‑raped German and Polish women.⁶⁵