Soviet Women in Combat A History of Violence on the Eastern Front [Paperback]

Soviet Women in Combat explores the unprecedented historical phenomenon of Soviet women's en masse volunteering for World War II combat.Soviet Women in Combat narrates a story about a cohort of Soviet young women who came to think about themselves as women soldiers in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and who shared modern combat, its machines, and commanding positions with men on the Eastern front between 1941 and 1945.Soviet Women in Combat narrates a story about a cohort of Soviet young women who came to think about themselves as women soldiers in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and who shared modern combat, its machines, and commanding positions with men on the Eastern front between 1941 and 1945.Soviet Women in Combat explores the unprecedented historical phenomenon of Soviet young womens en masse volunteering for World War II combat in 1941 and writes it into the twentieth-century history of women, war, and violence. The book narrates a story about a cohort of Soviet young women who came to think about themselves as women soldiers in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s and who shared modern combat, its machines, and commanding positions with men on the Eastern front between 1941 and 1945. The author asks how a largely patriarchal society with traditional gender values such as Stalinist Russia in the 1930s managed to merge notions of violence and womanhood into a first conceivable and then realizable agenda for the cohort of young female volunteers and for its armed forces. Pursuing the question, Krylovas approach and research reveals a more complex conception of gender identities.Introduction: the woman veteran as a World War II memoirist; Part I. Before the Front, 1930s: 1.?A portrait of a young woman as the citizen soldier: the 'prewar generation' in popular culture, in school, and at the shooting range; Part II. On the Way to the Front, 19415: 2. 'And this is exactly who we are - soldiers!': Women volunteers, local authorities, and the Stalinist government inlã=