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, 1941–5: 2. 'And this is exactly who we are - soldiers!': Women volunteers, local authorities, and the Stalinist government in 1941; 3. The exceptional mobilization of 1941: the making of a female combat collective by state order; 4. New gender landscapes for the army: from grassroots enlistments to the state-run mobilizations of 1942–5; Part III. At the Front, 1941–5: 5. Partners in violence: the woman soldier and the machine in the 1941 trenches; 6. 'To be a woman-commander - that was great!: remechanizing and regendering in the Red Army, 1942–5; 7. Bonded by combat: women and men sharing violence, authority, and romance in mechanized warfare, 1942–5; Conclusion; Appendix.
Soviet Women in Combat explores the unprecedented historical phenomenon of Soviet women's en masse volunteering for World War II combat.
Anna Krylova is Hunt Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History at Duke University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Russian gender and cultural history, World War II and mechanization of warfare, and problematics of historical interpretation. She has published articles and critical historiographical essays in the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and has served as a guest editor of a special Slavic Review issue on Soviet and Russian notions of self. Professor Krylova has been a Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and visiting scholar at Tuebingen University (Germany).
Reviews of the hardback: 'In this brilliant book, Anna Krylova
rediscovers a cohort of heroic Soviet Nazi fighting women,
reconstructs the documentable yet obscure Stalinist policy that
shaped and fulfilled the female fighters' desires to become
mechanized warriors, and establishes the role Stalinist culture –
what she terms the 'ambiguous cultural and institutional terrain of
Stalinism' – played in creating an internally contradictory
Communist modern, statist gendered order. Krylova … opens this book
to a nonspecialist reader like me and points in the direction of a
truly global history of the longest revolution.' Tani Barlow, Rice
University
'Soviet women played an extraordinary role in World War II. Their
counterparts in other countries served as military auxiliaries; in
the USSR many women fought in the front lines of the ground war or
took a direct part in the air fighting, and many of them were
killed in action. Anna Krylova's book is the first to
systematically study this, and her scope extends to the prewar
social and gender context and to the postwar telling of the story.
Soviet Women in Combat makes an important contribution to the
social history of the war and is also a milestone in the gender
history of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia.' Evan Mawdsley,
University of Glasgow
'Anna Krylova has already established herself as one of the most
important voices among a new generation of Soviet historians. Now
her Soviet Women in Combat offers a pathbreaking interpretation of
perhaps the formative era in modern Russian/Soviet history – the
Second World War. Krylova is not the first scholar to note that
women fought with the Red Army, but she asks new questions about
them, combining military, cultural, and gender history in novel and
even unsettling ways. The book focuses on the experiences of (and
stories about) roughly 120,000 Soviet women combatants – snipers
and pilots, anti-tank fighters, and others – to show how, amid this
crucible of combat, they created a range of possibilities for
thinking differently about gender, about personal identities and
social roles, and about the place of violence in a modern and
mechanized world.' Douglas Northrop, University of Michigan
'In this extraordinary study of Soviet women in combat, Anna
Krylova has with great sensitivity taken a myriad of varied sources
(letters, diaries, fiction, films) to produce striking insights
into the discourse of gender, war, and women … This book is
pathbreaking – rich and textured in its depiction of the various
incidents and episodes of women's experiences and male-female
contacts. Krylova gives us women as warriors who are still women.'
Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan
'The combat performances of Soviet women during the war were so
extraordinary that they actually have posed problems for
historians. The literature so far has done little more than
enthusiastically champion their courage. Krylova's achievement is
to approach these women's military careers from the perspective of
highly sophisticated questions concerning identity, gender, and
change … Despite the theoretical sophistication of Soviet Women in
Combat, she is a masterful storyteller who has not lost touch with
the magic of her subject. The reader walks away with not only a
more subtle understanding of gender transformation but also a vivid
sense of these women's courage and sense of adventure.' Mary Louise
Roberts, University of Wisconsin, Madison
'… Anna Krylova has certainly posed provocative, important,
questions about gender, the state, Stalinist or otherwise, and
modern warfare, which will undoubtedly resonate with contemporary
discussions about women and war.' Roger D. Markwick, The Russian
Review
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