I took a class on warfare throughout the 20th Century this semester just gone, and my professor let me choose my own question for the assigned research essay. I chose to look at women combatants, because I and Bene have both been on a bit of a spree getting excited about various excellent ladies involved in wars a lot lately. I ended up becoming most interested by the roles of women in Russia's military, and decided to focus on that in my research. My topic, when I eventually realised what it was, was on the promises of equality made to Russian women by the Bolsheviks early in the 20th Century and how well that promise was kept. As it was a class on warfare, I was examining it through the lens of women's involvement in Russia's military action.
Anyway, before I start rehashing the whole thing, here's the real thing!
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| Female soviet pilots relax between missions during World War II |
The Second World War of 1939-1945 saw a dramatic increase in female combatants on the Soviet Union’s frontline from Russia’s involvement in World War I, 1914-17. This increase in the number of women and variety of roles was largely caused by a progression in the attitudes toward women, brought about not only through feminist activism but the adoption of Communist ideology shortly after the end of WWI. Focusing on the women combatants of Imperial and Soviet Russia in the First and Second World Wars, I will examine the changes that occurred in the attitudes to and roles of women in Russia throughout the 20th Century. I will use this to make a comparison to women’s roles in the armed forces of contemporary Russia and show that, though Russia’s women gained “unprecedented rights to equal jobs, pay, [and] education,” the promises made by Socialism of gender equality failed to be fully realised (Schwartz, 1979, p. 67).
The 20th Century was a period of turmoil and change for Russia, particularly after the beginning of the First World War. National fervour and patriotism peaked during the war, and many Russians began to feel that they would not “achieve victory until [they] had obliterated or neutralised [their] internal adversaries” in addition to the external threats posed by the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires (Fuller, 2006, p. 259). The “fear and discontent at home” was exacerbated by the Russian forces’ weaknesses and their many casualties, the royal family became “increasingly unpopular,” living conditions worsened, and by late 1916 “industrial upheavals in Russian cities became frequent” (Blainey, 2007, p. 87-89). The monarchy had become equated with treason; V.D. Nabokov, quoted in Fuller, claimed that “to be for the tsar meant to be against Russia,” and Fuller further explains that even right-wing leaning patriots who supported the concept of monarchy came to “[concede] that this particular monarch and his court were threats to the national security” (2006, p. 262). Continuing civil unrest lead to the February Revolution of 1917 (Westwood, 1987, p. 222); by March, the tsar was forced to abdicate, and, in October, another revolution occurred, during which the socialist Bolsheviks took power (Fuller, 2006, p. 90; p. 92; Christian, 1997, p. 207). Russia’s instability, however, was not over: civil war followed, during which time the Bolsheviks became very different both in name (they changed to the Communist Party in 1918) and morality, and Russia emerged ravaged—it went on to experience its worst famine in over a century from 1921-22 (Westwood, 1987, p. 246-7; Westwood, 1987, p. 277). The Soviet Union was established in 1922, and after Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin fought for leadership of the Communist Party, finally gaining total control by the end of the 1920s (Darraj, 2010, p. 10; Westwood, 1987, p. 286-90). Though food shortages were frequently an issue for the lower-classes of Soviet people, the early 20th Century was a time of great industrialisation and modernisation as the Soviet Union pushed to catch up with the more developed western nations (Westwood, 1987, p. 278-309; Christian, 1997, p. 289-90, Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 8). The Soviet Union entered the Second World War only after Hitler broke the “non-aggression pact” between Germany and Soviet Russia by launching “the greatest and most ambitious military operation in world history, Operation Barbarossa, on the […] 22 June 1941” (Bellamy, 2007, p. 38; p. 99). The Soviet Union became a reluctant ally of the Allied forces, and were instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany: it “bore the brunt of the German onslaught and broke the back of German power” (Overy, 1997, p. 1). By the time atomic bombing of Japan ended World War II in 1945, tensions were running high between Soviet Russia and the United States of America, and the Cold War between the two powers began in 1946, only beginning to wind down in 1989 (Freedman & Dockrill, 2004, p. 77; Bartlett, 1986, p. 255; Reese, 2000, p. 174). Two years later, in December of 1991, the Soviet Union formally dissolved (Reese, 2000, p. 183).
There’s a strong correlation between the February Revolution of 1917 and female combatants in the First World War. While individual Russian women from “all walks of life, peasants to princesses,” had been fighting on the frontline of WWI “as regular soldiers, with and without formal approval, since the very start,” it wasn’t until 1917 that they were deployed in any significant numbers. In February, the Bolshevik Party provided women with “propaganda for celebrating International Women’s Day (February 25), but declared that the time was not ripe for revolution” (Clements, 2012, p. 180; Stockdale, 2004, p. 78; Hutton, 2001, p. 118). They were steadfastly ignored, and working-class women set about drawing men from a number of industries into demonstrations that led to the tsar’s abdication a week later (McDermid & Hillyar, 1999, p. 1-3; Hutton, 2001, p. 118). The revolution “proclaimed the disparate subjects of the empire to be free and equal citizens” and “[t]housands of women interpreted this equality to mean that women could and should assume the citizen’s right to bear arms” (Stockdale, 2004, p. 80). Many were against Russia’s role in the war—Nicholas II had committed them to it in August 1914 in retaliation to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia, though Russia had “neither the economy nor the leadership to prevail”—but it provided them with a means of demonstrating “their readiness for full citizenship through patriotic self-sacrifice in support of the nation at war, and in doing so […] ultimately receive the right they had earned” (Robson, 2011, p. 247; Clements, 2012, p. 180; Stockdale, 2004, p. 83). In June of 1917, a battalion of 300 women soldiers were “sent as combatants to the front,” and their departure was met with thousands of spectators in a “solemn public ceremony unique in modern history” (Stockdale, 2004, p. 78). This was the first instance of women being publically and officially celebrated as combatants, and “inspired the formation of other companies and battalions of women volunteers” (Stockdale, 2004, p. 78-9).
The enfranchisement of women by the liberal Provisional Government in 1917 was short-lived. Women were declared emancipated and equal citizens by “the Weimar Constitution in the 1920s and the 1936 Soviet Constitution […], thereby rejecting any need to improve their real status” (Hutton, 2001, p. 8). In general, the Soviet Constitution promised “civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms” that were “trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin’s death” (Getty, 1991, p. 18). Wages declined somewhere between 20-40 percent between 1928 and 1937, and women were forced into the paid workforce in order for their families to earn enough money to support themselves (Christian, 1997, p. 282). Not only, though, were women now in the workforce, “the government did little to ease their domestic burden” and, in fact, a pro-natalist movement was gaining traction during the 30s, reinforcing “‘the joys of motherhood’ and ‘the family’” with “the outlawing of divorce and abortion in 1936” (Christian, 1997, p. 283; Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 7). However, the 1930s were still a significant decade for women’s rights in Soviet Russia, despite the harsh conditions of life under Stalin’s rule. The Soviet woman was lauded as “an emancipated representative of ‘progress’ and modernization” and the generation of women who would grow up to serve as frontovichki (‘frontline girls’) were “nurtured and reared in Stalin’s ‘super-women’ environment” (Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 7-8). They were taught to “[combine] a sentimental, ‘feminine’ commitment to marriage, motherhood and Motherland with an inherent, passionate belief that they were ‘strong women’ and equal partners in the heroic Soviet project with men” (Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 8).
It is no surprise, then, that the women who came of age in the 1930s and 40s volunteered as eagerly as the men when the Soviet Union went to war against Germany in 1941 (Braithwaite, 2007, p. 108). Cardona and Markwick say that “[w]ithin 24 of the Axis invasion, thousands of Soviet women flocked to meetings and military recruiting posts ‘begging, demanding and crying’ to be sent to the front, arms in hand” (2012, p. 33). Initially, they were rebuffed with an official stance being that “women should serve on the home front while men went to the frontline,” but it was less than two months before the situation became so dire that “the women of Moscow found themselves on the frontline defending the threatened capital” and the State Committee of Defence began “laying the groundwork for mass recruitment of women to the Red Army in the spring of 1942” (Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 32-33). Estimates of the total number of women on the Soviet’s frontline vary hugely—with some estimates as low as 490,234 and some as high as 800,000 (Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 10; Campbell, 1993, p. 318). Women took on roles throughout the frontline, from medical work (“forty percent of the Red Army’s frontline doctors and all its frontline nurses were women”) to “combatant fighting units,” most commonly in the air force, where many became distinguished as “fighters, bombers, and ground-attack planes,” and as snipers, which “required a good eye and good breathing [as well as] the ability to lie stone-still in the freezing cold for hours” and for which women proved to have a high aptitude (Braithwaite, 2007, p. 108; p. 111; Bellamy, 2007, p. 487-9; p. 523). The acceptance of women to the armed forces did not always correlate with acceptance of their presence by male soldiers. They were often “grudgingly received by commanding officers, at least until they had proved themselves in action,” and the army was often not prepared or willing to provide “accommodation, sanitary arrangements or medical care [for] its women soldiers” (Braithwaite, 2007, p. 114). Women were also considered to be “susceptible to bribery and seduction by a ‘crafty’ enemy” and more likely to “[succumb] to the lure of the enemy,” which meant that women under enemy occupation were often automatically assumed to be traitors (Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 145-7).
The end of the Second World War was a step backwards for Russian women combatants. Most serving women were “demobilized as soon as possible after the victory over Germany” and though “they had done almost everything that the men did, their enormous wartime contribution was not seen as a catalyst for change in their role in society” (Bellamy, 2007, p. 684). The high death toll suffered by the Soviets contributed to another movement of pro-natalism that required women to “return to family life,” however attitudes toward female veterans “varied wildly, from ‘the ideal partner to the whore’” (Bellamy, 2007, p. 684; Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 239). Vera Malakhova, quoted in Cardona & Markwick, was a frontline physician, and in the 1990s she confessed that “[she] didn’t like to show [herself with her medals] because many people thought [she] was some kind of front-line “W” [Whore]” (2012, p. 239-40). Regardless of the quality of their records as frontovichki, women veterans were restricted from military service post-war; the “radical ‘expansion of gender roles’ afforded by the Great Patriotic War did indeed prove to be a ‘temporary’ expedient” (Cardona & Markwick, 2012, p. 248). Only “a handful of female officers” remained, and though women did join the Soviet Army in the decades that followed, numbers were consistently low (Reese, 2000, p. 153). The army was only around a quarter Russian, though “the officer corps never ceased to be overwhelmingly Russian,” and they struggled with language barriers rather than choose to “recruit more female soldiers to gain more Russian speakers” (Reese, 2000, p. 152-3). In the 1980s, “the number of women […] hovers around 20,000, most of them warrant officers,” and in 1991, they had “only 700 female officers” (Reese, 2000, p. 153-4).
In 1979, Schwartz wrote that, though Soviet Russian women “gained unprecedented rights to equal jobs, pay, education, etc. […] equality had remained elusive” (p. 67). If this statement is examined through the military lens provided above—that is, by the numbers, roles, and percentage of women that make up the armed forces in contemporary Russia—it provides an interesting answer, particularly in comparison to the same statistics from the United States, another nation that came to be a major power in the 20th Century. As of McDermott’s article in November 2013, there were “around 29,000 women serving” in Russia’s Armed Forces, with none “[serving] above the rank of colonel.” With the reported total manpower at 771,462, this means women make up approximately 26 percent of the Russian Armed Forces. Among that number, “3.5 percent serve in command posts; the remainder function in posts such as staff workers, medical and financial specialists, or in the communications troops” (McDermott, 2013). The total number of women serving, however, has declined with “some estimates [indicating] the numbers have dropped by two thirds since 2007,” but in January 2014, Deputy Defence Minister Nikolai Pankov stated, “My personal opinion is that we should see more women in the military ranks serving as officers, generals, sergeants, and privates,” and that admissions had been opened for women to the Ryazan Higher Airborne Command School with a reportedly “enormous” number of applications (McDermott, 2013; Novosti, 2014). The most recent statistics available for the Unites States Armed Forces come from Pentagon figures in 2011. At that time there were “more than 200,000 women […] in active-duty military, including 69 generals and admirals,” making up approximately 14.5 percent of the total “active-duty force of nearly 1.4 million” (Smith & Smith, 2013). “Enlisted women made up 2.7 percent of the military’s front-line units” (Smith & Smith, 2013). Gender equality would assume a percentage of the armed forces to be roughly 50 percent, which quickly makes it possible to say that the promises made by Socialism for equality were misleading, even without the evidence providing by the treatment of Soviet women in post-war environments, where they were quickly removed from service and forgotten (Reese, 2000, p. 153). Russia has been a socialist nation since the early 20th Century and the United States is a capitalist nation (Smith, 2007, p. 2); it is interesting to look at the difference between the Russian Armed Forces and the United States military—which had women at 26 percent (2013) and 14.5 percent (2011) respectively—in that light. Russia’s comparatively higher percentage of women in their army (by 11.5 percent) suggests, in fact, that, though the ideals of total gender equality promised by socialism are unrealistic, there does, in fact, seem to be a positive difference between that and the equality found in a capitalist society.
Throughout the previous centuries, Russian women fought for gender equality and were promised it by the socialist Bolshevik movement in the 1910s. Using women’s involvement as combatants in warfare during the 20th Century, including the First and Second World Wars, and the Russian Revolution, I have examined changes in attitudes to and roles of women in Imperial and Soviet Russia. I then looked at the numbers and roles of women in the Russian Armed Forces in modern Russia, comparing them not only to the conditions of women in Russia’s past, but to a contemporary example: the United States of America. The United States is a capitalist nation that, like Russia, rose to power in the 20th Century. My conclusion is that the promises made by Socialism concerning gender equality in Russia were not wholly realised. There is evidence to suggest that the gender equality in Russia is higher than in other nations.
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Image source: This Daily Mail article, which has some really interesting info and a bunch more photos!
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