Soviet Union, Women in the Armed Forces

(19 17-1991)

Apart from their participation in World War II, women in the Soviet Union played an auxiliary role in the Soviet military. Despite the historical record of competent military service by Russian women and recurrent manpower shortages notwithstanding, women have not been treated as a permanent component of the Russian military, and senior officers have resisted placing women in jobs traditionally held by men.

During the Russian Civil War (1918-1920) the recruitment of women was largely limited to medical and political appointments, some of a very onerous nature, as women placed in staff positions had to explain the ideological reasons for combating the opposing Whites (the collective appellation of the opponents of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War). A minority of women received weapons and tactical training. The 1918 draft applied exclusively to women physicians. About 80,000 women served during the civil war, of whom approximately 40 percent were physicians, medics, orderlies, and nurses; the remaining 60 percent were employed in administrative positions, including as political workers (Herspring 1997, 45). By 1919, when the Political Administration of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republics was created, about 27 percent of all political workers were women, and some of them occupied senior positions. Among those who served in the Red Army during the civil war, 1,854 were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner (Herspring 1997, 45).

After the civil war ended, women were expected to go back to civilian life. Between 1925 and 1939 only men were conscripted. The interest of the military with regard to women was largely limited to food service and jobs and education for wives, some of whom received basic military training as dependents of regular military officers. About 100 women studied at military academies in the 1920s and 1930s, a number of whom were to play an important role during World War II, yet these career officers were usually employed in staff positions and had no line troops under their command.

In the late 1930s women often took part in the work of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. In addition to keeping fit through participation in military sports sponsored by the Komsomol (Young Communist’s League), women were able to engage in paramilitary training offered by the Osoaviakhim (Society for Assistance to Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Industry), founded in 1927. Women mastered a number of military specialties, especially after World War II began, when they were given enhanced access to weapons training by Osoaviakhim. Women workers also received 110 hours of military training provided by the Vsevobuch (Administration for Universal Military Training) of the ministry of defense (Cottam 1998, xix). In 1942 so-called Vsevobuch Komsomol youth subunits trained 222,000 women as mortar personnel, heavy and light machine gun and submachine gun operators, snipers, and communication specialists (Cottam 1998, xx). Such training took place both before and during the war in military schools, reserve regiments, and field units.

The all-female crew of Minesweeper No. 611 of the Soviet Volga Naval Flotilla. Left to right: A. F. Tarasova, E. S. Parkhacheva, A. E. Kupriianova, V. S. Chapova, T. I. Dekalina, and A. P. Shabilina. (Viktorov, S. 1986. "V ekipazhe korablia—tolko devushki" [The Ship Crew Is All-Female].

Initially women were sent mainly to air defense and reserve communications units, as well as rear units and establishments of the army and navy, or they were assigned to firefighting, police, and civil defense duties. Such duties were mainly auxiliary and defensive but involved exposure to enemy fire and explosives during air-defense and mine-clearing activities. In the course of the war, women, as a result of manpower shortages as well as their own struggle for equality, moved into new military occupations, including combat duty in both mixed-sex and all-female units. The transfer of women to combat roles often took place despite, rather than because of, official policy. Women volunteering for service at the front were not always motivated by purely patriotic considerations but rather by the loss of loved ones as well as enemy-caused devastation and atrocities. At the end of 1943 the number of enlisted women reached its maximum, estimated at 800,000 to 1 million, or 8 percent of the total strength of the Soviet armed forces; at least half of these women served at the front (Cottam 1980b, 345).

In addition to those who volunteered, more than 400,000 women were mobilized. In 1942, following the state council of defense’s decisions of March 23 and April 13, 100,000 women were drafted for air-defense duties. Some 30,000 were sent to logistical units and establishments of the army (decision of April 26), and 25,000 were directed to logistical and coastal units of the navy (decision of May 6) (Cottam 1998, xx). By 1943 all childless women not aiding the war effort were declared eligible for military service.

The first women to leave for the front in early July 1941 had peacetime communications experience. Some were to be charged with very important assignments. For example, the military and civilian authorities in Leningrad cooperated in the laying of an underwater cable across Lake Ladoga, which restored telephone communications with Moscow and other cities. The entire operation, including equipment trials and all installation work, was directed by V. A. Iarchevskaia, a highly qualified female engineer.

In each hero-city (cities threatened by the advancing Germans), hundreds of women volunteered to dig antitank ditches and build fortifications. In Leningrad (the City-Front), there was an unprecedented female construction army of engineer corps, with women in command of sections and platoons. Forty-five thousand women built and maintained permanent strong points, bunkers, foxholes, trenches, and highways. In the summer of 1943 they constructed a belt of powerful fortifications, 25 kilometers (15.53 miles) long, in the 42nd Army zone, as well as five ferro-concrete pillboxes located in the avenue of the probable enemy tank approach (Cottam 1980b, 351). The women worked day and night, in all kinds of weather, under artillery fire and air strikes. Meanwhile, a pipeline for uninterrupted fuel delivery to the blockaded city was laid on the bottom of Lake Ladoga. This project was conceived and executed with the assistance of N. V. Sokolova, a female engineer and diver.

In 1944 and 1945 Leningrad’s women engineers were retrained for mine-clearing duties in the huge territory comprising the Leningrad, Pskov, and Novgorod regions. Using dogs to sniff out the explosives, many women perished attempting to disarm the mines. A young woman from Minsk, Iadviga Urbanovich, distinguished herself in mine-clearing work in the Leningrad region. She trained hundreds of other women and personally disposed of more than a thousand shells and over a hundred bombs in Leningrad (Sokolov and Borchenko 1983, 162).

Senior Lieutenant Lidiia Shulaikina, who flew the IL-2 attack aircraft known as the Flying Tank, was the sole woman naval pilot during World War II. The most prominent role in the navy was assigned to women in the Volga Flotilla, created to safeguard shipping. (The Volga River had the transportation capacity of ten railroads.) In addition to working as crew members and captains of cargo ships, women operated antiaircraft guns and served aboard passenger steamships converted to minesweepers. Entire families, including wives and adult children, operated ships in the flotilla.

Very few women served with the large-caliber Ground Forces artillery. An undefined number, however, served in armored units. Women were radio operators, turret gunners, drivers, and tank and subunit commanders. They progressed from lighter to heavier vehicles and either volunteered for tank duty or were transferred, at their request, from other duties. Ekaterina Petliuk was too short to become a pilot so she drove a T-70 tank. Vera Bezrukova was a tank driver. Her baptism of fire took place near the Volga River, after which she fought all the way to Berlin. Managing to extricate herself from the most difficult predicaments, she survived the disabling of eight tanks. Aleksandra and Ivan Boiko, a married couple, served together as tank commander and driver, respectively. Valentina Barkhatova, a native of Siberia, was a radio operator-gunner. She died in a T-34 tank, one of the first to burst into Sevastopol in May 1944. The tank now stands on a cement base in Simferopol as a monument to those who fell during the Crimean operation of 1944. The attractive Aleksandra Samusenko was a tank school graduate, tank commander, platoon commander, and a Guards senior lieutenant. When her battalion commander fell, she led the battalion into battle and out of encirclement. She was killed on the outskirts of Berlin.

There were exceptional female machine gunners and snipers who owed their training to the Osoaviakhim and line units. About 102,333 future snipers attended special Vsevobuch courses and schools (Cottam 1998, xx). The most famous of them was the Central Women’s School for Snipers, located near Moscow. Its graduates alone were credited with eliminating 12,000 enemy personnel (Herspring 1997, 46).

Women army scouts were parachuted behind enemy lines or crossed into occupied areas on skis to gather intelligence or to liaison with local underground organizations. Between 1943 and 1944, ninety-four women led underground Komsomol organizations at the regional, district, and urban levels.

By February 1944 there were 26,707 female partisans (Herspring 1997, 47). Women constituted 16 percent of the total partisan strength in Belarus (Cottam 1982, 367). They functioned as radio operators, snipers, machine gunners, and saboteurs and proved invaluable as messengers and scouts.

After the targeted call-ups of March, April, and October 1942 and the sporadic recruitment of women in 1943 and 1944, the proportion of women soldiers was greatest in the land-based Air Defense Forces (ADF), amounting to 30.5 percent in the Moscow area and 34.5 percent on the entire eastern front (Herspring 1997, 46), where women replaced 300,000 men. The average women’s participation in the ADF, including in Air Defense Aviation, amounted to 24 percent (Cottam 1980a, 118).

In the spring of 1942 ADF women fully replaced men in the handling of barrage balloons, where teams of 12 were reduced to 6 or 7 women who played a major role in protecting the Soviet capital. In instrument sections of air-defense artillery, women replaced 8 out of 10 men; in machine-gun crews, 3 out of 5; in the Air Warning Service, 5 out of 6; and in the rear services, all male enlisted personnel and noncommissioned officers (Cottam 1980a, 117). The mobilizations significantly affected the entire Soviet armed forces, releasing a large number of men for service at the front and strengthening the ADF, where women constituted more than 50 percent of total strength in some regiments and divisions (Cottam 1980a, 117). During the historic Battle for Berlin massed searchlights were used to blind the enemy at night; at least half of the searchlight operators were women. Additionally, there were all-female gun batteries in the Leningrad Army of Air Defense.

The majority of Soviet women officers were political workers, many of whom served in the ADF, where by 1943 the majority of political workers were women. They involved themselves with every aspect of military life. There were many female political workers in partisan units, mainly at the lower party and Komsomol levels. Those in the underground tried to win over Soviet defectors and troops of Germany’s allies, with some success. Above all, political workers were expected to set examples of fearlessness. For instance, Aleksandra Postol’skaia, radio operator and Komsomol battalion organizer of the 88th Rifle Division, replaced her fallen commander and was killed while leading her troops in a successful attack in Rybki in the Smolensk region on August 15, 1943. It was a woman political worker, Major Anna Nikulina, who hoisted the red flag on the rooftop of the Chancellery in Berlin, at considerable danger to herself. Two soldiers in her party were killed, and one was severely wounded. Soviet female political workers of World War II were more numerous than during the civil war, and the tendency for many of them to be line rather than staff personnel was new. Hence their impact on morale was undoubtedly as great or greater than during the civil war.

Women appear to have had a qualitative impact on morale out of proportion to their numbers. Some, at least, were willing participants, full of idealism and enthusiasm. Female partisans and regular army personnel increasingly established themselves in nontraditional roles; those in support and political categories also fought and sometimes assumed command. The result was that mixed-sex crews learned to work harmoniously and all-female groups developed the team spirit and solidarity previously associated only with comradeship among men. Also, some women became attached to their equipment and weapons, which they treated as extensions of themselves. This perceived increase in their physical and mental powers was to them a liberating experience. Often women displayed a strong sense of solidarity and loyalty toward their husbands, brothers, and fathers, and they wished to avenge those who perished.

Although women partisans derailed trains, blew up bridges, and stormed enemy garrisons, they were also frequently expected to cook and do the men’s laundry. In the army, women were expected to render first aid regardless of whether they were radio operators, snipers, or machine gunners. This was a wartime version of the female "double shift." Women were drafted as communications specialists or for other nonag-gressive duties; even mine clearing fell in that category, though it was at least as dangerous as tank duty or service in Ground Forces artillery. Perhaps never before in the history of warfare was the line between the combatant and non-combatant less clearly drawn than during the "Great Patriotic War," as World War II was referred to by the Soviet regime and the Russian people.

After the war most women were demobilized and banned from attending military schools and academies. A common belief reasserted itself that women should serve only when the country was endangered. By 1959 there were only 659 military women in the USSR army of 4 to 5 million, serving in women’s traditional military occupations such as nursing, political work, communications, and administration (Herspring 1997, 48). The 1967 Military Service Law specified that single women, aged 19 to 40, with medical and specialized training would be accepted for military service in peacetime and could be drafted in wartime to perform auxiliary or specialized duties. By the mid-1970s the estimated number of women in the Soviet armed forces was 10,000 (Herspring 1997, 49). They were, however, prohibited from serving on combat ships and aircraft, and their access to firearms was strictly regulated.

In 1990 women were allowed to teach in military medical institutions. By the end of 1992 (after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.) the number of women in the Russian military climbed to 100,000, including 20,000 warrant officers and 1,100 officers (Herspring 1997, 50). The majority of them served in the Ground Forces. About 1,000 women were admitted into the elite airborne forces (Herspring 1997, 50-51). One hundred and sixty-nine specialties were opened to women. In 1992 mixed staffing was introduced, and by the end of the year women volunteers outnumbered male conscripts by 367 to 125 in one motorized infantry unit. That same year the Moscow Military District announced that it intended to raise the percentage of women in its ranks to 10 percent (Herspring 1997, 51).

The increasingly important role women played was most evident in the ADF, where women occupied 50 percent of key positions in 1992 (Herspring 1997, 51). It was assumed that women had better aptitude than men for detailed work and making precise calculations. When in 1993 women were allowed to join the military on contract, the intent was not only to alleviate manpower shortages but also to assist underpaid professional soldiers by providing employment for their wives. Thus, by 1994 the total number of women in the military approached 250,000, but only 1,500 of them were officers (Herspring 1997, 52-53).

Despite their increasing reliance on women, Russian senior officers tended to resist placing them in "men’s" jobs and dismissed them at the earliest opportunity. Yet by mid-1997 the situation of Russian women soldiers had improved. Out of an army of 1.2 million, women officers numbered approximately 2,400, including 4 colonels and 300 senior officers (major to colonel) (Herspring 1997, 53). Also, astronaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to be granted a major general’s rank. Meanwhile, women had been admitted to communications and chemical warfare schools. Though male commanders acknowledged women’s proficiency in carrying out technical, medical, and administrative tasks, they were reluctant to use them in combat, even when they constituted 20 percent of divisional personnel and were appropriately trained (Herspring 1997, 54). Also, there was no effective women’s lobby group to argue that women were full-fledged members of the Russian armed forces. The recurrent severe shortages of men, coupled with persistent praise of women in the press (citing the superior discipline of women, their more efficient work habits, and their greater devotion to duty), may improve the status of Russian military women in the future.