Introduction

Abstract

One million women served in the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, resisting the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; genocidal, mysoginist warfare of unprecedented ferocity. Another 28,000 women fought with the partisans. Mass participation by women in warfare on such a scale is historically unique. Understanding why and how Soviet women came to fight in ‘The Great Patriotic War, 1941–5’ is a fundamental objective of this book. But it was not the original motivation for this study. The initial impetus came from our desire to know why it was that, given the draconian nature of the Stalinist state in the 1930s, millions of Soviet citizens, men and women, seemingly willingly fought so tenaciously to defend their ‘Motherland’ against German fascism. So much has been written about the repressive nature of extreme Stalinism and mass resistance to it, especially since the opening up of so many Soviet archives, that one has to ask why would anybody have fought for such a regime, even for patriotic reasons? Of course, thousands of Soviet citizens and even soldiers collaborated with the Wehrmacht. Some did so in the mistaken belief that it would liberate them from ‘Bolshevik’ tyranny, as in the case of many peasants in the Western Ukraine who initially greeted the Wehrmacht with bread and salt, only to find themselves enslaved.