Women‘s front-line everyday life during the Great Patriotic War as a historiographical problem

Abstract

The phenomenon of mass participation of Soviet women in the Great Patriotic War has no analogues in the history of world wars. Despite this, their contribution to the Victory was not immediately reflected in historiography and is still not sufficiently covered both in encyclopedic publications and in school textbooks, which determines the relevance of our study. The purpose of the work is to trace the development of scientific approaches to the study of the participation of Soviet women in the Great Patriotic War. The author uses methods of historiographic analysis, historiographic synthesis, and periodization. The study led to conclusion that in Soviet historiography the main emphasis was made on the leading role of the party in organizing the military service of women, on their heroism and military merits; works on certain categories of female military personnel did not add up to a complex picture. The only generalizing studies on the problem published during the Soviet period were the works by V.S. Murmantseva, based on archival materials. The turning point of the Soviet historiography was the documentary essay by S.A. Alexievich «War’s Unwomanly Face», where, based on oral history materials, a female perspective on the events of the Great Patriotic War was presented for the first time. At the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, when new scientific directions emerged – military-historical anthropology and military-historical psychology, established by E.S. Senyavskaya, – conditions are being created for deeper and more comprehensive study of the phenomenon of women in war. However, no general work devoted to the frontline everyday life of Soviet women soldiers has yet appeared, which makes the study of this problem promising in contemporary historical science.

Keywords

• women
• front-line everyday life
• ussr
• great patriotic war
• historiography
• military-historical anthropology
• gender history