October 20, 2006

Anna Krylova (Duke University)

Beyond Gender:
Women in Combat at the Soviet Front, 1930s-1940s

This paper explores the making of an unprecedented social phenomenon in modern history: the mass 1941 volunteering of Soviet young women to the front, their consequent conscription into the regular military, training, and participation in combat.  Anna Krylova uses the mass volunteering of young women in 1941 and their sharing of the Soviet front with men as a promising ground to investigate aspects of Stalinist official culture, social policies, State conscription logics, and interpersonal relationships that went beyond normative notions of gender differences.  The questions she asks help her find and approach those spaces and logics that did not divide the Stalinist wartime society into two clearly gendered camps of the male front and the female home front. How did the idea of shared combat become conceivable, thinkable, and realizable in the prewar Stalinist society and at the Soviet front?  And, what happened at the Soviet front when young female volunteers and trained military specialists arrived there to fight and stayed there for four years?

Anna Krylova is Hunt Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. She is the author of articles on Soviet and women’s history and culture, Marxism, and American historiography in Slavic Review, Kritika, The Journal of Modern History, and Gender and History. Her current project is a history of Soviet women fighters in World War II and alternative understandings of straightness and gender differences in Stalinist Russia.