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November 20, 2009 Anna Krylova (Duke University) Bonded by Combat: In this paper, Soviet wartime diaries and letters home, frontline publications and handwritten newspapers, military documentation and postwar recollections take us to the trenches and airfields where, starting in 1942, young women pilots, air gunners, snipers, field antiaircraft and artillery fighters, and junior commanders began to show and share their knowledge of specialized and mechanized warfare. To draw from this mass of experiences, a complete list of combat arrangements and situations that nurtured intergender bonds of comradeship would be an unmanageable task. Such a list would be virtually endless, reflecting the deeply complex structures of modern combat. The structural impossibility of fighting in isolation—either as a woman commander in charge of a men's platoon or as part of a women's sniper company or air regiment joining a larger male formation—forms the main contextual terrain of this paper. Anna Krylova is Hunt Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History at Duke University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Russian gender and cultural history, World War II and mechanization of warfare, and problematics of historical interpretation. She has published articles in The Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Her book Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Co-sponsored by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies . |