Heroines of the Soviet Union

Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to give birth after learning about Auschwitz and Dachau. But as it turned out, she was already pregnant. Anastasia Voropaeva, a corporal and searchlight operator, recalled a pretty Russian girl in liberated territory who had been raped and impregnated by her German ‘boss’ and had hanged herself after victory rather than give birth to a ‘little Fritz’. Albina Gantimurova remembered nearly shooting an adolescent member of the German Volkssturm in Berlin before he burst into tears and took her hand.

Svetlana Alexievich finished The Unwomanly Face of War, the first of her astonishing oral histories of Soviet life, in 1983. After some interference from censors who accused her of having read too much Remarque and ‘making our victory terrible’, she released it in 1985, the same year Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary. Around 800,000 women had served in the war, often as partisans or in medical units, and many had returned home to communities that saw them as damaged goods. ‘Men,’ as Sergeant Valentina Chudaeva put it, ‘didn’t share the victory with us.’ But the book sold two million copies.

Alexievich’s idea for a women’s narrative of the war was rooted in her childhood in the postwar Belorussian countryside, which she described in her 2015 Nobel lecture as a place of women without men. Although her father, a loyal communist, had fought in and survived the war, most of her impressions of the 1941 German invasion had come from the memories of the women it had left alone. Drawing on that background, Alexievich advances some roughhewn theses about how men and women perceive war differently: men, she says, ‘hide behind history’ and focus on conflicts of ideas and interests; women are ‘caught up with feelings’ and ‘capable of seeing what is closed to men’.