Military Women

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of women soldiers and their heroization in the literary and press discourse of the 1910s and 1920s. The creation of all-female battalions in revolutionary Russia in 1917 was groundbreaking. The Women&s;s Battalions of Death shaped a type of woman soldier that embodied expanded femininity, similar to that of the Red nurses, despite the different ideologies behind these identities. Leonid Grigorov&s;s “Iz dnevnika soldata Kirovoi” (“From the Diary of the Soldier Kirova,” 1917) and Veniamin Kaverin&s;s novel Deviat’ desiatykh sud’by ( Nine Tenths of Destiny , 1925) are analyzed in detail in this chapter, as is the concept of women&s;s heroism in the 1920s press. During the early Soviet period, perceptions of heroism were constructed around a willingness to die for the cause of revolution, mass appeal, impersonality, typicity, youthfulness, and working-class or peasant origins. The defining features of women&s;s heroism were voluntariness and masculinization. Due to both state politics and patriarchal tendencies, the First World War heroines and the defenders of the Winter Palace in the October Revolution were erased from the collective memory, while the historical Bolshevik women who fought in the Russian Civil War were replaced by artistic, literary, and cinematic representations.