Female Commanders of the Russian Civil War

This chapter demonstrates the heterogeneity of the concept of commanders’ military femininity and its variability in the texts of different authors. The chapter analyzes representations of two commanders in memoirs and fiction. One is Liudmila Mokievskaia-Zubok (1895–1919), who was the world&s;s only known female commander of an armored train and a Bolshevik political commissar. The other is Maria (Marusia) Nikiforova (1890–1919), who was the only woman who commanded a large partisan anarchist detachment in Ukraine in 1917–1919. These extraordinary women violated gender norms, inspiring memoirists and serving as prototypes for literary characters in works by Zinaida Chalaia, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Lavrenev, Eduard Bagritsky, Ilya Selvinsky, and Pavel Bliakhin. While the female Bolshevik was ascribed an expanded femininity that encompassed “masculine” features, the female anarchist was endowed with an “incorrect” femininity that was either insufficient or excessive. This interpretation of women soldiers was linked to changes in concepts of gender that began during the First World War and continued throughout the Civil War.