Love, Sex, D The article ends with a discussion of pregnancy and its implications. In the course of her service, she would kill 69 enemy soldiers and take command of a sniper platoon 2. Yet after she had been at the front for months, she still remembered her greatest fear while training in an elite all-female sniper school. In an interview with the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War in , she recalled:.
When I was in training I was dying to get to the front but I was also afraid. I thought that I would be surrounded by men and it would be a hard life, I feared rape and coercion. I was very afraid of this and thought that it could never be β I will leave a girl and return as a girl.
I wanted my momma to know that I remained so. And when I thought of my momma, I was simply overcome with fear. And I set myself the goal of not falling in love with anyone at the front. Much of the propaganda produced during the war spoke of personal happiness, the realization of romance and families, as something that could happen only after victory. In the war years, happiness could be tied only to success at the front and romance was seen to have no place. This article is by no means an attempt to cast moral judgment on anyone who served in the Red Army or any choices made by female soldiers.
The author is neither endorsing nor criticizing the tropes traced here. Purely voluntary unions based on mutual affection were, of course, also quite common, but not the focus of this article. As a result, relations between men and women serving in the army were worked out in an ad-hoc manner. Most female soldiers serving in the army seem to have been mobilized by the Komsomol, which as an organization was deeply concerned with upholding Bolshevik morality among soviet youth.
The state itself demonstrated ambiguity about equality or the need to observe social norms:. Commanders and political workers should always remember that a warrior-girl is before them, and not a man. They should take into account the physical condition, character and demands of girls. Without this it is impossible to organize their education. Indeed, once she was wounded, she was shocked to find the girls under her command had acculturated to the language of the trenches:.
