A LOVE LESS CANDID THAN DEATH:

World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War in the USSR, remains perhaps the single most definitive event of a twentieth century marked by global changes. Certainly in the public and private memories of former Soviet people and their descendants, it remains an enormous presence that is difficult to quantify. Its mark is one that is impossible to ignore, though not for lack of trying on the part of Soviet government. Many Soviet documents relating to every aspect of the war on the eastern front were hidden and classified for decades, some to be lost forever. Aside from the harsh reality of military life on the front, the social order of the Soviet people was upended completely over the course of the war. Due to the incredible work of historians such as Catherine Merridale, Mie Hakachi, Svetlana Alexievich, and many others, we are able to begin piecing together how old Soviet norms surrounding family life, marriage, and sexual relationships were formed and reformed again and again over the years during and preceding the war. Even with the incredible stressors of the most devastating war in human history, love and romance did not disappear during the war years, but rather shifted and altered to accommodate the intense social and physical forces of the war. This ‘new’ love, created largely on the front line between servicemen and women, affected gender roles and sexuality in a way that drew a clear line from early Soviet legislation on these very subjects. In the end, it was these newly conceptualized frontline relationships that proved the catalyst for the social changes surrounding such Soviet norms after the war ended.

Part 1: The Rise and Fall of Pre-War Revolutionary Gender Politics

To better understand the many splintered aspects of Soviet romance, sex and family during the war, we must first understand that which preceded it. The years between the First World War and the Second, referred to as the interwar period, were fraught with social reforms in the Soviet Union. Several of these early reforms targeted gender equality as part of the grander Soviet effort to move toward complete societal egalitarianism. Things were at their most idealistic following the 1917 revolution and into the 1920’s: “According to [the author of the Family Code of 1918]... it prepared the way for a time when ‘the fetters of husband and wife” would become ‘obsolete.’”1 The official Bolshevik attitude towards the family was the same as their attitude toward the state, as remarked upon by a Soviet sociologist in 1929. They believed that, like the state itself, it would become obsolete with continued Soviet social progress.2 The blame for this perceived antiquity of the family was placed squarely on capitalism, which they believed in turn placed an unfair “contradiction” on women, “between the demands of [industrial] work and the needs of the family,” resulting in “broken homes” and “neglected children.”3 The goal would be to shift the unpaid labor of millions of women from the private household to the public labor force, where communal solutions would be created to resolve those domestic needs and also compensate the service providers fairly. The burden of women would then be relieved, and they would be free to pursue traditionally male aspects of society on the road to true equality and ultimately a more productive society.4

This undermining of the legal family would also guarantee the dissolution of the importance of marriage, and of legally defined relationships between men and women in general.5 To this end, religious marriage was replaced with civil marriage, and divorce made easily accessible. This allowed married couples far more freedom in defining their relationship.6 More liberal theorists proclaimed “the duration of marriage would ‘be defined exclusively by the mutual inclination of the spouses.’”7 However, even at the time there were some concerns by party members that these reforms went too far. Lenin himself expressed a more conservative mindset “reflecting his hidebound Victorian prejudices” by calling into question the complete normalization of all sexual desire and acts.8 Others of a similar mindset argued that as long as the possibility of pregnancy existed simultaneously with an absence of government assistance in the raising of the child, “men should not be freed of their responsibilities toward women,” and thus, their responsibility to the support of the child and family unit.9 Most on both sides of the debate on sexuality contextualized their arguments around children. It was indeed this very issue of children that was thrown into crisis by the events of the war, and what spurred a war-time and post-war transformation of norms surrounding sexuality and love.

These were drastic reforms compared to the pre-revolution legal terms of marriage, which defined the woman as little more than the property of her husband, fully under his control. At that time, illegitimate children were afforded few rights under the law. Divorce was incredibly hard to accomplish.10 In this way, the Family Code of 1918 was perhaps the most progressive legislation on gender equality at the time of its ratification. However, so drastic a change in such a short amount of time came with social resistance. Additionally, by virtue of necessity, this was transitional legislation, rather than the end goal. Provisions to protect and support existing marriages had to be included, even though Bolsheviks saw the need for marriage and the family as declining. The law left gaps in its definitions, which led to more conservative legislation finding its foothold in the 1930’s. According to historian Wendy Goldman, abortion, for example, was one of the central areas where legal ambiguity became an issue. To receive a legal abortion, a woman was subject to a hierarchy based on ‘need’, which in turn was based on vague categories that were often circumvented in favor of direct cash payment for the procedure.11 Many women lied about their exact living conditions to hopefully get access. Poverty remained the largest motivator for abortion.12 Conditions for family life, especially after the first five-year plan began, were unbearable.13

This nearly two decades long of progressive legislation came to a very definitive end in 1936, when a new family code was established that harshly reverted many of the progressive reforms of the 1918 Code. The rising number of legal abortions in many major Soviet cities, combined with a striking drop in the birth rate, can be cited as the true primary factor in the 1936 decree that banned legal abortion. Those still offering abortion procedures would be jailed.14 Under the slogan of “Family Responsibility,” pro-natalist policies, such as expanded maternal care, day-care facilities, stipends for mothers, and punitive measures for fathers refusing to support their children, were also included in this new wave of reforms. Rather than discuss the true reasons for these rules, the Party emphasized that with better living standards came a decline in the necessity for abortion.15 As Goldman rightly points out, “If the standard of living was so high that women no longer needed to resort to abortion, why bother criminalizing it?”16 All of these pre-war factors left the ideas of romance and sexuality in Soviet culture as malleable, or at the very least uncertain. In the 1920’s, these myriad reforms had first pushed against romance, sex and gender being tied to the idea of the family. Then in the 1930’s, the relationship between romance, sex and gender was reinforced heavily, reintroducing the more traditional roles of these categories of Soviet culture and society. It was this very family, along with these existing conservative notions of the family and romance, that was fractured by the tortures of the war and forced to become something new.

Part 2: Fluctuating Sexual, Romantic and Gendered Norms in War

When the war began, gender equality was still a focal point of Soviet propaganda. Merridale states, “[T]he first official wartime propaganda effort, which began before shots were exchanged, was all about community, not manliness.”17 However, she continues, even though young people of both genders rushed to enlist, recruiters at first only took male prospects. Even after decades of propaganda pushing equality, the Red Army remained a masculine unit. “There was great inspiration in all of us; our hearts were on fire. Again we [the young women] were sent home.”18 As the existing Red Army was effectively destroyed and forced to retreat in the first weeks of the invasion, millions of men were captured or killed, including the nearly all male first wave of idealistic recruits. Even in the face of this disaster, it was difficult for the Party and military leadership to accept that women on the front lines would not only be beneficial, but necessary to a successful war effort. “It was no accident that the cartoon character ‘Winter Fritz’, the German who could not cope with the Russian cold, was often shown to Soviet audiences wearing an assortment of stolen women’s clothes.”19 The feminization of the enemy proved that femininity was still associated with weakness and tenderness in the Soviet Union, and certainly was within its overwhelmingly masculine armed forces.

This destruction and demobilization of the existing Red Army defenders at the hands of the German advance in those first weeks was one catalyst for the future, far reaching effects the war had on sex, romance and gender during the war. Along with army units, entire villages and families were either decimated by or forced to flee from the fast and deadly advance of the German mechanized war machine. Many millions on the western border of the Soviet Union were sent to places in the east, like Siberia.20 At the same time, millions of citizens were mobilized directly to the front or to training areas. The tense atmosphere of confusion and lack of information exacerbated the effects of being separate from loved ones, further splintering active relationships and families that only days before had been emphasized as essential to Soviet socialism. “[D]eparting soldiers had an almost existentially strong desire for their family members to wait for them to come home.”21 This value placed on the existential idea of protecting the family who was loyally waiting for your return was one that proved unreflective of reality. “The prolonged separation and extreme wartime experiences changed both men and women physically and emotionally, creating a fear that mutual attraction might have already disappeared.”22 As Nakachi continues, the entire Soviet Union entered conditions perfect for a variety of new sexual and romantic relationships, both on the front and at home. Women at home could be found taking up with the undrafted men who had stayed behind. This theme showed up in Soviet media of the time (“Masha [...] had stopped writing to her husband and had taken up with a lame musician.”),23 and also in later Soviet texts, such as films The Cranes are Flying and Ballad of a Soldier. In these films, the instances of the women’s and men’s betrayal are part of what amounts to essentially propaganda, extolling the value of the honorable and chaste soldier and the dedicated and loyal communist civilian woman. To achieve this, they juxtaposed the images of the good soldier or civilian with that of these ‘amoral’ people, who were damaging the Soviet Union with their actions. However, these depictions were not, as stated, akin to reality.

The pre-war idea of the family was, in actuality, becoming completely eroded. As the Red Army increased the scope and effectiveness of its training in response to its near disintegration in those early days, “the physical pressures and the male culture of the front were unavoidable” for new, still almost all male recruits.24 It is well documented that the Soviet Union’s large deployment of women in WWII set it apart from the other military forces involved. Merridale notes, “this unique brotherhood ought to have been challenged by the recruitment of the first women into combat units.”25 However, for most of those units, it was not. This masculine aura in some ways replaced that of the family, and the women who joined the front were not integrated to that idea with any consistency. These men viewed the war and battle as being the antithesis of the family and the motherland. It could not be reconciled with women, who were associated entirely with that ideal of the family. “Red Army troops consistently focused their letters on worry for their family, and sought to provide for their emotional and financial needs while stoically omitting most mentions of frontline hardship or danger.”26 Even in their letters, which would presumably reflect their private thoughts, the male soldiers maintained the incredibly sharp distinction between the world of the ‘faraway’ family and that of the close, unspeakable war. When women did eventually begin joining the front, it cannot be denied that their experiences in this historically and actively masculine environment were different from that of their male counterparts. Even as they carried out the same heroic efforts as the male soldiers, and sacrificed the same, they were often not allowed to enjoy those distinctions as soldiers. Rather, they were compartmentalized as ‘girls’ or ‘women,’ both simplistic notions of a female soldier's role in war, depending on the context.

And indeed, the distinction between ‘woman’ and ‘girl’ was an important one, as elucidated by historian Brandon M. Schechter. “The term ‘girls’ implied sexual purity and the placing of duty above both personal happiness and the fulfillment of traditional roles.”27 When these female soldiers were acting as soldiers, they were ‘girls.’ They were an idealized figure, conceptualized in antiquity, that allowed them to exist in a role seen as masculine but not be men, nor capable of the same things as men. Girls are children, and children’s behavior can be excused and explained by the nature of their youth, and by their impetuousness - the very idea that they are not adults. These men were essentially patronizing these women, in order to rationalize their presence and maintain their own masculine value. This existed in conjunction with ‘women,’ “which in Russian was generally associated with the loss of virginity, [and] pointed to a person who was sexually active and potentially pregnant… placing the personal above the political, a form of moral decay through sex.”28 One could not be a soldier and a mother at the same time. For a male soldier to recognize a female soldier's femininity or sexuality would be to disregard them as a soldier capable of existing in a professional, masculine environment.

This simple binary, and all its many offshoots and consequences, largely dictated the experiences of these female soldiers throughout the war. Indeed, the focus on a ‘girl’s’ purity, her dedication to service and her rejection of the personal and effeminate, contrasted with the assumption of total adherence to military rank and authority.29 Male superiors often expected their female subordinates to comply with requested sexual favors as part of their service, with disregard not only for their own families and wives at home, but also for the female soldier’s own attitudes and ideals. Thus, these women were immediately torn between duty to themselves and their ideals, and duty to their superiors and the pressure of the frontline’s masculine dominance. Many women interviewed by Alexievich were vehement about their duty to serve on the front, for various personal reasons. They wanted no obstruction to that professional and patriotic purpose. The fact that there was no rigid or even bare minimum guiding policy on the organization and treatment of female soldiers from party or military leadership lent to the intense and often confusing navigation of these sorts of pressures. This impossible situation is embodied in Shechter’s summary of a propaganda piece put out by Komsomol, a political youth organization, aiming to define the role of the female soldier: “Female soldiers were to be ‘tempered’ yet ‘tender,’ to kill the enemy as well as a man, yet remain ‘clean.’”30

Placed within these seemingly impossible confines, female soldiers displayed a multitude of reactions, behaviors and otherwise coping mechanisms. Many wished to distinguish themselves from ‘women,’ those who were perceived as impure, feminine and amoral. ‘Girls’ were expected to avoid any romantic or sexual relationships with any man on the front or otherwise, in order to carry out their duty. However, as these women noted themselves, it was often impossible to do so. ‘Girl’ soldiers were in many ways meant to be a beacon of morality within the ranks, reminding the male soldiers of their purpose, and to prevent them from falling in a pit of amorality. This role as moral guidance that put them on a pedestal was expected to take priority over their soldierly duties.31 Many of these women, especially those in medicine, fully believed in this idea and practiced it as much as possible. “I figured I had to smile as often as possible, because a woman should bring light… ‘your strongest medicine is love.’”32 This conflict in actuality placed incredible pressure on female recruits, who were expected to maintain ‘purity’ but to also integrate themselves into a coarse masculine culture in order to do their duty they so badly wished to fulfill. Attesting to this cognitive dissonance, the Komsomol article mentioned above was issued in many ways as a corrective for the ‘corruption’ of female soldiers, whom Komsomol leadership thought were behaving poorly by picking up masculine military values, such as cursing, smoking and drinking.33 In ‘field wives,’ who many soldiers looked down on, this ‘woman’ of impure morality that the Komsomol feared was personified.

These field wives, also referred to as PPZh, were one such coping behavior that these women, and the men who solicited them, took. As stated before, “the Komsomol’s policy of sexual abstinence and that of the Party itself, which supported a commanders’ privileges and authority (including the right to take lovers), were not in alignment. The fact that male soldiers had received no such instructions to be chaste also contributed to confusion.34 The commanding officers not only allowed sexual relationships between themselves and their female underlings, but in many cases actively pursued it.35 Commanders taking partners from their medical staff became a bit of a stereotype.36 As for the women who participated in these relationships, some did do so under the impression that the relationship was born out of true romance, and believed that after the war, they would remain with this person. Others still did so out of self-preservation, as tying oneself to a single man, especially an officer, would help protect from advances made by the many male soldiers that surrounded them every day.37 “Our battalion commander fell in love with me… during the whole war he protected me, wouldn't let anyone go near me.”38 She intentionally talked around the reality of love, of what kind of relationship that was. Another female soldier said, “He was a good man, but I didn’t love him. There were only men around, so it was better to live with one than to be afraid of them all.”39 Merridale addresses this writing, “‘Wives’ could be semi-permanent (for the war’s duration) or they could change from day to day. The euphemism masked the essence of the situation, which was that male officers could pick, choose, discard and choose again.”40 This arrangement heavily skewed the balance of power in the men’s favor. This idea that all women in the armed forces were present as purely sexual objects corrupted their image within the army and in the eyes of many civilians. “When the medal ‘For military service’ (za boevye zaslugi) was worn by a woman in the post-war years, it was often dismissed, half-humorously, as being ‘for sexual service.’”41 First Sergeant Klavdia Grigoryevna Krokhina, a female sniper, recounts briefly one of these instances of stereotype and degradation: “He sees I’m in uniform, with decorations. ‘How many Germans did you kill?’ I say to him: ‘Seventy-five.’ He says a bit mockingly, ‘Come on, I bet you didn’t lay eyes on a single one.’”42

Others still worked incredibly hard to create their own feminine space within the masculine confines of the Red Army. Female soldiers almost never received female undergarments or uniforms, not until near the end of war. They wore men’s boots, which were oversized along with the uniforms, and they had their heads shaved. This caused much distress for young girls who strongly related their femininity to their hair and dress, especially when the loss was combined with the physical discomfort of ill-fitting equipment.43 To cope, some made scarves out of footwraps,44 for instance, or sewed their uniforms into something better fitting.45 “‘Give her a man’s haircut.’ ‘But she’s a woman.’ ‘No, she’s a soldier. She’ll be a woman again at the end of the war.’ All the same, as soon as the girl’s hair grew a little, I’d curl it during the night.”46 Many women and girls in Alexievich’s interviews recall such moments of either forced or consensual masculine conformity, along with the small acts of resistance that helped female soldiers hold on to femininity and therefore their identity. All the same, this masculine culture combined with the traumas of battle and medical care made maintaining one’s pre-war identity and ideology, particularly toward love, family and sex, exceedingly difficult. Some women decided to relinquish any femininity they felt they once had, and embrace the army’s masculine culture. “I wasn’t embarrassed in front of them, they were like brothers to me, and I lived among them as a boy.”47 For one Appolina, it was a strategy of protecting her mental and physical wellbeing: “I tried not to think about love… during the war. I forbade myself many things in order to survive. Especially everything gentle and tender.”48 At the very least, many prioritized their perceived duty to fight on the front over their wishes to retain pre-war femininity: “God forbid I spend the whole war in the kitchen.. I yearned [for action]. I dreamed!”49 For those others, this feminine erasure was a crisis and one that predicted the present and post-war degradation and evolution of romantic relationships in the Soviet Union; “There wasn’t enough women’s work for us, it was simply unbearable. You looked for any pretext… to take back your natural image at least for a time.”50

Perhaps this effort was futile, as some interviewees suggest: “The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren't women… we didn’t have periods… Like it or not, something masculine appeared in your gait and your movements.”51 This urge to maintain one's self image, that for most if not all women was one of femininity and pre-war communist installed ‘virtue’ and ‘purity,’ left them no choice but to put up these acts of resistance despite the incredible and awful circumstances of the war. “‘Pull those earrings off at once! What kind of soldier are you?’ They needed soldiers… but we also wanted to be beautiful. What is it for a man? Even if he loses his legs… he’s a hero anyway. He can marry! But if a woman is crippled, it’s her destiny that’s at stake.”52 This revealing passage, from the account of one Maria Shchelokova, shows us that even within harrowing circumstances, women of the Red Army were often looking ahead to their demobilization and the post-war. They knew already, from their treatment by their male peers, that the world would look at them differently when they came home. As further interviews confirm, they would be devalued, their skills as soldiers useless for a woman in the eyes of society. This, combined with the idea that women served only as sexual relief for the men on the front, caused female soldiers great harm during and after the war.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the many challenges to both women and men’s psyche and physical bodies on the front, what might be called ‘true love’ did manifest itself, albeit nearly always as something different from what the pre-war family oriented Stalinist propaganda instructed. At the very least, interviewees attest to the existence of romantic and sexual relationships that were perceived as well intended by the parties involved and the culture surrounding them. Sergeant Major Nina V. recounts her experience as a young, “childish” woman faced with near certain death: “We thought most likely we would die… And lieutenant Misha T. … he asked, ‘Have you tried it?’ … And I never had. We might die and not even know what love is like.”53 Her attempts to talk around the brief sexual encounter she had, faced with certain death, reveal that the likelihood of such sexual encounters was not as low as Komsomol and military leadership may have hoped. Though such instances often came with some shame and confusion for the extremely young soldiers involved - a shame that had stayed with this woman for her entire life. Clearly, these encounters also offered human comfort, which was in exceedingly low supply on the front line. “I liked the commander… he didn’t notice me… braids weren’t allowed, we all had boys haircuts. In the hospital my hair grew back. I could braid it… [the commander and sergeant] both fell in love with me! Just like that!” These relationships were driven by a more fleeting desire for human comfort and sexual desire, feelings that did not often manifest in a post-war, ‘traditional’ family for the parties involved. Part of this was certainly due to the high casualty rate. Who could allow themselves to love, above duty and professionalism, when that love could so easily be decimated by a bullet or shell at any moment? Such was the motivation for many women interviewed by Alexievich. War pressed them into not only horrific physical and mental positions, but also into a premature and rapidly occurring navigation of their own sexuality, identity, and morality.

Young men and women alike were forced into situations that demanded a grave maturity, something so different from pre-war civilian life, especially for women previously unfamiliar with the army’s masculine demands. Embracing love in this atmosphere was something difficult but potentially lifesaving, helping give soldiers purpose and morale: “I think if I hadn’t fallen in love at the war, I wouldn’t have survived.”54 However, this kind of love and romance was oftentimes not something to be touted in front of society. The women in particular who participated in these relationships were vulnerable to the condemnation of a post-war society that looked down on women who engaged in sex and romance on the front. Alexievich writes of these interviewees: “Love is the only personal thing in wartime. They spoke about love less candidly than death….I understood what they were protecting themselves from: Postwar insults and slander….After the war was over, they had to fight another war.”55 In these relationships, much of what early revolutionary thinking proposed began to see reflection in reality. A ‘field wife’ speaks to the eroding of marital and familial importance: “I loved him, and he had a beloved wife, and two children. At the end of war I got pregnant… I raised our daughter by myself. He didn’t help me, didn’t lift a finger… The war ended, and love ended.”56 This type of arrangement was in strict contrast to the more conservative familial values of the pre-war, and the precipitator of the post-war single mother pro-natal policy that relaxed paternal responsibility. Where once there was a strict adherence to marriage and a difficult divorce process, men in the post-war were encouraged by the state to impregnate as many women as possible without regard for consequences, in order to rebuild the population. “My commander… came to me and we got married. A year later he left me for another woman... ‘she wears perfume, and you smell of army boots and footwraps.’”57 Many men who fell in love with their female peers on the front left them later for a more ‘traditional,’ ‘feminine’ woman, one who did not remind them of the war and its horrors. It was these relationships, not the few that survived the war and civilian life, that dictated the course of Soviet values around love and sex.

As the war came to a close, the Soviet population was indeed decimated and displaced. The young adult male population especially was much lower than its female counterpart. The relationships that occurred on the front were the catalyst for such significant changes in romantic and sexual relationships, and changes in the gendered expectations of these relationships. Many women who served were left heartbroken and/or traumatized by the reality of war and the loss or rejection of their wartime lovers. Single mothers became a norm of post-war society, in conjunction with male infidelity. Women also were scorned by their society for their perceived roles as ‘whores’ on the front line, further splintering these women’s hopes or aspirations for a traditional nuclear family. As Alexievich’s interviews attest, many of these women hid their service for this exact reason, at the same time military men of all ranks and background were treated as heroes and enjoyed easier access to sexual partners upon their return home. Though as Nikachi notes, the 1944 Family Law was equally as important in creating these norms as the war itself;58 it was the war acting as a catalyst that allowed the law to further its effects. Without it, that legislation would perhaps never have existed, and Soviet sexuality, gender and love left relatively untouched from its pre-war state.

Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936,
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid.
Ibid., 3, 5.
Ibid., 3, 4.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 49.
Ibid., 275.
Ibid.
Ibid., 277.
Ibid., 291.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Catherine Merridale, “Masculinity at War: Did Gender Matter in the Soviet Army?” (Journal of War and Culture Studies 5 (3), 2012,) 309.
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, (New York: Random House, 2017), 6
Merridale, “Masculinity at War”, 309.
Ibid.
Ibid, 427.
Ibid.
Ibid., 428.
Ibid., 310.
Ibid.
Steven G. Jug, “Red Army Romance: Preserving Masculine Hegemony in Mixed Gender Combat Units, 1943-1944,” (Journal of War and Culture Studies 5, 2012), 3./
Brandon M. Schechter, "“Girls” and “Women”. Love, Sex, Duty and Sexual Harassment in the Ranks of the Red Army 1941-1945", (Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies, no. Issue 17, 2016), 2
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid.
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, 187.
Brandon M. Schechter, "“Girls” and “Women”, 4.
Ibid, 5.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mie Nakachi, “A Postwar Sexual Liberation?”, 429.
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War
Ibid, 235.
Merridale, “Masculinity, 111. at War”, 313.
Ibid, 313.
Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, 15.
Ibid, 104.
Ibid, 94.
Ibid., 104
Ibid, 164.
Ibid, 196.
Ibid, 219.
Ibid, 205.
Ibid., 83
Ibid., 195.
Ibid, 187.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 235.
Ibid., 226.
Ibid, 236.
Ibid., 238.
Mie Nakachi, “A Postwar Sexual Liberation?”, 433.