Catherine Merridale is a professor of history at Queen Mary College
at the University of London.
Soviet propaganda claimed that women in World War II had equal access
not only to civilian jobs, but also to military life. "This was quite untrue," Merridale
argues. "Women and men were comrades, but they were certainly not equals."
According to Merridale, the front was a grim, misogynistic world in
which physical hardships were crueler to women than to men. As a smallscale example, the
Russian army issued men's boots to women, who wore layers of foot cloths to fit into the
giant sizes. Merridale discusses documentation revealing that women were accused of sexual
promiscuity at the front, not only by those to whom they returned, but also by their
comrades in uniform. She notes that after the war, it was very hard to find husbands. Men
wanted wives who didn't remind them of the frontline, who hadn't witnessed the atrocities. A
woman veteran, says Merridale, was a living reminder of the horrors everyone was trying to
escape.
However, Merridale suggests that women survived better than men in
the postwar world. There were 20 million more women than men in the Soviet Union in 1945.
Women rebuilt the postwar Soviet Union. Women formed social networks while they attended to
the practical tasks of pulling ploughs, caring for children, washing clothing, finding food,
and preparing food.
"Women are, in my experience, far better narrators than the men with
whom they served," concludes Merridale. "The men were left with dark images that trouble
them even now, and things about which they cannot speak. The women, meanwhile, can and do
criticize the war, its conduct, their own behavior, and the behavior of males."
She closes by noting that the particular circumstance of World War II
allowed the decimated Russian population to recover from the tragedies it collectively
experienced. They, women and men, believed that they were fighting a just war and that they
were fighting to save their country, and so they felt exonerated from responsibility for
many of the things that troubled them.
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