The Making of the frontovichki

Abstract

The young Soviet women who went to the frontline in the 1940s—the frontovichki—were essentially products of the peacetime Stalin era of the 1930s. Stalin’s abandonment of socialist internationalism in good part repudiated the genderless citizen of the earlier Bolshevik period whereby women were firstly workers wedded to the world revolution, alongside their male comrades.² In the 1930s a pro-natalist ‘triumphal rehabilitation’, as Trotsky put it, of ‘the joys of motherhood’ and ‘the family’ reinforced by the outlawing of divorce and abortion in 1936, necessarily re-emphasized distinct social roles for the sexes.³ Nevertheless, Stalinism did not simply force women out of the public domain back into the family. Quite the opposite; as part of Stalin’s drive for industrial accumulation, millions of women were forced by hunger and poverty, or driven by enthusiasm, into the factories while still carrying the burdens of domesticity. In the 1930s a veritable ‘regendering’ of the workforce took place as women took on previously male-dominated occupations, including heavy industry.⁴ But continued mass female participation in the Soviet industrialization drive, and commitment to the Soviet nation, family and Stalin, generated hybrid self-conceptions of Soviet womanhood: pre-revolutionary and Soviet values of family, marriage and nation coupled with a fervent post-revolutionary commitment to industrialization, education, and an increasingly patriotic and gendered ‘socialism in one country’.

Although I want to live peacefully

For war I am ready—here is the reason why:

Beware! Not only I alone proudly

Hold a Komsomol ticket!

Yevgeniya Rudneva, diary entry, 31 December 1936¹