Home The Journal of Power Institutions Issue 17 Women in Arms: from the Russian E 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.
