Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers

About one million women served in the Soviet Armed Forces during WWII, yet their significant contribution to victory in that war has, so far, received insufficient attention. Publications in English have been limited to Soviet airwomen and are based on recent interviews with a handful of survivors. Unfortunately, most of these publications contain errors of fact and in some cases trivialize and sensationalize the subject.

This collection includes one hundred brief biographies of WWII Soviet female air force, infantry and navy personnel, as well as women partisans and leaders of urban resistance, recipients of the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union (HSU) and the Order of Glory I Class. As indicated in this collection, in the ground forces women distinguished themselves as medical personnel, political officers, tank crew members, machine gunners and snipers.

Among decorated women snipers whose biographies appear in the book was Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to tour the United States, she was the first Soviet citizen to be received at the White House and visited Canada, too; a Winchester rifle with an optical sight, now on display at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow, was presented to her in Toronto. Also included in the book were biographies of four participants in the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), including the incomparable Rozaliya Zemlyachka, deputy Prime Minister during WWII, and Raisa Azarkh, senior medical officer, who met Dr. Normal Bethune, a famous Canadian (who died tragically in China in 1939) while they both served in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War.