She Fights for the Motherland: Rewriting the History of Soviet Women in World War II 2021

 

The live reading of She Fights for the Motherland took place on October 14, 2021 at the Central Madison Public Library.  A Q&A after the reading was led by UW-Madison History Department professors Francine Hirsch and Kathryn Ciancia, both of whom use the book, The Unwomanly Face of War, in their courses.

 

A dramatic audio recording of excerpts from Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

Two notes about the reading: 1) This reading (and the book) contain graphic descriptions of the horrific things done to humans in war – this is not for the faint of heart;  2) With the exceptions of photos with names listed, the photos are generic and are not those of the speakers whose names are projected.

Why this book/project?  I recalling hearing on the radio that the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to Svetlana Alexievich for her oral histories.  It was a name I was not familiar with.  But in the course of background research for our 2019 reading Anna Akhmatova and the Engineers of the Human Soul I came across Alexievich’s book, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.  I was enthralled by it – and I had read many books about the Soviet Union, the war on the Eastern Front, the battle of Stalingrad and partisans.  This book was different and the stories told by the women interviewed by Alexievich almost beyond belief.  I could see just how dramatic a reading of excerpts might be.  So I started to reread and mark up the book and select stories.  But there was a very large problem – the book is 331 pages and a script for an hour long reading would need to be about 18 pages.  The aim of the reading would be to bring the book to a wider audience, to give American readers some notion of what the Soviet Union experienced during that war and to highlight the incredible role that women and girls – some as young as 14 – played in the fighting, from pilots, to snipers, to surgeons to laundresses.  American forces fought bravely in France, Italy and northern Africa, but Nazi Germany was defeated on the Eastern Front by the Soviet Union.  The stories in the book are so compelling I was loathe to cut them and so the first draft of the script was 39 pages.  The second draft was 34 pages … and so it went, and still I had to cut and ended up with a 24 page script that runs to one hour and twenty-seven minutes.  I will be developing an index to the recording with timing and subjects noted.  Any mispronunciations (and there are some) are on my head.

Our plan was to do a live reading and we started to accumulate partners – the Madison Public Library’s Beyond the Page program reached out to us and we set a date, printed posters … and the COVID pandemic intervened and we decided to record the excerpts.  UW-Madison professors Francine Hirsch and Kathryn Ciancia will lead a talk back after the live reading. That live reading will be shorter and allow time for discussion and Q&A, and will happen once live audiences are possible.

I have tried to include stories that touch on some main themes – the shock of the German attack, the eagerness of women to get to the front (despite the horrors of the famine in Ukraine in 1933 and the purge trials of 1936-37), the terrors of Stalingrad and the 900 day siege of Leningrad, the many roles women played at the front and in the rear, the role of partisans, the destruction of village life, antisemitism, the Victory, and the reception these brave fighters faced after the war.

An hour and twenty-seven minutes is long, but of course many audio books are much longer, and you the listener can always pause and come back to the audio.  I hope you will come away with not only new knowledge but, a visceral appreciation of the horrors of war, an understanding of the different ways women react to war, and a conviction that such a catastrophe must never happen again.  A final bit of advice – read the book!

• David Simmons

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The program from the live reading:

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Sveltana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her oral histories.  The Unwomanly Face of War was her first book and took seven years to research and write.  A complete bibliography of her work is below.  As noted above, this reading was originally scheduled to be a live event at the downtown Madison Public Library in April 2020.  The author kindly gave her permission and blessing to this project.

Along the way we have collected many partners and funders for the reading of this astonishing book.  The Beyond the Page project of the Madison Public Library was the first to reach out with an offer to host and help fund the event.  They are funded by the Madison Community Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  John Hall, UW-Madison Professor of History, connected us to the Madison Veterans Museum and Kevin Hampton, and the Museum is now backing the reading.  As mentioned, Francine Hirsch and Kathryn Ciancia from the UW- History Department will lead a talk back after the live reading. Many of these people and groups wrote letters of support and helped us obtain a small grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council with help from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin.  Additional funding was provided by the Wisconsin Arts Board. the Madison Arts Commission and many individual donors.

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Cast:

Samra Teferra as the voice of the author

Mya Kahler and Maggie Schenk as the voices of the soldiers

Sam Olson is the bassist

David Simmons prepared the script and titles and images

             

Maggie Schenk                                                      Sam Olson

       

Samra Teferra                                         Mya Kahler

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Funding and support for this ongoing project is provided by these organizations:

                  

               

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Other works by Svetlana Alexievich:

Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

Enchanted with Death, the story of suicides prompted by the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

… and the best book to describe what it was like to live in the Soviet Union during the war?  We think it’s a work of fiction:  Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, a war reporter who describes a large and interlocking group of people, from soldiers to scientists, the challenges they faced, the relationships they formed, and their reactions to both war and the overarching authority of the Soviet Communist Party.  Written in the 1950’s, the manuscript, as required, was submitted to the censors. They sought the opinion of Mikhail Suslov, head of ideology for the Communist Party, and he said “It will be 100 years before this book is able to be published.”  Smuggled out of the country, it was first published in west in 1980 and then in 1988 when Gorbachev came to power.

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A few basic facts about the war on the Eastern Front:

27 million Soviets died, two thirds of them civilians – that is one in seven citizens.

1,700 towns, 70,000 villages and 30,000 factories were destroyed on Soviet territory.

Over two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers on their way to Berlin.

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UW-Madison history professors Francine Hirsch and Kathryn Ciancia put together this bibliography:

For More on the War on the Eastern Front

Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945, A History (New York, 1964)

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (New York, 1980)

Richard Overy, Russia’s War, A History of the Soviet War Effort: 1941-1945 (New York, 1998)

Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2002)

Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York, 2006)

Roberto J. Carmack, Kazakhstan in World War II: Mobilization and Ethnicity in the Soviet Empire (Lawrence, 2019)  

Brandon Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Ithaca, 2019)

 For More on Soviet Women Soldiers

War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence, 2002)

Kazimiera Cottom, Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers (Indianapolis, 2006)

Anna A. Timofeyeva-Yegorova, Red Sky, Black Death: A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front, trans. Kim Green and Margarita Ponomaryova (Bloomington, 2009)

Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge, UK, 2011)

Lyuba Vinogradova, Defending the Motherland: The Soviet Women Who Fought Hitler’s Aces (London, 2015)

Lyuba Vinogradova,  Avenging Angels: Soviet Women Snipers on the Eastern Front (1941-45) (London, 2018)

For More on World War II on the Homefront

Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York, 1969)

Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Champaign-Urbana, 2000)

Elena Kozhina, Through the Burning Steppe: A Wartime Memoir (New York, 2000)

Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds., Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, 2002)

Kenneth Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence, 2006)

Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda During World War II (Cambridge, MA, 2012)

Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, MA, 2020)

For more on the Nazi Occupation and the Holocaust

Lucian Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945 (New York, 1993)

Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, eds., The Unknown Blackbook: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington, 2007)

Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, 2007)

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler (New York, 2012)

David Shneer, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph (New York, 2020)