War's Unwomanly Face

Belorussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich spent seven years, from 1978 to 1985, traveling across the Soviet Union to interview hundreds of women who served in the Soviet military during World War II. Approximately one million Soviet women fought in the war, mastering every military specialty, including roles so exclusively male that the Russian language lacked feminine forms for words like "tank driver" and "machine gunner." Yet after the Victory, their contributions were erased. Men wrote about men, and when women spoke, they defaulted to the official narrative of commanders, unit numbers, and heroic deeds. Alexievich set out to record a different war: not the history of military operations but the history of feelings and the soul.

The book opens with a historical overview of women in armies from ancient Greece through World War I, then moves into Alexievich's authorial introduction. She describes growing up in a postwar village populated almost entirely by women. Her own family bore the war's full weight. Her Ukrainian grandfather was killed at the front, her Belorussian grandmother died of typhus as a partisan (a member of the voluntary resistance that fought a guerrilla war against the Germans), two uncles went missing, and German soldiers burned 11 family members alive. Alexievich explains her interview method: She sat for hours in women's kitchens, drinking tea and waiting for the moment when an interviewee departed from rehearsed accounts and spoke from personal experience.

Alexievich recounts the obstacles to publication. For two years, Soviet publishers rejected her manuscript for presenting the wrong kind of war. Censors removed passages depicting the physical realities of women's wartime experiences, including menstruation during retreat, a partisan mother who drowned her crying baby to prevent a German search party from discovering the group, and Soviet soldiers raping German women and girls during the advance into Germany. Gorbachev's perestroika, the program of political and economic reform, enabled publication in 1985 with a printing of two million copies.

The testimonies are organized thematically rather than chronologically, each chapter gathering voices around a shared aspect of wartime experience. The first testimony comes from Maria Ivanovna Morozova, a retired accountant who served as a sniper with 75 confirmed kills. She describes her first kill through a telescopic sight: Her hands trembled, and something inside her resisted pulling the trigger. Her war friend Klavdia Grigoryevna Krokhina describes a parallel shock, followed by a hardening after she discovered charred remains of Soviet wounded. Krokhina returned from war at 21 with completely white hair.

A large early chapter collects dozens of shorter testimonies tracing the women's paths to the front. Many were 16 or 17, repeatedly turned away by recruiting offices. Their motivations varied: patriotic duty, desire to avenge killed relatives, love for boyfriends at the front, and the impossibility of standing aside. At the front, they were issued men's boots several sizes too large. The army made no provision for menstruation. One rifleman identifies the most terrifying thing in war not as death but as wearing men's underpants for four years. Medical assistants carried wounded men two or three times their own weight.

Nina Yakovlevna Vishnevskaya, a 17-year-old medical assistant in a tank battalion, illustrates the dangers women faced in armored units. She hid under a tarpaulin to reach the front, then spent days evading attempts to send her home. Tank medical assistants died quickly because they had to cling to the outside of the armor. Of her five girlfriends who served together, she alone survived. When Alexievich later sent Vishnevskaya the transcribed account, the veteran crossed out personal details, revealing a tension between private truth and the public narrative of heroism.

Valentina Pavlovna Chudaeva, a Siberian girl who became an antiaircraft artillery commander, traces how family history shaped her wartime identity. Her mother was shot by a kulak (a peasant who resisted Soviet collectivization) when Chudaeva was an infant. After her father was killed at the front, she demanded transfer from a telephone unit to an antiaircraft gun, because telephones did not shoot. Wounded and frostbitten, she nearly died by suicide in a hospital, but a nurse-aide stayed awake all night to prevent it. After the war, she describes how men "robbed us of the victory," refusing to acknowledge women's service.

At a veterans' reunion in Moscow, more than a dozen former nurses and doctors speak collectively about death. They describe how the dying always looked upward, how men asked for "just five more minutes of life," and how Germans did not take women soldiers prisoner but killed them. The women also recall animals' suffering: soldiers abandoning combat to save burning horses, birds falling from the sky during barrages, and nightingales disappearing from one village for three years after the war.

Olga Yakovlevna Omelchenko, a medical assistant who joined an infantry company at 16, depicts the extreme violence of front-line medical work. She describes biting through a wounded man's shattered arm with her teeth because she had lost her instruments, and volunteering for the firing squad that executed two deserters whose cowardice caused the capture and mutilation of her wounded. Her action prompted the rest of the battalion to follow.

Chapters on non-combat roles reveal the war's logistical underworld: laundresses whose hands were destroyed by caustic delousing soap, cooks who worked around the clock, and a mechanic who finished the war physically broken but determined to complete university. Other chapters explore the tension between military demands and the women's desire to preserve their femininity. Alexandra Popova, a pilot in the all-female regiment that flew Po-2 biplanes as night bombers, describes how the physical strain of combat eliminated their menstrual cycles entirely.

Love and motherhood during wartime appear through several testimonies. Efrosinya Breus, a doctor, describes persuading Marshal Rokossovsky to provide a special plane to bring her husband's body home to Belarus. Raissa Khosenevich, a partisan, recounts carrying her two-year-old daughter through a two-month partisan blockade. A sniper identified only as Klavdia S—va attributes her daughter's severe disability to the war's damage to her body and describes decades of postwar humiliation when other women called returning soldiers "army whores."

The partisan war and civilian experience receive extensive treatment. Antonina Alexeevna Kondrashova, a scout for a partisan brigade, describes lying in ambush while her own mother, wearing a recognizable white kerchief, was used as a human shield by German forces. Kondrashova fired in her mother's direction when ordered. Village women recount plowing fields without horses or men, subsisting on acorns and grass, and receiving death notices on thin scraps of paper.

The final chapters address Victory and its aftermath. Sofya Adamovna Kuntsevich, a medical assistant, describes entering Germany with fierce hatred, yet finding herself feeding German children. Several testimonies address the organized rape of German women by Soviet soldiers and the shame that followed. Maria Yakovlevna Yezhova, a medical platoon commander, develops a lifelong allergy to the color red, keeping nothing red in her house. Valentina M—va, a partisan liaison, describes her husband's arrest by the NKVD (the Soviet internal security force) after his return from the front because he had been a prisoner of war, and her decades of silence as the wife of an "enemy of the people."

The book closes with the extended testimony of Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina, a medical assistant who volunteered at 17. She describes the catastrophic early retreat, the horror of Stalingrad where even the river seemed to burn, and an episode that encapsulates the book's moral vision. Crawling across a battlefield, she realized she had been carrying both a Soviet tankman and a wounded German, both burned black and indistinguishable. She hesitated, then crawled back for the German. She reflects that throughout the war she thought about how to save her heart.