Anne Eliot Griesseand
Richard Stites

War and revolution are two of the major motifs of Russian history in
this century. One cannot really be understood without the other, so closely
is Russia's present military condition linked with its past wars and its
social transformation caused by the revolution. The female population has
been involved in both. Women participated sporadically and minimally in
Russia's nineteenth-century wars, as peasant partisans against the French
in 1812 and as nurses since the Crimean War, and steadily and importantly
in the Russian revolutionary tradition from the 1870s through the civil
war. ¹ As almost everywhere else in Europe, women played no real role in
war until 1914. Then they appeared in a variety of roles and in the context
of three separate historical episodes. In World War I, until the fall of the
monarchy in February 1917, they entered individually as volunteers and
fought in combat; during the eight months of the provisional government
that succeeded the monarchy in 1917, they served in regularly constituted
women's battalions; then after the Communist revolution of October 25,
1917, they fought against counterrevolutionaries in the civil war
( 1918-1920). Twenty years of peace and the virtual absence of women
( 1920-1941) followed until their massive involvement in World War II,
called by the Soviets the Great Patriotic War, ( 1941-1945), and then again
demobilization. In the course of the last sixty years or so of Soviet power,
the Communists have developed a political, economic, and military style
that makes their utilization of women dramatically different from that
found among the Western, democratic, industrial states.

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