"My death for the motherland is happiness": Women, patriotism, and soldiering in Russia's great war, 1914-1917

American Historical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 78-116

  Stockdale, Melissa K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

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EID: 56249120233     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/530152     Document Type: Review

References (276)

1. Descriptions come from Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (New York, 1919), 94-95;
2. Maria Botchkareva [sic], Yashka, My Life as Peasant, Officer and Exile, as set down by Isaac Don Levine (New York, 1919), 189-92;
3. Nina Krylova in Boris Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi: Istoricheskii roman (Buenos Aires, 1955), 84-87;
4. Rech' (June 22, 1917): 4.
5. There is a diffuse and uneven literature on the history of women as fighters and in the military. Among the works I have found most helpful are Nancy Loring Goldman, ed., Female Soldiers - Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Westport, Conn., 1982);
6. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women's Lives (London, 1983);
7. Linda Grant de Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman, Okla., 1998);
8. Gerard J. DeGroot and Corinna Peniston-Bird, eds., A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military (Harlow, England, 2000).
9. A different perspective is military historian Martin van Creveld, Men, Women and War (London, 2001), who presents a historical argument on women's unsuitability for combat.
10. Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 91.
11. The first scholarly examination of the women's battalions is by Richard Stiles in his seminal work The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 295-300.
12. See also the insightful piece by Richard Abraham, "Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian Amazons of 1917," in Linda Edmondson, ed., Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (Cambridge, 1992), 124-44;
13. neither of these scholars had access to relevant Russian archives for their accounts. Treatments drawing on archives are by Laurie Stoff, "They Fought for Russia: Female Soldiers of the First World War," in DeGroot and Peniston-Bird, Soldier and a Woman, 66-82;
14. A. S. Senin, "Zhenskie batal'ony i voennye komandy v 1917 godu," Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1987): 176-82;
15. see also Iu. N. Ivanova, Khrabreishie iz prekrasnykh: Zhenshchiny Rossii v voinakh (Moscow, 2002), 107-18.
16. I use the phrase "Russian women" in the broad meaning of women who were subjects of the Russian Empire - rossiiskie zhenshchiny - as opposed to the more narrow term russkie zhenshchiny, which would refer only to women who were ethnically Great Russian. The non-Russian national groups constituted nearly 50 percent of the empire's population.
17. Here, I employ the term patriotism in its most traditional way, as love of and loyalty to one's country, or what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as state patriotism; such a definition does not determine or rank specific focuses of love and loyalty within the abstraction "country" - ruler, institutions, compatriots, native land - or preclude a critical attitude toward the existing status quo. On patriotism, see E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), 86-93;
18. Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, Calif., 1976), 95-114;
19. Hugh Cunningham, "The Language of Patriotism, 1750-1914," History Workshop Journal, no. 12 (1981): 8-33.
20. On the practice of such patriotism, see Earle L. Hunter, A Sociological Analysis of Certain Types of Patriotism (New York, 1932), 18-19, who writes that a signal manifestation of patriotism is "the support which national states expect from their citizenry in times of defense or offense against external enemies. It is also evident that to the citizens themselves activity matching this expectation is the outstanding service which patriotism denotes."
21. Full-length published memoirs are those by Maria ("Yashka") Bochkareva and Nina Krylova (see note 1); shorter published recollections are referenced elsewhere. Bochkareva dictated her account to a Russian émigré in New York while events were still fresh in her mind. More problematic is Krylova's text, written some twenty years after the war and posthumously published in novelized form by her friend Boris Solonevich as Woman with a Bayonet: An Historical Novel. Although some episodes appear to have been reworked for dramatic effect (particularly the chapter on defending the Winter Palace), most of the account seems plausible. A third full-length memoir is by Mariia Bocharnikova, "V zhenskom batal'one smerti," in the Bakhmeteff Archive (hereafter, BAR), General Manuscript Collection, Columbia University, New York. In the fall of 1918, Bocharnikova (whose name is confusingly similar to that of battalion founder Maria Bochkareva) wrote down her experiences as a soldier. She used these notes to write a memoir in the 1950s but was able to publish only the section relating to defense of the Winter Palace: Mariia Bocharnikova, "Boi v zimnem dvortse," Novyi zhurnal (New York, 1962): 216-27. It is impossible to tell how much Bocharnikova reworked her original notes, which have not been preserved, but her account of the battalion appears careful and eschews sensationalism.
22. "Preface," Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias, eds., Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics and Social Theory (Savage, Md., 1990), xi;
23. J. G. A. Pocock on Bruni quoted in Linda K. Kerber, "May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation," in Women, Militarism, and War, 91-92;
24. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York, 1987), 49-60.
25. An excellent short discussion of the concept of civic virtue is Richard Dagger, "Republican Citizenship," in Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, eds., Handbook of Citizenship Studies (London, 2002), 145-58.
26. A stimulating collection of essays exploring the intersections between war and gender is Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
27. The nature and attributes of citizenship are, of course, highly contested. The definition I use here is based on Rogers Brubaker's discussion of the French Revolution and the origins of the modern institution of national citizenship, but it does not take up the distinction he draws between citizenries defined as a territorial community and those defined as a community of descent; Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), x, 39-49.
28. The classic formulation of citizenship understood as encompassing social rights no less than civil and political rights is T. H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," in Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (Westport, Conn., 1973).
29. Conscription, citizenship, and the notion of "equality of sacrifice" are discussed in Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1997), esp. 80-130;
30. see also Alan Forrest, "La Patrie en Danger: The French Revolution and the First Levée en Masse," in Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2003), 8-32;
31. Bertrand Taithe, Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil, 1870-1871 (London, 2001), 1-20.
32. A different perspective on gender in modern traditions of thinking on citizenship is Ursula Vogel, "Is Citizenship Gender-Specific?" in Vogel and Michael Moran, eds., The Frontiers of Citizenship (New York, 1991), 58-85, which identifies the institution of marriage as the original terrain on which was worked out women's exclusion from direct membership in the community of citizens.
33. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modem Masculinity (Oxford, 1996), esp. 50-55, 107-11;
34. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990), 15-33, 65-69;
35. Mosse notes challenges to this normative ideal of masculinity by century's end but contends that it was still dominant on the eve of World War I. See also Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, 2001), 251-321;
36. for the American tradition, R. Claire Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republic Tradition (Lanham, Md., 1999), 85-91.
37. Noting that the subjects of the Russian Empire still did not enjoy full, modern citizenship in 1914 is not to say that a dynamic civil society was not developing in tsarist Russia or that the incomplete revolution of 1905 did not give impetus to the development of citizenship rights. See particularly Joseph Bradley, "Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia," AHR 107 (October 2002): 1094-1123;
38. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J., 1991).
39. An analysis of the 1905 rhetoric of citizenship as it applied to women is Linda Edmondson, "Women's Rights, Civil Rights and the Debate over Citizenship in the 1905 Revolution," in Edmondson, Women and Society in Russia, 77-100.
40. On reform and citizenship expectations for the war, see Melissa K. Stockdate, "Russian Liberals and the Contours of Patriotism in the Great War," Russkii liberalism: Istoricheskie sud'by i perspektivy (Moscow, 1999), 283-92;
41. V. Iu. Cherniaev, in "Pervaia mirovaia voina i perspektivy demokraticheskogo preobrazovaniia rossiiskoi imperii," in Rossiia i pervaia mirovaia voina: Materialy mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo kollokviuma (St. Petersburg, 1999), 189-99.
42. R. N. Shishkina-Iavein, "Voina i zhenshchina," in Chego zhdet Rossiia ot voiny: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1915), 210-16;
43. on Russian feminists in the war, see Linda Harriet Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900-17 (Stanford, Calif., 1984), 158-65.
44. A thoughtful discussion of women's wartime service as a basis for gaining full citizenship is Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), esp. chap. 6.
45. There is a rich literature on women's experience of World War I; among the many works that have informed my discussion are Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London, 1981);
46. Margaret H. Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford, 2000);
47. Nicoletta Gullace, "White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War," Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (April 1997): 178-206;
48. Krisztina Roberts, "Gender, Class and Patriotism: Women's Paramilitary Units in First World War Britain," International History Review 19, no. 1 (February 1997): 52-65;
49. Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jensen, et al., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, Conn., 1987);
50. Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).
51. The women's services in Britain enrolled more than 90,000 women; on women's auxiliaries, see David Mitchell, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London, 1966), 222-28.
52. For the German experience, see Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, Margaret Ries, trans. (Oxford, 1997), esp. 65-86;
53. Robert Asprey, The German High Command at War (New York, 1991), 403; by war's end, the German military employed some 17,000 women. The American military, not having comparable manpower shortages, made limited use of women's auxiliaries: the navy and marines enlisted a total of 12,185, while the army accepted no women outside the Army Nurse Corps.
54. The fullest overview of Russian women in the war is Alfred G. Meyer, "The Impact of World War I on Russian Women's Lives," in Barbara Evans Clements, et al., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 208-24;
55. see also Barbara A. Engel, "Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War One," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 696-721;
56. Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (Athens, Ohio, 1999), chap. 5.
57. On women in refugee work, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 125-27.
58. The figure for Red Cross nurses is given by V. S. Krivenko in Russkii invalid (May 25, 1917): 4.
59. The term social patriotism, understood as an expression of loyalty to the people of one's country rather than to a ruler or ideology, comes from Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 90.
60. The gendering of work roles is not identical from culture to culture, or even from class to class, and the expected behaviors and activities of Russian women could differ from those of women in other countries of Europe in the pre-war period. On women's work in Russian peasant society, see, for instance, Christine Worobec, "Victims or Actors? Russian Peasant Women and Patriarchy," in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921 (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 177-206;
61. on factory workers, see Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914 (Berkeley, Calif., 1984);
62. a case study for a profession is Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860-1914 (Pittsburgh, 1994);
63. an overview of changes affecting women's work for the period 1861-1917 is Barbara Alpern Engel, "Transformation versus Tradition," in Clements, Russia's Women, 135-47. My point here is that Russians were highly conscious of the way the war had introduced women into many kinds of waged labor and spheres of activity from which they had previously been excluded.
64. "Russia's Women Soldiers," Literary Digest (August 25, 1917): 20,
65. V. V. Brusianin, Voina, zhenshchiny i deti (Moscow, 1917), 63;
66. "Warrior Women," Literary Digest (June 19, 1915): 1460;
67. "Zhenshchiny-geroi," Voina, no. 24 (1915): 6. It is worth noting that the terms fatherland (otechestvo) and motherland (rodina) were used more or less interchangeably in both printed texts and petitions.
68. Zhenshchina i voina (March 1915): 11;
69. "Young Girls Fighting at the Russian Front," New York Times Current History of the European War (May 1916): 367;
70. "Those Russian Women," Literary Digest (September 29, 1917): 53;
71. Brusianin, Voina, 62-63, 105-06.
72. The sensationalized autobiography of a girl who joined a Cossack unit is Marina Yurlova, Cossack Girl (New York, 1934).
73. The London Graphic did not give a source for its figure of 400 women in the Russian army, quoted in Literary Digest (June 19, 1915): 1460;
74. Florence Farmborough, an Englishwoman who nursed with the Russian Red Cross at the front, maintained that "A woman soldier, or boy soldier, was no unusual sight in the Russian Army." Farmborough, With the Armies of the Tsar: A Nurse at the Russian Front in War and Revolution, 1914-1918 (New York, 1974), 300.
75. According to Joshua Sanborn, the tsarist military's ideals were both explicitly and implicitly masculine, and the authorities struggled to "insulate the army from feminine contamination"; Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb, III., 2003), esp. 132-33, 146-54, 160.
76. See also two essays by Karen Petrone exploring the gendering of heroism and cowardice, "Masculinity and Heroism in Imperial and Soviet Military-Patriotic Cultures," in Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healy, eds., Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (Basingstoke, England, 2002), 172-93,
77. "Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian War Posters," in Billie Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 (New York, 1998), 95-119.
78. An earlier exception to the prohibition on women bearing arms comes from the distinct martial culture of the Don Cossacks, which during the pre-modem period countenanced women fighting: Shane O'Rourke, "Women in a Warrior Society: Don Cossack Women, 1860-1914," in Rosalind Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge, 1996), 46.
79. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-Istoricheskii Arkhiv (Russian State Military Historical Archive, hereafter RGVIA), Moscow, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 28, 1. 69, petition of Elena lost, May 28, 1916. Nina Krylova says many of her fellow women soldiers mentioned Durova; Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 91.
80. Brusianin, Voina, 63, gives other examples of girls pointing to Durova.
81. An English translation of the memoirs is Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden, Mary Fleming Zirin, trans. (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).
82. A few women also fought as partisans in 1812 but were never incorporated into the war myth in the way Durova was; see L. Bychkova, Partizanskoe dvizhenie v otechestvennoi voine 1812 goda (Moscow, 1941). Additionally, as was the case in virtually every Western society into the nineteenth century, there were women associated with the army in non-combat capacities: Russia permitted soldiers' wives to follow the army, since they provided essential services such as sewing and laundering. A law of 1821 banned wives from joining the army in the field; the military reforms of 1874 and 1912 seem to have further distanced women from the army in any capacity but nursing.
83. On soldiers' wives, see Elise Kimmerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 34-40.
84. On women in the Russian army prior to 1914, see Iu. V. Ivanova, "Zhenshchiny v istorii rossiiskoi armii," Voennoistoricheskii zhurnal, no. 3 (1992): 86-89.
85. On the marginalization of camp followers in histories of the military, see Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? 1-17;
86. Scott N. Hendrix, "In the Army: Women, Camp Followers and Gender Roles in the British Army in the French and Indian Wars, 1755-1765," in DeGroot and Peniston-Bird, Soldier and a Woman, 33-48.
87. Response of the duty general for the Supreme Command to the petition of Anastasia Kovalenka, February 21, 1916, RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 28, 11. 23, 45, 71-72, 131. Of the seventeen petitions in this file requesting admittance into the regular army in 1916, only two or three were granted (the final outcome is not always clear).
88. The poster is reproduced in Russkii plakat pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 1992), 75;
89. A. K. Iakovleva, "Prizyv k zhenshchinam," Zhenshchina i voina (March 1915): 2.
90. The dynastic use of the Borodino centennial is discussed in Richard Wortmann, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in the Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 428-38.
91. An edition of Durova's memoirs was among the many works published in 1912 concerning the Patriotic War: N. A. Durova, Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy Durovoi (St. Petersburg, 1912).
92. An early example of references to the "Second Patriotic War" is the lead article in the government-subsidized peasant newspaper Sel'skii vestnik (July 23, 1914): 1, declaring that, "Entering into a second patriotic war, Russia will meet it exactly as she did the first";
93. other examples include the Petrograd daily Istoriia vtoroi otechestvennoi voiny (founded September 3, 1914);
94. G. Anoflev, ed., Vtoraia otechestvennaia voina: Sbornik statei, stikhotvorenii i rasskazov (Kaluga, 1915);
95. Vtoraia otechestvennaia voina: Po rasskazam ee geroev (Petrograd, n.d.); and such entities as the "Society for Care for Orphans of Soldiers of the Second Patriotic War." Liberals and moderate socialists were more likely to speak of the "great war" or "great world war" (velikaia vsemirnaia voina).
96. On Russia's great retreat, see Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (London, 1975), 128-43, 165-91.
97. Examples of patriotic appeals are in Kievlianin (June 12, 1915): 3;
98. especially "Otechestvo v opasnosti" (The Fatherland is in danger) (July 23, 1915): 3.
99. Stites, Women's Liberation Movement, 291-95;
100. Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 165-68.
101. Vestnik vremennogo pravitel'stva (June 14, 1917): 1; six weeks elapsed between the order's signing and its publication.
102. Statement of commission chair O. A. Nekrasova, Russkii invalid (June 16, 1917): 1, and (June 17, 1917): 3. While no obligatory military service for women was instituted, an order of August 22 tried to attract women volunteers for non-combat railroad security, to replace male soldiers; RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 1. 28.
103. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 80-82. Typically, pamphlets aimed at a popular audience identified freedom and equality as the true hallmarks of the citizen. Liberals and moderate socialists were also likely to remind readers that even members of unpopular groups and privileged classes enjoyed these rights, that freedom was not license, and that citizens were "responsible people";
104. see, for example, N. S. Arsen'ev, "O svobodakh i obiazannostiakh grazhdanina" (Moscow, 1917), 4-6;
105. N. N. Pchelin, "Grazhdanin i ego obiazannosti" (Moscow, 1917), 8-9, 11, 14-15;
106. P. V. Gerasimov, "Novyi stroi i prava svobodnykh grazhdan" (Petrograd, 1917), 3,9.
107. The ways different groups understood and employed the languages of citizenship are explored by Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 104-26.
108. This figure is a rough extrapolation, since figures for Russian military casualties in the war are disputed and are not broken down for the period ending in 1916; see A. E. Stepanov, "Obshchie demograficheskie poteri naseleniia Rossii v period pervoi mirovoi voiny," Pervaia mirovaia voina: Prolog XX veka (Moscow, 1998), 474-84, who estimates 10.7 million military casualties (3 million of which were deaths) by the end of 1917, for approximate losses of 60 percent in the armed forces.
109. On the army's troubled state by the fall of 1916, see Allan K. Wildman's magisterial study, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldier's Revolt (March-April 1917) (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 107-15.
110. The notorious Order No. 1 was addressed only to soldiers of the Petrograd Military District, but its speedy dissemination at the front effectively made it applicable to the armed forces as a whole. On the impact of these orders, see Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, 182-90, 332-48, 362-72;
111. W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution (New York, 1986), 349-50, 404.
112. On the model of the French Revolution for creation of revolutionary units, see N. G. Ross, "Popytka sozdaniia russkoi revoliutsionnoi armii (mai-iiun' 1917 g.)," rpt. in Novyi chasovoi, no. 1 (1994): 76;
113. the connection between revolutionary war and efforts to cultivate a new civic patriotism is discussed by Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1996), 408-12.
114. Complexities inherent in summoning "the people" to arms in a multinational polity are explored in Mark von Hagen, "The Levée en Masse from Russian Empire to Soviet Union, 1874-1938," in Moran and Waldron, People in Arms, 159-88.
115. On misuse of the lessons of the French Revolution in Russia, see John Keep, "1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd," Soviet Studies 20 (July 1968): 22-45.
116. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 347, "Formation of Volunteer Battalions, 1917," 11. 2, 17; Brusilov's telegrams of May 16 and May 20, to the Petrograd Soviet and General Staff.
117. Botchkareva, Yashka, 56, 72-76, 139-53;
118. S. V. Drokov, "Organizator Zhenskogo batal'ona smerti," in Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1993): 164-65.
119. Botchkareva, Yashka, 157-59.
120. Russkii invalid (June 24, 1917): 5.
121. The text of the ten-point oath taken by the "revolutionary- citizen" volunteer is reproduced in Razlozhenie armii v 1917 godu (Moscow, 1923), 69-70.
122. have assembled figures for the number of such units from data in the file "Correspondence on Forming Shock Battalions and Battalions of Death," RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 352, 11. 65-69.
123. Botchkareva, Yashka, 161-62;
124. the government-sponsored military newspaper Russkii invalid (May 26, 1917): 4, announced the organization of women's "marching companies" under Bochkareva, with an address for those wishing to enlist.
125. The text of the appeal from the Women's Congress is in Rech' (May 28, 1917): 6, emphasis added.
126. Moskovskie vedomosti (June 17, 1917): 1;
127. Russkie vedomosti (July 6, 1917): 4;
128. Rheta Childe Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution (New York, 1917), 82.
129. Dorr, a war correspondent for the Evening Mail, spent several weeks with Bochkareva's battalion; she and Beatty provide the most detailed descriptions of the battalions by outsiders. Russkii invalid (July 2, 1917): 3.
130. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 28, ch. 2, 11. 60-63; the authorities checked into Tupitso's claims about her service, which were confirmed; there are no records as to whether she formed her legion. Petrova's letter is reproduced in Razlozhenie armii, 70.
131. Tatiana Aleksinskaia, Zhenshchina v voine i revoliutsii (Petrograd, 1917), 15, mentions local initiatives in Tambov, Mariupol', Baku, Ekaterinburg, Tashkent, Odessa, Pskov, Minsk, Riga, and Ufa.
132. References to units in Tomsk and Perm, respectively, come from Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 82;
133. Stiles, Women's Liberation Movement, 299, n. 18.
134. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 347, 1. 19.
135. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 347, 11. 11-12, telegram from General Denikin to General Brusilov, May 18, 1917, and 1. 18, telegram from Alekseev to Brusilov, May 21, 1917; see also Ross, "Popytka sozdaniia russkoi revoliutsionnoi armii," 77-78.
136. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 11. 10-11, 19-20, 23, 42, 47, and f. 29, op. 3, d. 1603, "On Forming Units of Women-Volunteers, 21 June-24 December, 1917," 11. 21-22. The popular illustrated magazine Niva featured photographs of women sailors (zhenshehiny-matrosy), October 7, 1917. By early August, the military authorities had transferred responsibility for organizing female units to the Women's Military Union in Petrograd.
137. Rech' (June 18, 1917): 5.
138. Aleksinskaia, Zhenshchina v voine i revoliutsii, 11-12, 14; she also proposed formation of "one mighty, all-Russian Union of Daughters of the Fatherland" to save the country. Concerning women's rights in the French Revolution, it is worth noting that women were not empowered to bear arms, despite requests to do so;
139. see Darlene Gay Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite, "Women and Militant Citizenship in Revolutionary Paris," in Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, eds., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York, 1992), 79-101;
140. Olwen H. Hufton, Women and Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992), esp. 3-50.
141. Margaret Darrow notes the difficulty French public opinion had envisioning the relationship between women and the masculine project of war: the French war myth could accommodate women around war but not directly "in" it, which helps explain why women's participation in the war was so quickly forgotten; Darrow, French Women and the First World War, 1-20.
142. The initial subscription for the Moscow Battalion was 371; large groups of women continued to join up even after the summer offensive collapsed, as smaller groups of volunteers dropped out on an equally steady basis; RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 1, 11. 1-5, 11-31, "Lists of Volunteers." Figures for the Petrograd Battalion come from the captain of its Third Company: Kapitan Shagal, "Zhenskii batal'on," Voennaia byl', no. 95 (January 1969), Paris, 6.
143. In a report to the British War Office, Bernard Pares said that, as of early August, the All-Russian Central Volunteer Committee knew of some 4,000 female volunteers; cited in Abraham, "Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian Amazons," 131;
144. Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 112, gives the figure of 5,000 women in combat units. Official sources do not give figures, but the preliminary order of November 19, 1917, dissolving women's combat units lists three battalions (Petrograd, Moscow, Ekaterinodar) and eleven liaison detachments as still in existence, which would represent about 4,300 individuals; Yashka's battalion was by then defunct, and no mention was made of the naval unit; RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 3, d. 1603, 1. 24. Military records contain no figures for unauthorized women's units, although they complain about their proliferation.
145. Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 112;
146. General William V. Judson, Russia in War and Revolution, Neil V. Salzman, ed. (Kent, Ohio, 1998), 89.
147. See, for example, "Those Russian Women," 51.
148. S. A. Smith, "Citizenship and the Russian Nation during World War I: A Comment," Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 329;
149. Figes, People's Tragedy, 412.
150. See also David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers ana the Soviet Seizure of Power (New York, 1984), 228-29, 239;
151. Wildman, End of the Russian Imperial Army, 1: 374, who asserts that, "the patriotic outpourings of cultured society notwithstanding," peasant soldiers had regarded the war as an alien enterprise from the start.
152. RGVIA, f. 3474, "Moscow Women's Battalion of Death," op. 2, d. 11. Dmitrii Stoliarov complained that his wife was supposed to be home caring for their elderly parents; he considered her enlistment "a blow worse than any the enemy has dealt me" and asked for her release.
153. RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 16, 11. 34-56; and BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 11. Bocharnikova, unsuccessful in her pre-1917 efforts to enlist, became a Sister of Mercy; a friend telegraphed her about formation of women's battalions, and she received her superiors permission to volunteer.
154. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 2.
155. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 56-58, also mentions several ethnically non-Russian members of the battalion, including an Estonian, a Jewish woman from Poland, and, surprisingly, a Japanese woman;
156. Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia (1918; New York, 1970), 211-19.
157. See also Botchkareva, Yashka, 164;
158. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 48-55, 64-66.
159. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 10, 18, 44.
160. Another account is by a volunteer from a group of sixty women from Viatka accepted into the Petrograd battalion: E. Piatunin, "Russkie Zhanny d'Ark (vospominaniia udarnitsy zhenskogo batal'ona smerti)," Nezavisimaia gazeta (March 4, 2000): 10. On August 23, 1917, the General Staff approved creation of a women's battalion and liaison detachment in Ekaterinodar; RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 11. 10, 27.
161. The Department on Service and Pensions, General Staff, set the basic frontline pay for a rank-and-file soldier (riadovyi) in the revolutionary army at 60 rubles a year; RGVIA, f. 29, op. 3, d. 1613, 1. 12. Rates of pay for women were given as 60 rubles a year in the June 29, 1917, order establishing the women's liaison detachments; the same rates were listed on August 16 for the Minsk non-combat guard units. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 11. 8-9, 37, 46.
162. Thirty women finished officers' training and received the rank of ensign (praporshchik); reported in Russkie vedomosti (October 4, 1917): 5. Information on soldiers' committees is in RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 1, 1.8; and Botchkareva, Yashka, 172-83. Yashka entitles an entire chapter of her memoirs "My Fight against Committee Rule."
163. Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 113; RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 1, 1. 7.
164. Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 101; and RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 11, 11. 12, 36, 39, 59.
165. An analysis of the phenomenon of mass volunteering in Britain in World War I is W. J. Reader, At Duty's Call: A Study in Obsolete Patriotism (Manchester, 1988).
166. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 56-57, 71;
167. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 67; petition from K. M. Otto, in RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 28, ch. 2, 1. 28.
168. RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 11, 1. 36; Bryant, Six Red Months, 217.
169. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 19.
170. On feminist attitudes toward the women soldiers, see Stites, Women's Liberation, 298-99;
171. Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 167-68.
172. Pankhurst's opinion is mentioned in Abraham, "Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian Amazons," 128-29.
173. On Breshko-Bieshkovskaia, see Moskovskie vedomosti (August 2, 1917): 2;
174. Rech' (August 3, 1917): 4;
175. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 7.
176. Sofiia Zarechnaia, "Amazonki velikoi voiny," Zhenskoe delo (July 15, 1917): 16;
177. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 90-94.
178. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 28, 1. 70.
179. See, for example, Brusianin, Voine, 110.
180. An argument that sees the putative incompatibility between dealing death and giving life as one common to Western culture is Nancy Huston, "The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes," in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 119-36, which also touches on the deeply rooted belief that "contact with the female world inhibits men's capacity to fight."
181. Stites, Women's Liberation Movement, 297-98;
182. for pacifist and socialist criticism, see Michael Melancon, The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914-1917 (Columbus, Ohio, 1990).
183. Shagal, "Zhenskii batal'on," 7-8, suggests a generational factor in public attitudes: "old women cried and blessed us; others, primarily workers, cursed us and spat in our direction."
184. Botchkareva, Yashka, 165;
185. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 50-51;
186. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 20;
187. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 68.
188. Botchkareva, Yashka, 157-58, 160, 164, 174, 157;
189. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 57, 69-70.
190. On women soldiers' acceptance by their male comrades, see Yurlova, Cossack Girl, 49-53;
191. Botchkareva, Yashka, 78-80, 95-96, 193-96, 208-18, 252-53;
192. "Young Girls Fighting on the Russian Front," 366;
193. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 79-82.
194. On allegations of loose sexual conduct directed against milicianas in the Spanish civil war and American women auxiliaries in World War II, respectively, see Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver, Colo., 1995), 109-12;
195. D'Ann Campbell, "The Regimented Women of World War II," in Elshtain and Tobias, Women, Militarism, and War, 115-16.
196. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 15; the temporary nature of the transformation for Bocharnikova herself is suggested by her emphasis, elsewhere in the memoir, on her essential femininity both before and after military service.
197. Russkii invalid (July 2, 1917): 3.
198. RGVIA, f. 3474, op. 2, d. 11, 1. 4; Russkie vedomosti (July 3, 1917): 6.
199. Niva, no. 26 (1917): 895, linked patriotism, citizenship, and manly courage in its salute to the Battalion of Death's participation in battle: "In a terrible, troubled hour Russian woman manfully [muzhestvenno] raised her head and entered the ranks of the frontline soldiers. Let this be an example, a high example of patriotism, a persuasive example of civic spirit."
200. Bernard Pares, cited in Abraham, "Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian Amazons," 131; and RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 28, ch. 2, 11. 30-31.
201. The text of the Sixth Company's petition is printed in Russkie vedomosti (June 6, 1917): 3.
202. Botchkareva, Yashka, 193-95;
203. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 95-101.
204. Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922, Richard Sheldon, trans. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 23, 30.
205. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 160-61;
206. Petrone, "Family, Masculinity, and Heroism," 104-10; women could also show courage but of a passive kind.
207. Botchkareva, Yashka, estimates losses of fifty women dead or wounded, 209-19;
208. Senin, on the basis of archival material, estimates two dead, thirty-three wounded, and two lost in action; "Zhenskie batal'ony," 180;
209. Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 73-75, names two women killed and reports speaking with thirty-one wounded after the engagement, saying she did not speak with the more seriously injured;
210. Bryant, Six Red Months, 212, says six women were killed, thirty wounded.
211. A history of the offensive is Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy's Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York, 1987).
212. Quoted in Dorr, Inside the Russian Revolution, 75.
213. General Denikin put the blame squarely on the regular, male soldiers: Ocherki russkoi smuti, vol. 1 (Paris, 1922), vyp. 1, 136;
214. one Siberian commander's favorable appraisal of the battalion's performance is reported in Rech' (August 2, 1917): 3.
215. See also "Russia's Women Soldiers," 20;
216. "Those Russian Women," 48;
217. Novoe vremia (July 11, 1917): 2.
218. Farmborough, With the Armies of the Tsar, 304-05, wrote of hearing mixed stories, according to which some women bravely attacked while others became hysterical or fainted.
219. Mariia Ancharova, "Batal'on smerti," Zhenskoe delo, no. 15 (August 1, 1917): 2.
220. Regular soldiers also beat or killed men who wanted to keep fighting; Botchkareva, Yashka, 230-36, 240-42;
221. Heenan, Russian Democracy's Fatal Blunder, 118-19.
222. There are discrepancies in the sources concerning the battalion's fate. Botchkareva, Yashka, 242-43, 254-57, says the battalion was still functioning when the Bolsheviks seized power;
223. Krylova, in Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 148-50, says the battalion broke itself up before that date, with some of its members joining other women's battalions.
224. A September 7 memo from the Stavka Committee on Formation of Revolutionary Battalions to the General Staff stated that women were still coming by frequently to volunteer for battalions and asked where to direct them; RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 1. 32. The Military Council's decision of November 30, 1917, to disband women's combat units was promulgated January 10, 1918, as Order No. 22 of GUGSh: RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 11. 66-67.
225. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 11. 54-55. The companies were assigned to the Twenty-seventh Infantry Division of the Tenth Army, on Russia's Western front; in late October, a report to the Supreme Command asked that no more women's units be sent to this front, noting their usefulness was "highly problematic." Shagal, "Zhenskii batal'on," 10, recounts speaking in early November with the male commander of a women's company at the front attached to one of the Turkestan divisions.
226. RGVIA, f. 2003, op. 2, d. 349, 11. 40 and 50; Sir Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914-1917, vol. 2 (New York, 1921), 705.
227. On John Reed, see Abraham, "Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian Amazons," 124, 130-31;
228. N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record, Joel Carmichael, ed. and trans. (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 641.
229. Accounts by defenders include BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 23-27;
230. Piatunin, "Russkie Zhanny d'Ark," 10;
231. Aleksandr Sinegub, "Zashchita Zimnego dvortsa," Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, no. 4 (Berlin, 1922): 121-97, who refers to the women as "heroine-shock fighters."
232. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 26-30, says that after several hours the women were transferred from the hostile Pavlovskii barracks to the Grenaderskii barracks, where the soldiers treated them as comrades;
233. see also Shagal, "Zhenskii batal'on," 9;
234. Meriel Buchanan, Petrograd: The City of Trouble, 1914-1918 (London, 1918), 196-97;
235. Knox, With the Russian Army, 711-14.
236. On allegations of mistreatment of the women being largely incorrect, see Bryant, Six Red Months, 212;
237. Beatty, Red Heart of Russia, 216.
238. The demobilization process began with the decree of November 10 releasing soldiers of the 1899 call-up into the reserves; a more general demobilization was worked out in an order of December 21; S. N. Bazarov, "Demobilizatsiia russkoi armii," Voenno-istoncheskii zhurnal, no. 2 (1998): 27-37.
239. On aid given to the women soldiers, see Shagal, "Zhenskii batal'on," 10, who mentions receiving help from the Petrograd Committee of Public Safety and the Red Cross;
240. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 42-45.
241. Bryant, Six Red Months, 215-19, interviewed women soldiers in Petrograd who did not even own shoes.
242. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 36-42.
243. For example, Michael Posner, "The Battalion of Death," The Touchstone 1, no. 5 (September 1917): 431-35, portrays women soldiers defending the revolution as a natural outgrowth of Russian women revolutionaries' long fight for freedom.
244. Kerensky was the sole socialist in the original Provisional Government; six socialists joined him in the First Coalition, including Socialist- Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov and the prominent Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli.
245. Bocharnikova provides information on the fate of twelve members of the First Petrograd Battalion. The six male officers for whom she has data all joined the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army; three of these were killed. Five of six women for whom she has data served with the Volunteer Army, two as soldiers; one nurse was wounded and one soldier, a Princess Cherkasskaia, was killed in battle. A male officer, Captain Shagal, later married former junior officer Natalia A. Stebel-Kamenskaia; they raised a family in Paris; BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 57-58;
246. Shagal, "Zhenskii batal'on," 6.
247. On women in the Soviet military during the civil war, see Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 52-57;
248. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 153-58.
249. Bryant, Six Red Months, 212, interviewed several women soldiers planning to join the Red Army.
250. Drokov, "Organizator Zhenskogo batal'ona smerti," 167-68;
251. the published transcript of Bochkareva's final interrogation, " 'Moi batal'on neostramit Rossii . . . ' Okonchatel'nyi protokol doprosa Marii Bochkarevoi," Rodina, nos. 8-9 (1993): 78-81. Maria "Yashka" Bochkareva was posthumously rehabilitated by the procurator of Omsk oblast, January 9, 1992.
252. BAR, Bocharnikova Papers, "V zhenskom batal'one," 5, 45;
253. Solonevich, Zhenshchina s vintovkoi, 12, 150.
254. The phrase "sites of memory" is from the influential work by Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995);
255. for Germany's shaping of war memory, see also Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, esp. chap. 5;
256. Holger H. Herwig, "Of Men and Myths: The Use and Abuse of History and the Great War," in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary R. Habeck, eds., The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 299-330.
257. On memory and Russia's experience of the war, see Aaron J. Cohen, "Oh, That! Myth, Memory, and World War I in the Russian Emigration and the Soviet Union," Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 69-86;
258. Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York, 2001), 96-100;
259. the fine essay by Daniel Orlovsky, "Velikaia voina i rossiiskaia pamiat'," in Rossiia i pervaia mirovaia voina, 49-57.
260. For instance, M. I. Akhun and V. A. Petrov, Tsarskaia armiia v gody imperialisticheskoi voine (Moscow, 1929), 13-17.
261. A good later example is S. V. Tiutiukin, Voina, mir, revoliutsiia: Ideinaia bor'ba v rabochem dvizhenii Rossii 1914-1917 gg. (Moscow, 1972), 77-90. Many Western scholars would not share the view that there was a great deal of popular patriotism to overlook, but Russia's experience of World War I has only recently begun to attract much scholarly attention. Treatment of the war has largely represented the 1914 popular patriotism in Russia as short-lived, suggesting that patriotism was not well developed in the Russian Empire, or at least not widely diffused among the masses.
262. On the brief life of patriotic enthusiasm, see Richard Stites, "Days and Nights in Wartime Russia: Cultural Life, 1914-1917," in Aviel Roschwald and Stites, eds., European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 1999), 31 and note 51 above.
263. Hubertus Jahn, author of the only full-length study of wartime patriotism in Russia, believes that Russians lacked a unified national identity and a clear idea of what they were fighting for, and sees patriotic culture as mainly an urban phenomenon; Jahn, Patriotic Culture, 172-75, 208. However, several studies suggest that Russian peasants and peasant-soldiers might have been better able to imagine themselves part of a national community than has been assumed, a capacity that would provide a foundation for patriotism;
264. see Josh Sanborn, "The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation,"
265. Scott J. Seregny, "Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I," both in Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 267-89, 290-315.
266. Concerning urban workers, Eric Lohr concludes from his study of wartime anti-German riots that they "expressed powerful patriotic sentiments that were not simply incoherent xenophobia"; Lohr, "Patriotic Violence and the State: The Moscow Riots of May 1915," Kritika 4, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 624.
267. On Soviet memorialization of the war as a legitimating myth, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994), esp. chap. 6.
268. For Russian revisionist scholarship on World War II, including the "politics of memory," see Iu. N. Afanas'ev, ed., Drugaia voina, 1939-1945 (Moscow, 1995).
269. The sole exception would appear to be Antonina Tikhonovna Palshina, a peasant girl who fought from 1914 in the tsarist army and was decorated for bravery, then married a commissar and worked for the cheka during the civil war. Her story-with emphasis on her work for Soviet power-was featured in several books and a film; see I. Kobzev, "'Kavalerist-devitsa' iz chekha," Rodina, nos. 8-9 (1993): 75-77.
270. Kerensky and Rodzianko, for example, both closely associated with forming the women's battalions, fail to discuss them in their postwar writings; see Abraham, "Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian Amazons," 149. Even Wildman's lengthy volume on the Russian army in this period makes no mention of the existence of women soldiers: End of the Russian Imperial Army.
271. On women as the "invisible combatants" of World War II, see D'Ann Campbell, "Women in Combat: The World War II Experience in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union," Journal of Military History 57, no. 2 (1993);
272. Raina Pennington, Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence, Kan., 2001), esp. 155-60;
273. Barbara Alpern Engel, "The Womanly Face of War: Soviet Women Remember World War II," in Nicole Ann Dombrowski, ed., Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent (New York, 1999), 138-61.
274. Similarly, several scholars suggest women's part in making the February Revolution has been unduly minimized in histories; see McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives of the Revolution, 143-62.
275. A representative Soviet example is A. M. Astrakhan, "O zhenskom batal'one, zashchishchavshem Zimnii dvorets," Istoriia SSSR, no. 5 (1965), who states that the "isolation of the bourgeois Provisional Government in October 1917 is clearly manifested in the bankruptcy of all its attempts to organize any sort of serious defense of the Winter Palace"; he also contends that the women soldiers had only the "foggiest notion" of current developments in the country.
276. For the historiography of the war's long-term impact on gender roles and relations, see Billie Melman, "Introduction," in Melman, Borderlines, 1-25.