On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched an army of 4 million across the Soviet border. The nation that had been ravaged from within for decades now faced an enemy more formidable and merciless than any yet imagined in the murky depths of Stalin’s paranoia. One-third of those who enlisted in the Soviet military, some 8.6 million people, would die. More than 20 million civilians would perish too, from warfare, malnutrition, disease, and Nazi oppression. By the end of the war, 25 million people were homeless and 2.75 million veterans were disabled.43 One-third of the nation’s material resources had been destroyed, and the western third of the USSR, an area equal in size to the entire United States, had been laid waste.
The low point of the war for the Soviets came in the first six months of 1942, when German forces swept through Ukraine, wiping out entire armies. In the summer, the leadership and the nation rallied. By then generals had learned how to manage their enormous armies, officers were formulating new strategies and tactics to counter German attacks, and enlisted men had become battle-hardened. Recognizing this rising competence, Stalin ordered that the political officers in the army be stripped of much of their power so that military commanders could lead more effectively. Meanwhile, the supply situation improved as Soviet factories, many of which had been dismantled and moved east beyond the reach of the invaders, churned out weapons and supplies. Aid from the United States in the form of aircraft, communications equipment, food, industrial raw materials, light trucks, and jeeps also began to arrive.
These improvements in organization, supply, strategy, and tactics were brought to bear in the fall of 1942 in the epic battle of Stalingrad. By January 1943, an Axis army of 290,000 men had been defeated. The next summer, the Soviet army scored a decisive victory in a huge tank battle at Kursk, in Ukraine west of Stalingrad. Although millions more Soviet and Axis troops and civilians would die before the Red Army received the German surrender in Berlin in May 1945, the tide of the war in the east had turned.
It was on the eastern front that German forces suffered their greatest defeats. This was an extraordinary achievement: the Soviet military, which had entered the war riddled with inefficiencies and reeling from Stalin’s purges, had defeated one of the best armies in European history. It prevailed because the Soviet system rose to the occasion. Stalin’s regime did not become gentler: the NKVD, though reined in, still went about its dirty work, and the recklessness of Soviet commanders produced far higher battlefield casualties than the Germans suffered. But Stalin’s agencies relaxed their predatory supervision, administrators at the regional and local levels applied the survival skills acquired in the 1930s to cope with the disruptions of war, and the people resolved to follow their leaders. This resilience, born of desperate necessity, led to battlefield victories and to considerable achievements in military production. In 1943, for example, 24,000 tanks rumbled out of Soviet factories; Germany produced only 17,000 that year. The disparities in 1944 were still greater. John Barber and Mark Harrison report that during the four years of the war, Soviet workers manufactured “100,000 tanks, 130,000 aircraft, 800,000 field guns and mortars and up to half a billion artillery shells, 1.4 million machine guns, 6 million machine pistols and 12 million rifles.” This output was roughly equal to that of Great Britain and was half that of the United States, which began the war with a more developed economy than the Soviets and experienced no enemy invasion.44
Perhaps German arms production could not keep up with the Soviet because the Germans did not have as skilled a female labor force, for it was mostly women who built the Soviet tanks. They also kept the farms going and served as support troops in the military. In no other combatant nation did women play such a significant part in the war effort, so the most important contribution of Stalinist industrialization to the Soviet victory in World War II may well have been its preliminary mobilization and training of female workers.
WOMEN IN THE ARMED FORCES
More than 1 million women served in the Soviet military during World War II. At their greatest participation in 1943, they were 800,000 to 1,000,000 strong, 8 percent of the regular army. This was by far the largest enlistment of women by any of the combatant nations. By contrast, the U.S. and German militaries contained 400,000 women each and the British 450,000.45
Before the war, the government had not intended to recruit women. In the late 1930s, planners decided that, should war come, women would remain on the home front, where they would fill in for men who had been drafted. Women would also participate in civil defense. To that end, the government encouraged them to take courses in first aid, marksmanship, demolitions, and radio communications and invited them to learn to fly at aviation clubs. Immediately after the German invasion, the government called on female doctors and nurses, communications and demolition experts, truck drivers, paratroopers, and engineers to join the army. It turned away tens of thousands of other women who volunteered for service. Some of these then found their way into the service by talking low-ranking officers into accepting them or joining the “people’s corps,” hastily assembled to defend the major cities.46
A few female aviators also refused to take no for an answer. Chief among them was Marina Raskova, who had made a series of record-setting long-distance flights in the 1930s and had afterward received a commission in the Soviet army. In the late summer of 1941, Raskova began working her connections to party bosses, perhaps including Stalin himself. In the fall she received permission to recruit women for three all-female air-corps regiments. Anna Krylova argues that the top leadership saw the women’s regiments as a worthwhile experiment; they were proved correct. By the spring of 1942, the graduates were flying combat missions.47
As the several hundred female pilots trained, huge losses at the front and women’s continuing efforts to join the military were forcing the Soviet government to reconsider its decision to limit women’s service. In the spring of 1942, it ordered the Komsomol to recruit female volunteers. Recruitment drives continued periodically through 1944.
The majority of the women in the Soviet army were unmarried, Slavic, and young, as were the men. The women, many of them Komsomol members, were also better educated than rank-and-file infantrymen, most of whom had been conscripted from the peasantry. The women’s motives for volunteering were very similar to those of the female soldiers of World War I: they wanted to avenge loved ones killed by the Germans; their friends were going; they thought of war as a great adventure. Above all, female veterans later remembered that they went because they felt they had the same obligation as men to defend their country. Vera Malakhova was a medical student who enlisted with some of her classmates right after the German invasion. “What was there to talk about?” she remembered years later. “We had graduated, they had given us our diplomas. Naturally, it was our duty to go to the front.”48
The Soviet high command did not assign women to a separate army corps, as did the British and U.S. militaries. Soviet women served in all-female units within the larger command structure or in units that were gender-integrated. They received the same pay as men of their rank and were equally eligible for promotion and benefits. Most female soldiers worked in support services, as they had done during the civil war. That is, they were medical personnel, truck drivers, translators, communications operators, clerks, and cooks. Women constituted about 70 percent of the personnel in some communications and transport units. By 1945, some anti-aircraft regiments were entirely composed of women. They were 41 percent of physicians and 43 percent of feldshers at the front. Women also served as political officers. Officially these were non-combat assignments, but those stationed close to the front often came under fire.49
Women also made up 5 to 10 percent of the partisan forces operating behind enemy lines in Belarus and Ukraine. Some fought alongside men, sabotaging communications, sniping at German patrols, carrying messages, and collecting intelligence. Others were double agents, working for the German occupiers while reporting to the anti-German underground. Most partisan women did housekeeping chores, that is, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. Some protested against this state of affairs, as did some male officers, and the central command of the partisan forces, headquartered in Moscow, periodically issued orders to involve women as men’s equals in operations. The orders and the complaints were usually disregarded. Local commanders, operating far from Moscow, could not be forced to take women on dangerous missions. This arrangement was probably fine with many women, who had fled with their children to the partisans’ forest camps to escape from the occupiers, not to fight them.50
One hundred and twenty thousand women served in combat units in the regular army. They were armorers, artillery and anti-aircraft personnel, machine and mortar gunners, pilots, and snipers. The 1,885 graduates of the Women’s Sniper Training School proved particularly skilled at the cruel arts of their trade. In the summer of 1942, two snipers, Maria Polivanova and Natalia Kovshova, Komsomol members and fast friends, received the Order of the Red Star, the highest Soviet military medal, for killing more than three hundred enemy soldiers. Soon afterward, their platoon was surrounded. Although wounded, Polivanova and Kovshova kept firing until they ran out of ammunition. When German troops closed in, they blew up themselves and some of their captors with hand grenades. Posthumously they were declared Heroes of the Soviet Union, an award equivalent to the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor. Many other women in the Soviet military performed heroically; by the end of the war, more than a hundred thousand had received medals.51
THE FLYERS
The most famous women’s units in the Soviet military were the three air-force regiments—the 46th Guards Night Bomber, the 125th Guards Bomber, and the 586th Fighter—founded as a result of Raskova’s lobbying in 1941. The female pilots in the British and American armies during World War II flew transport missions; only the Soviet army sent women into air combat. Furthermore, almost all the personnel of the three combat regiments, from the ground crews that kept the planes flying to the officers, were women. The 125th and 586th had male commanders during some of their service; the 46th was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Evdokia Bershanskaia throughout the war. The regiments received no special treatment; they were assigned the same types of aircraft as male units, flew the same missions, and dealt with the same anguish and danger. Polina Gelman, a pilot in the 46th, remembered “a night when I flew with tears on my face. We were pushed back from the Ukraine to the Caucasus. We were bombing the advancing columns of German tanks. They were advancing so fast that we had no time to change bases. We didn’t even have maps. It was August and September, we could not harvest grain, so they burned it. And so I was crying. Because it was my country and it was burning.”52
Much has been written about the 46th Night Bomber Regiment, perhaps because its equipment was antiquated and its missions so dangerous. Its plane was the Po-2, a plywood and fabric biplane that carried the pilot in the forward cockpit and the navigator-bombardier in the rear. Pilots affectionately nicknamed the Po-2 “little farmer,” because it could land in small fields and was very maneuverable, able to fly low and dodge away from fighter fire. The women of the 46th flew it at night, navigating with maps when they had them and the aid of whatever landmarks they could see. When they were near their targets, the pilots cut the engines and swooped in low. The navigators released the bombs, the pilots fired up the engines and the Po-2 climbed as fast as it could away from enemy fire and shrapnel rocketing up from the blasts. Crews routinely flew five to ten of these missions per night. The Germans called them “the Night Witches,” which the women took as a compliment. By the end of the war, thirty-one of these flyers, 27 percent of flight-crew members in the regiment, had died. Given the conditions in which they fought, it is surprising that casualties were not higher.53
The women of the three air regiments, eager to prove their competence, pushed themselves, as did other women assigned to combat units. By 1945, the 46th had flown 24,000 missions and the 125th had dropped 980,000 tons of bombs; each received the honorific “guards regiment” in recognition of their achievements. The pilots of the 586th Fighter Regiment also went beyond the call of duty. Their most celebrated member was Lilia Litviiak, who was reassigned to a male regiment during the battle of Stalingrad. Litviiak was a small, pretty blonde who wore polka-dot scarves over her leather flight jacket, dyed her hair blonde, and painted flowers on her plane. She scored eleven solo kills in sixty-eight combat flights in eleven months, a record that earned her a series of promotions. In June 1943, Litviiak became a flight commander and on August 1, leading her fourth mission of the day, she was shot down. Her remains were not found until 1979.54
ANNA TIMOFEEVA-EGOROVA (1918–)
One of the most accomplished fighter pilots who flew in a male unit was Anna Egorova, the young woman who had worked as a steel-fitter on the Moscow metro, learned to fly at a flying club, and then been refused further training in 1938 because her brother was in the Gulag. When she got that news, Egorova endured a few weeks of despair and a long, aimless train ride. Then she pulled herself together, got off the train at Smolensk, and found a sympathetic local Komsomol head, who signed her up to teach at a flying club. He also advised her, she remembered, “If they ask you to write a resume, don’t waste too much paper on brothers. Got it?”55 With talent, determination, and the support of male mentors, Egorova taught novices and improved her own flying skills. When the war began, she and three friends volunteered for the military, but were turned down.
Refusing to take no for an answer, Egorova went to Moscow. She talked a colonel into assigning her to a flying club in Ukraine, then made the long, dangerous journey south. Once there, she found an air-corps major who was willing to take her as a replacement for pilots lost at the front. She began her military career flying communications and reconnaissance missions in Po-2s and later moved on to the Ilushin-2 fighter-bomber, which provided air support to troops at the front. In 1944 Egorova was promoted to the position of chief navigator of the 805th Attack Aviation Regiment. By then she had flown hundreds of missions through heavy enemy fire, had been wounded often, and had crashed several times. Once she enlisted a Cossack and his horse to pull her battered Po-2 to safety. In August of 1944, Egorova’s luck ran out. Leading an attack on German forces near Warsaw, she was shot down, captured, and, close to death, was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp.
Egorova survived, due to the ministrations of the prison doctors, themselves prisoners, and the tender care given her by other inmates. When Soviet troops entered the camp in 1945, she came into the custody of SMERSH, the police agency charged with investigating returned prisoners of war, all of whom Stalin had condemned as traitors for having allowed themselves to be captured. She was freed after ten days, because her friends from the camp had written letters on her behalf attesting to the fact that she had been shot down, rather than surrendering voluntarily. Still recuperating from her injuries, Egorova went back to Moscow.
Soon thereafter, she retired from the military with the rank of lieutenant and a pocket full of honors, including the For Bravery medal and two Order of the Red Banner medals. She accepted the marriage proposal of the commander of her former division, Colonel Viacheslav Timofeev, and settled down to a quiet life raising two sons. Her brother survived the Gulag; other brothers and nephews died in the war.
The stain of having been a POW hung over Egorova. “There’s always some vigilant flunky politician,” she wrote in the early 1990s, “who feels the need to remind you that you are ‘marked,’ and you’d better keep a low profile.” She refused to submit, fighting instead to have her reputation restored. She prevailed in the 1960s when the government began to acknowledge the injustices done to POWs. In 1965, she was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest award, the title Hero of the Soviet Union. When she received the news, Egorova, like many veterans so honored, thought of those who had perished. “As I read the words of this solemn document,” she remembered, “I saw the faces of my regimental comrades, who had ascended into the flaming heights, never to return. I heard the formations of Shturmoviks [Il-2s], roaring evermore into the troubled skies of my youth.”56
GENDER RELATIONS
Soviet soldiers lived with boredom, terror, injuries, death, disease, and dirt. They slept in tents, huts, or dugouts in the earth, went for weeks with little food and sleep, and were dirty most of the time. To keep down the lice, they shaved their heads and picked the bugs out of the seams in their clothes. Women learned to make do with uniforms and boots that were sized for men. They fashioned menstrual cloths from old clothing and adjusted to dropping out of the line of march to relieve themselves. Some women tried to keep in touch with their feminine side by decorating tents with flowers or pictures cut from magazines. Some decorated themselves as well: Lilia Litviiak wore a polka-dot scarf, Anna Egorova a blue one.
Many male soldiers did not want women at the front. They believed the age-old ideas that women could not handle the stresses of war, that they disrupted the camaraderie of the men, and that they brought bad luck. Women in command positions were a still greater affront. These convictions coexisted with shame born of the equally ancient notion that men should protect women from war, not send them into it. “We men had a guilty feeling about girls having to fight; and that feeling is still with me,” declared Nikolai Borisovich, the commander of an engineering battalion. Years later he was still haunted by the memory of a female medic lying dead by the side of the road. “A lovely girl with a long braid; she was all covered with mud. The girl’s presence among us and her death amidst all that horror, mud, and chaos, it was all so unnatural.”57
Female veterans wrote in their memoirs that male soldiers accepted them once they proved their competence, that feelings of comradeship developed, and that some of the men, in Egorova’s words, “protected” and “helped” the women. This had also been the experience of female soldiers in World War I, the Revolution, and the civil war. In all these wars, working together knit bonds of trust and comradeship. Lelia Novikova, a medic, told journalist Vasili Grossmann in 1942 that before her unit was moved forward into the battle of Stalingrad, the female medics and male soldiers had argued a lot, but once they went into combat, the friction disappeared. “And now the soldiers are saying, ‘We are very grateful to our girls,’” Novikova told Grossmann. “We have gone on the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers; we even used to urge them on.” The women’s courage engendered respect, as did the very significant facts that they were volunteers who had chosen to subject themselves to the horrors of the front and who were there with the support of the authorities.58
Although military regulations prohibited sexual relations between male and female soldiers, people found a way. “I was young,” remembered Lidia Kravits, a partisan in Belarus, “and like many young women I thirsted for love.” Death was ever-present and pleasures were few, making sex that much more appealing. Some of the couples that met at the front stayed together after the war, and veterans remembered such marriages as particularly close, enduring ones.59
Sex in the military was also sometimes predatory. In their memoirs, female veterans report incidents of sexual harassment, most of which they say they successfully rebuffed. Rape, which undoubtedly occurred, is not discussed in the sources. Veterans did talk about “front marriages” between officers, particularly commanders, and women assigned to their units. Military regulations outlawed such liaisons, but many officers declined to enforce the rules. As a result, commanders often took “field wives,” much to the disgust of lower-ranking soldiers, female as well as male. Women resented the fact that the “wives” got better rations and lighter work loads than women not so well connected, and they denounced them as little better than prostitutes. This criticism was not always justified, for some of the wives had been coerced into living with their commanding officers. Others, no doubt, had not.
WOMEN ON THE HOME FRONT
The great majority of Soviet women contributed to the war effort on the home front. There they worked alongside men in civil defense, maintaining barrage balloons, watching for enemy aircraft, and operating searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries during bombing raids. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, a Leningrad artist, wrote in her diary in August 1941, “In our building an around-the-clock watch has been organized…. Each person keeps watch two hours on the stairs leading to the attic. It’s light there, and one can sew, darn and read.” Meanwhile, 150,000 women in Moscow were digging a labyrinth of anti-tank trenches around the city.60 After the German bombers flew away, women and men fought fires and removed unexploded munitions. They also searched for survivors in the rubble. Most of these workers were volunteers serving during time off from their regular jobs.
In those regular jobs, women were more important to the Soviet economy than ever before, because so many men had been sent to the military and because women who had not been employed before joined the paid-labor force during the war. Such women were not all volunteers; beginning in February 1942, the government drafted unemployed women aged sixteen to fifty into jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and transportation. The feminization of the workforce that followed was substantial. The percentage of women among non-agricultural workers climbed from 39 percent in 1940 to 57 percent in 1943. In the same period, the percentage of women in the American paid-labor force increased from 25 to 37 percent. There were still more women working in certain geographic regions and economic sectors. In Moscow, women had been 46.6 percent of the labor force in 1939; they were 63 percent in 1945. In Leningrad in December 1942, 80 percent of all factory workers were women. Occupations and manufacturing sectors with predominantly female workforces before the war became even more feminized: by 1945, 80 to 90 percent of the workers in light industry were women. Women were 52 percent of collective farmers in 1941, 80 percent in 1945. Even in occupations in which men had previously been in great majority, the numbers of women grew. By 1943, the majority of tractor drivers were female; by 1944, 41 percent of coal miners in the Donets Basin of southern Ukraine were women.61
Female workers moved from one type of employment to another to meet war needs. Clerks became lathe operators and teachers learned to drive trolleys. Women also moved geographically, fleeing the front in the first years of the war for towns in the rear to which factories were relocated, and then returning to the liberated west as the Soviet army drove the Germans out. Women moved upward in the labor force as well, into skilled blue-collar jobs and managerial positions vacated by men. This was especially true on the collective farms, where women in large numbers became mechanics and brigade leaders.
Promotions into positions once held by men brought higher wages, but no raise in pay could compensate for the enormous hardships of life during the war. Like the soldatki of World War I, Soviet wives suffered financially because they lost the support of their husbands’ incomes when the men were drafted. As in the past, the government promised to help; as in the past, the allotments were lower than most husbands’ peacetime pay and were often late in coming. The government also cruelly removed from the rolls of military dependents the wives of the millions of Soviet POWs held by the Germans.
Women coped with worsening working conditions as well. Insistent on maximizing production, the government suspended health and safety regulations and increased penalties for absenteeism. Women worked ten-to twelve-hour days for weeks on end. They also took physically taxing jobs once reserved for men, such as lumbering, steel-making, and manufacturing heavy equipment. Valentina Bushueva remembered loading logs onto trains bound for Leningrad: “You lift the log on your shoulders and carry it along the ladder to the cars. And don’t even dream of looking around! The commander of our group would be watching…. We worked that way for twelve hours at a stretch. Fifty minutes work, ten minutes rest. One month—day shift; the next—night shift. We lived in a dugout; inside there were communal bunk beds that slept sixty people…. No holidays, no days off, nothing of the sort, no let up.”62
Peasant women endured equally grueling conditions because so many male peasants were drafted into the army and the industrial labor force. Between 1941 and 1944 the number of able-bodied men working on the collective farms dropped from 16.9 million to 3.6 million.63 Women, older men, and children took their places; those too old or young to work in the sprawling grain and potato fields tended family gardens. In Siberia, native women cared for the reindeer herds and took the fishing boats out to sea. All this work was made more taxing by the fact that the army had requisitioned trucks, tractors, and horses. Growing shortages of spare parts and fuel then made it difficult to keep the equipment that was left running.
The women least affected by the war were the wives of top party officials and generals, many of whom were evacuated to places far from the invaders where they received the best housing and consumer goods available. The millions of less privileged women mended again oft-mended clothes, got by with little soap and water, coped with power outages, and heated their homes with firewood they gathered themselves. Peasant women made difficult journeys to the towns to sell or trade their produce for manufactured goods. Still more challenging was the crisis in the food supply.
Because the war was fought on the best Soviet farmland, because so many peasants were drafted and so many farm machines sat idle for lack of spare parts, and because the government gave first priority to feeding the troops, food supplies for civilians dwindled. Most urban women subsisted on bread; rural women lived on potatoes. City dwellers turned vacant lots into kitchen gardens and traded food with people from the countryside. These efforts and the government’s rationing system beat back starvation in most of the Soviet Union, but they could not prevent chronic malnutrition and the diseases that accompanied it—influenza, malaria, pneumonia, scurvy, typhus, and tuberculosis. Nor could they save the most vulnerable—children, the infirm, and the old—who died by the millions.
Women closest to the front suffered the most. In Leningrad, under siege from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944, 3 million people perished from the bombardment and from starvation. Millions died in areas under German occupation as well. In the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine, the invaders rounded up millions of Jews for immediate execution or shipment to the death camps. Included were children plucked from the orphanages. They also raided the orphanages for teenagers who could be sent, along with millions of adults, to be slave laborers in Germany. Most of the deported women became factory workers, but Hitler also wanted to help out German housewives, so in 1942 he ordered his commissars to deport half a million Ukrainian women, aged eighteen to thirty-five, to work as servants in German homes.64
Those people they did not execute or deport, the occupiers terrorized. They seized peasants’ crops and animals, kept rations at starvation levels, and, in reprisal for partisan attacks, destroyed entire villages. In the time-honored tradition of armies, they raped captive women and forced some to become their lovers. Karel Berkhoff has found that the Germans and their allies fathered ten thousand children in Ukraine alone. Some of these babies were born of consensual relationships, for local women, desperate for food and willing to make the best deal available to them, became collaborators. In retaliation for the depredations visited on their people, Soviet soldiers driving toward Berlin in the last months of the war gang-raped German and Polish women.65
THE EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON THE FAMILY AND GENDER IDEAS
As the front ebbed and flowed across the western landscape, many died, many fled, and in the chaos, families became separated. By 1943, almost seven hundred thousand homeless children were living in orphanages.66 Women who managed to keep their loved ones nearby found that the double shift had become far more burdensome because their hours at work were so much longer. Childcare became a struggle as daycare centers and schools closed intermittently because of air raids, power outages, and shortages of teachers. Moscow’s entire school system shut down for the academic year 1941–42. Many of the teenagers released from school found work: the legal minimum age for employment was fourteen, but children as young as twelve were often hired, and their income made a crucial contribution to their families’ survival. Other youngsters roamed the streets, adding to the crime wave that swept through Soviet cities during the war. For mothers, therefore, the burdens of endless work were exacerbated by fears about their children.
Those who were married coped with long separations. Soldiers at the front worried about how their wives were managing without them and whether they were being faithful. Soldiers in all the armies of World War II had these worries, in part because they knew that people were taking a more relaxed attitude toward marital fidelity during the crisis. Given the shortage of men on the Soviet home front, and the manifold difficulties women faced providing for themselves and their children, it seems unlikely that many wives had the time or the opportunity to have love affairs. Instead, they lived in constant fear of joining the ranks of war widows. Millions did.
Soviet authorities worried about the war’s effects on the family. People married in great numbers in the summer of 1941, before the draft carried the men away, but thereafter the rates of marriages and births fell precipitously and remained low until 1944. When men began to return in that year, the birthrate rose, as did the number of divorces, for the years of separation and the post-traumatic stress that men and women experienced made the readjustment to living together very difficult for many.
Wishing to encourage marriage and childbearing, the government took a familiar course: it revised the marriage law yet again. The Family Law of 1944 attempted to discourage divorce by raising the fees charged for it and extending the period of time required to complete the process. Realizing that the immense losses of young men in the war meant that many women would never marry, and wanting to encourage them to have children anyway, the lawmakers promised government-funded benefits to single mothers. The law also lengthened pregnancy leave to seventy-seven days, raised the food rations allotted to pregnant and nursing mothers, and cut the fees charged by daycare centers to families with more than two children. The new marriage law also reaffirmed an income tax, first instituted in 1941, on people of childbearing age who did not have children. To prevent single mothers from breaking up marriages by claiming child support from the fathers of their children, the drafters of the code prohibited such claims.
It was also in 1944 that the Soviet government launched the much-publicized “mother-heroine” campaigns. Women who bore more than two children received cash bonuses on the birth of each additional child. The award rose to the substantial sum of five thousand rubles when the tenth baby arrived. Women with seven or more children also received medals and were written up in the Soviet press. The heroine-mother awards continued on after the war, becoming the source of many Soviet jokes while having little impact on the birthrate.
The authorities need not have feared that the war had caused permanent changes in Soviet family values. For most people, it had made family seem more precious than ever. Virtually all the surviving female soldiers, who had lived the most unconventional lives during the war, did as Egorova did, that is, they left the army as soon as they could and tried to build a peacetime life. “When the war was over,” remembered Zinaida Korzh, a medic from Minsk, “I wanted to forget about it as quickly as possible.” Her comrade, Tamara Umniagina, agreed. “We’d had enough of it, the girls who served at the front.” zinaida’s sister Olga, also a medic, remembered that on Victory Day, May 8, 1945, “I felt then as if I had wakened from a terrible dream…. Suddenly we all began to talk about the future. We talked about love. We all wanted to love. And although we had lived through a grim war, nevertheless we all managed to give birth to beautiful children. That’s the most important thing.”67