Title: The Unwomanly Face of War Author: Svetlana Alexievich Creation Date: 1985 Location: Soviet Union
Summary
Svetlana Alexievich spent seven years interviewing hundreds of Soviet women who fought in World War II — snipers, tank drivers, pilots, nurses, partisans, sappers — and assembled their testimonies into a devastating oral history. Nearly one million Soviet women served in combat roles, a fact that post-war Soviet culture systematically erased or sentimentalised. The women describe not only combat — killing at close range, dragging wounded comrades through mud, performing amputations without anaesthesia — but also the details that official war narratives suppress: menstruation in the trenches, the shame of losing their hair, falling in love under bombardment, returning home to find that society wanted them to be silent about what they had done. The book's power comes from the collision between the enormity of their experience and the ordinariness of the voices recounting it.
Why This Book Matters
This book shatters one of the deepest assumptions in war literature: that combat is exclusively a male experience. By centring women who fought, killed, and survived, Alexievich exposes how every civilisation constructs war narratives that erase inconvenient participants. The Soviet Union sent more women into combat than any nation in history, then pressured them into silence because their stories complicated the heroic masculine mythology the state required. The book thus operates on two levels of power analysis: the power exercised in war itself, and the power exercised afterward in determining whose war counts. For any collection concerned with how civilisations process violence, this absence — the missing half of the war story — is the most important gap to fill.
Historical Context
The Soviet censors cut approximately one-third of the original 1985 manuscript, removing passages about Soviet soldiers' cruelty, sexual violence, and disillusionment. The uncensored edition appeared only in 2004. Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist, developed her method of "documentary prose" — weaving together hundreds of individual voices into a collective narrative — specifically to capture experiences that official Soviet history suppressed. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, the first non-fiction writer in decades to receive it, largely on the strength of this work and its companion volumes.
Literary Significance
Alexievich invented a literary form. Her polyphonic method — no single narrator, no authorial argument, just voice after voice building an overwhelming chorus — has no real precedent. It draws on Russian oral tradition, Soviet documentary film, and the interview techniques of journalism, but the result is something new: a genre that sits between literature and history, using the tools of the novelist (selection, juxtaposition, rhythm, silence) to organise raw testimony into art. Her influence is visible in the explosion of oral history as a literary form in the twenty-first century. The emotional effect is cumulative and devastating — each brief testimony adds weight until the whole becomes unbearable.
Research Notes
Flagged by the war-power analyst because Russian civilisation scholars will likely prioritise Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Solzhenitsyn. Alexievich's work is specifically war-power territory: it addresses the systematic erasure of women from war narratives, a phenomenon that crosses every civilisation in this collection. No scholar covering "Russian literature" is likely to place this above the nineteenth-century giants, but for a thematic thread on war and power, it is indispensable — it reveals the gendered architecture of how civilisations remember and forget violence.
The Reading
"I Don't Want to Remember"
Maria Ivanovna Morozova is a senior accountant at the Udarnik automobile factory in Minsk, and the short newspaper notice of her retirement mentions, almost in passing, that during the war she had been a sniper, had eleven combat decorations, and her total as a sniper was seventy-five killings. She lives in an old three-storey house on the outskirts of the city, one of those built hastily just after the war. She would rather not talk about it. Speak to my husband, she says — he remembers everything, the commanders, the generals, the numbers of the units. She remembers only what happened to her. Her own war. And take the tape recorder away; she needs a pair of eyes in front of her to tell it.
She was a village girl. She went with other girls, the way girls went, and they were sent to the front near Orsha, to the 62nd Infantry Division, where the commander, Colonel Borodkin, looked at them and was not pleased. "They've foisted girls on me. What is this, some sort of women's round dance?" he said. "Corps de ballet! It's war, not a dance. A terrible war . . ." Then he took them to dinner and asked his adjutant to find something sweet for their tea. They sat there with their sweets and were insulted, because he had received them as girls and they had come as soldiers.
Then the first one. She had been taught to shoot, and she shot, and a man fell down, and afterwards there was nothing in her at all like the thing she had expected to feel. "I killed a man?! I had to get used even to the thought of it. Yes . . . In short — horrible! I'll never forget it . . ."
Nearly a million Soviet women went into that war. No other major power put women into front-line combat: they went as snipers, sappers, tank drivers, machine gunners, pilots, anti-aircraft gunners, cavalry, surgeons, medical assistants, telephone operators, cooks, laundresses, partisans. Everything anyone knows about war, they know in a man's voice. Women are silent. Nobody had ever questioned their grandmothers, or their mothers. Even the ones who were at the front say nothing, or say the men's version of it, tuned to the canon, and only at home, or among their own combat girlfriends and weeping, do they begin to talk about the other war, the one nobody has written down.
"Grow Up, Girls — You're Still Green"
They were seventeen and eighteen. Many of them lied about their age to be taken. They were schoolgirls who believed what they had been taught — that the country was the best country, that the army was invincible, that it would be over quickly — and they queued at the recruitment offices and wept when they were turned away.
The first thing that happened to them was the haircut. It comes back again and again, from woman after woman, and always in the same tone, as though describing a small death. "I had such a beautiful braid, and I came out without it . . . Without my braid . . . They gave me a soldier's haircut."
Then the uniform. There were no women's sizes because nobody had thought there would need to be. They were issued men's tunics with collars that rubbed the chin raw, men's underclothes, and boots so far beyond their feet that they walked out of them; girls with a size thirty-five foot were given size forty-three, and the boots filled with blood from the blisters, and they stuffed them with rag and footcloth and kept walking. Nothing had been provided for menstruation. There were no brassieres and no knickers, and proper cotton underclothing did not reach some units until the war was nearly over. The machine had no idea what to do with these bodies, so it dressed them as men and issued them the same kit and sent them forward.
The training was short. Within weeks girls who had been studying literature and mathematics were digging trenches, laying mines, carrying a rifle taller than they were, and learning the specific technique of killing a person at eight hundred metres. Then they were at the front, where the men looked at them and did not know what they were looking at. A girl commanding a platoon of men, and a sapper-miner besides, became a sensation. Not laundresses, not telephone operators, but sniper-girls. It's the first time we've seen such girls.
"We were so young when we went to the front. Young girls."
They went partly because they had been raised to and partly because they had no idea. "My fearlessness came from an ignorance of life."
"Telephones Don't Shoot"
The war they describe has almost no strategy in it. It has weight, and cold, and the smell of things, and enormous quantities of ordinary work.
At the Sevsk the Germans attacked seven or eight times a day, and a medical assistant carried the wounded out, and carried their weapons out with them, because a soldier brought in without his rifle counted for less. Surgeons operated until they could no longer stand and then went on operating. The anaesthetic ran out and the bandages ran out and they tore up sheets.
A regiment of women flew to the front in May 1942 — the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, in Po-2 biplanes made of plywood and canvas, with no armour and no parachutes for most of the war. They cut the engines above the German positions and glided in, and the only sound was the wind in the wires, and the Germans called them the Night Witches. Girls of nineteen flew eight, ten, twelve sorties in a night.
Partisans went out to the railway lines and brought the troop trains down the embankments and lay in the wet listening to what came afterwards.
And behind all of that: the laundresses, who washed uniforms in water that was never anything but red, whose hands never healed; the cooks; the bakers; the women who kept the field post moving. They speak of themselves as being backstage, as having contributed without being permitted to be heroes, and they say it without self-pity and with a small, unbudging insistence that it was their war too.
The telephone operators sat in dugouts and connected the lines and heard everything, and were held to be safe because telephones don't shoot, and were shelled like everyone else.
Women drove the supply routes for years at a stretch and took their families with them because there was nowhere else to put them. "For four years we drove a freight car, and our son was with us."
"My legs were gone . . . They amputated them . . . They did the surgery right there in the forest."
"I Alone Came Back to Mama"
War is first of all murder, and then it is hard work, and then it is simply ordinary life — singing, falling in love, putting your hair in curlers. At the centre of everything there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die, and how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill.
"A bullet is alone, and man is alone; a bullet flies wherever it likes, and fate twists a man however it likes."
"I left for the front a materialist. An atheist."
"It's not a woman's task — to hate and to kill."
What is left over at the end of it is mostly mothers. Mothers who received the notice and prepared the house anyway. "My little son! We prepared the house for you! You promised you would bring a young wife home!" And mothers who buried other women's sons because the other women were too far away to come: "I will weep instead of them, and pity all of you . . . My dear ones . . ."
They came back from the field and could not eat. They stopped being able to cry, and then years later could not stop. Some of them counted what they had done and some of them refused to count and both are in the record, side by side, uncorrected.
"The battle ended during the night. In the morning fresh snow fell. Under it the dead . . . Many had their arms raised up . . . toward the sky . . . You ask me: what is happiness? I answer . . . To suddenly find a living man among the dead . . ."
And in the same breath, from the same mouths: "Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat . . . You look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful . . . And the air . . . And the dear sun . . ."
The war stands between them and the world afterwards. An underground fighter: "The war stands between us, between me and nature. When the cherry trees were in bloom, I saw fascists in my native Zhitomir."
"They Needed Soldiers — but We Also Wanted to Be Beautiful"
The testimonies circle back constantly to the body, which the culture had no permission to discuss and which the women discuss anyway. Their hair fell out. Their periods stopped for a year, two years. Their voices dropped and their skin coarsened and they stopped recognising the person in the mirror.
And they went on wanting to be beautiful, which the men found unintelligible and which the censors would later find obscene. They dreamed about underwear. Vasilisa Yuzhnina was a private, and the regiment's hairdresser:
"My specialty… My specialty is men's haircuts… A girl comes… I don't know how to cut her hair. She has luxuriant wavy hair. The commander enters the dugout. 'Give her a man's haircut.' 'But she's a woman.' 'No, she's a soldier. She'll be a woman again after the war.' All the same… All the same, as soon as the girls' hair grew a little, I'd curl it during the night. We had cones instead of curlers… Dry pine cones… We could at least curl the forelock…"
One of them tied violets to her rifle:
"I forgot that I had violets tied to my rifle. He began to scold me: 'A soldier should be a soldier, not a flower picker . . .' He found it incomprehensible that I could think about flowers in such circumstances. A man was unable to understand it . . . But I didn't throw those violets away. I took them off and put them in my pocket. I got three extra turns of duty for them . . ."
They lived among men in trenches and dugouts and shared everything with them. Some were protected as sisters. Some were harassed. Some fell in love, and some of those loves lasted three days and some lasted the rest of their lives at a distance, unmentioned to anyone, including husbands. Children were conceived at the front and born in partisan detachments and did not always survive being born there. These are the passages the women had kept for forty years, and they come out slowly, and some of them stop halfway and cannot go on.
"I was friends with Oksana, she was from Ukraine."
"They Awarded Us Little Medals"
The war ended and they came home and found that the country they had fought for did not want to know what they had done.
They were told, by neighbours and mothers-in-law and men who had not gone, what a decent woman would and would not have done at the front. They were asked what they had been doing there among all those soldiers. Their medals went into drawers. At the parades they stood in the crowd and watched the men march.
Some of them had been warned while the war was still on, by men who meant it kindly: "Eh, you girls! You're good all around, but after the war men will be afraid to marry you."
"We were silent as fish. We never acknowledged to anybody that we had been at the front."
Many married men who had never been to the war and never told them. Many lived forty years with the dreams and had nobody to tell. The state that had recruited them had a use for the brave soldier and the stoic father and no use at all for a girl who had killed seventy-five men, and so it built the Victory without them in it, and the silence was not chiefly a matter of censorship but of everybody agreeing, quietly, that it would be better all round if these women were wives now.
Sofya Kuntsevich got as far as Berlin. She put her signature on the Reichstag: "I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war."
And still: "But there's no need to pity us. We're proud."
"It's Terrible to Remember, but It's Far More Terrible Not to Remember"
Nearly a third of what they said did not survive into print in 1985. The censors took out the atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers, and the doubt, and the disillusionment, and above all the bodies. The record of what the censors said while doing it was restored in 2004, in their own words:
"Who will go to fight after such books? You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism. Heroic women. You dethrone them. You make them into ordinary women, females. But our women are saints."
"This is a lie! This is slander against our soldiers, who liberated half of Europe."
To answer that sterile heroism leaves no room for physiology, that war tested the body as well as the spirit, and that a war without bodies in it is not believable, was to be told that such thoughts were alien. Not Soviet. Alongside the censors' cuts stands a second and harder list — the passages cut before any censor saw them. My own self-censorship, my own ban.
Courage in war and courage of thought turn out to be two different courages. They had been assumed to be the same one. They are not, and the women who had the first in abundance were made to spend forty years discovering they were not permitted the second.
The women being interviewed are in their sixties and seventies. Most have never told any of it in full. They call the woman with the notebook little girl, dear daughter. Many stop mid-sentence. Many weep, and then apologise for weeping, and then go on. And then, having decided, they explain why they have decided: it's terrible to remember, but it's far more terrible not to remember.
A history teacher, who has taught the same war out of three different textbooks in one lifetime: "Ask us while we're alive. Don't rewrite afterward without us. Ask . . ."
What is being written down here is the history of feelings. There are no heroes in it and no incredible feats, only people busy doing inhumanly human things, each of them carrying a small piece of history — half a page in one, two or three in another — and together they write down time itself. The nightmare of nuances.
The last of them to speak is Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina, a medical assistant, who was carried out of Stalingrad and went back in:
"There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart."
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The standard English translation is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Random House, 2017), the most complete version available in English and the first to be based on Alexievich's full uncensored 2004 edition. The original 1985 edition omitted approximately one-third of the text.
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Random House, 2017. Based on the full uncensored 2004 edition.
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