30 caliber (7.62mm) bolt-action rifle, with a 5-round internal magazine originally adopted by the Tsar’s army in 1891. As soldiers who kill deliberately with cold precision, snipers are a powerful test case for the capability of women in combat.įor most Soviet women snipers, the weapon was the 1932 model Mosin-Nagant, a. Many filled “traditional” non-combatant roles – as nurses, cooks, or clerks, but thousands fought with weapons in their hands and a few rank with history’s deadliest snipers. RIA Novosti photoīy one estimate, 800,000 served in the Red Army during World War II. The school graduated 1,885 snipers and instructors during the war. The head of the Central Women’s School of Sniper Training’s political department talks to women snipers before they leave for the front.

A 1934 Soviet film about the Russian Civil War, Chapaev, starred Varvara Myasnikova as Anka, the machine gunner, who became a role model for a generation of girls. Some achieved top scores in marksmanship. Thousands of young women learned to handle rifles in a nationwide network of shooting clubs. As early as 1931, anticipating a global war, the Communist Party had mandated universal military training for boys and girls beginning in elementary school. In a desperate fight for survival, even Stalin was willing to modify traditional patriarchal attitudes about the role of women.

In the first months of World War II, the Red Army suffered massive losses of manpower and equipment. After Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941, many young women seeking enlistment to fight the Germans were turned away, told to work in the factories, or enrolled for nursing training to serve as field medics. In Soviet practice, this meant the right to work as hard as men, with the additional burdens of housekeeping and child care. The 1917 Russian Revolution gave Russian women legal equality.

So warrior women who don’t fit conventional gender roles have been marginalized, delegitimized, or, like Joan of Arc, sanctified after martyrdom. Until very recently, men have written all the military history. But sometimes, they appear on the battlefield as combatants. In truth, women have always participated in war: Often as victims, as cheerleaders or as trophies. One of those “insignificant exceptions” that Keegan dismisses so readily was a little scrape that Russians call the Great Patriotic War ( Velikaya Otchestvennaya Voina). “Warfare is…the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart…”

Scopes during ww2