{"id":2001,"date":"2016-12-16T17:22:00","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T15:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imbipaju.com\/?p=2001"},"modified":"2024-12-11T17:29:53","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T15:29:53","slug":"women-at-the-mercy-of-war-and-confined-by-the-words-of-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/imbipaju.com\/en\/women-at-the-mercy-of-war-and-confined-by-the-words-of-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Women At the Mercy of War and Confined By The Words Of Men"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Imbi Paju is an Estonian author, historian and filmmaker whose work examines the traumas of totalitarianism. Her book and film \u201cSisters Across The Gulf of Finland: Watching The Pain of Others\u201d  looks at how Estonian, Finnish and other Scandinavian women around the Baltic Sea region, worked together to prevent the onset of crisis and war through their own unique actions. Her books have been translated into several languages and her book \u201cMemories Denied\u201d is considered a landmark work on Soviet repression in Estonia.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
In this essay, written originally for Estonian cultural journal,\u00a0Sirp<\/a>, Imbi Paju looks at 2015 Noble Prize in Literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich\u2019s work on the wartime trauma of Soviet women.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Last year the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to Belarusian author, Svetlana Alexievich, reminded us that writing is something more than just a well thought out story. It has the capability of bridging non-fiction and fiction: to create a relationship where people are presented as they are, with their virtues as well as their faults. And where simple phenomena, like the scent of a flower, clean spring water or the help of a traveling wanderer can dramatically affect their fate whether in the literary context of a dark and even event or the coming of a miracle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what Alexievich\u2019s celebrated book \u201cThe War\u2019s Unwomanly Face\u201d does. It\u2019s a depressing and tragic story of Soviet women who enlisted in the Red Army during WW II. They were not forced to go to war, but rather many had to practically force their way into the army. Girls ranging in age from fourteen to twenty were ready to fight and die. About one million women fought in the Soviet Army, leaving behind their homes and their parents. In place of dresses these women put on men\u2019s uniforms, rifle in hand and among them, snipers, tank drivers, foot soldiers, machine gunners, pilots, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

They left behind them concerned parents and family. No one knew how long the war would drag on. At the same time Stalin\u2019s reign of terror continued. One could never be sure about what one could be blamed for: \u201cTogether with father they wouldn\u2019t allow me, but I only had one thought: \u201cGo to the Front. Go to the Front.\u201dAll of those posters that are today on display at the museum: \u201cMother, Your Country is Calling You.\u201d \u201cWhat Have You Done for the Front Line of Battle? Those Soviet war posters always left a strong impression on me. They were always forced on us.
And what of the songs about the war? \u201cNow cheer up land without borders, and make a dash to the duel \u2026\u201d as Jevgenia Sergejevna Sapronova, who was a sergeant and airplane mechanic, recounts in her recollections to the writer.  For the mythological Soviet heroes from the Second World War or as the Soviets called it, The Great War of the Fatherland and The Holy War, there was no recognition of loss, mourning and fear. Death was just an end point on a Soviet created yardstick of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way that you\u2019ve written about the war is incorrect said a censor to Alexievich. According to the state, one should never make teary stories about history nor should a person ever be viewed as a victim in history.
\u201cThat is wrong!\u201d said the state censors. \u201cSuch treatment of this history slanders our soldiers who freed half of Europe. We do not need such little personal histories, we need a grand history. A history of conquest. Your history does not embrace our heroes or our big ideas. Marxist and Leninist ideas.\u201d  Aleksijevitch has chosen to look at the other side of the Soviet narrative of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201dEverything that we know about the war, was written from a male perspective and voice. We all impose a mental masculine appearance and a masculine role model in war; which are all encapsulated by a man\u2019s words. But women remain silent. No one other than me has ever asked my grandmother or my mother any questions.\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is it that during the war these women could fight for so long for the regime, which simply treated them as cannon fodder? Alexievich has searched for women who went to the front, to investigate how they really felt, how their lives were interrupted and what their lives were like during and after the war. The writer investigates the so-called Soviet \u201choly war\u201d that is connected with its World War II victory, and looks deeper, behind the narrative of Soviet heroes and reaches into the souls of the women who were at the font. She begins to correspond with these women. In the beginning she talks to them about courage. Just small talk, until she arrives at a moment when her subject is able to distance herself from the prescribed ideological norm of the mythical holiness of the war, and finally connects with her true experiences. Her story continues to grow from its opening passages. \u201cThen she is no longer, for me, a mute proletariat of history. Her soul tears her open. What then is my conflict with power? I have understood that a big ideas requires small people \u2013 a big person isn\u2019t necissary . But I am looking for exactly that person. I\u2019m looking for a small, big person. That person has been knocked down, minimized stomped on and hurt. She has journeyed through Stalin\u2019s camps and betrayals and has still won. It\u2019s an amazing wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The young men and women who fought in the Second World War were born in 1917 during the time of the Russian Revolution or after the arrival of the Bolshevik coup. The spirit of the tsarist-era generation was destroyed and many intellectuals, people of culture, and gentry escaped to the West. (They also came to Estonia but were arrested in 1940 and deported to the Gulag.) The loss of a very large army of writers and journalists caused Russia to fall behind culturally. The doors to schools and universities were wide open to indoctrinate the new generation of the revolution, Communist state ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Propaganda was forced its way into homes, schools and into the Soviet collectives. Old tsarist-era libraries were destroyed and history was rewritten. One particular story involved Lenin\u2019s wife, Nadezda Krupsakaya. Embedded in the school curriculum was Communist ideology and the militaristic-patriotic teachings which made very clear what a women\u2019s wartime role should be. Stalin told his people that a single man\u2019s contribution on the battlefield are insignificant, that it was the total mass of the people that mattered. Because of this, women fulfill the role of warrior while giving birth to future Soviets at the same time. And so those girls went off when duty called them, rifle in hand! Those who were captured and imprisoned by the enemy were considered traitors. Women believed that after the war everything would change and that Stalin trusted and believed in his own people. \u201cThe war hadn\u2019t yet ended, but the echelons were already rolling towards Magadan.  Echelons full of combatants who had won the war \u2026 They arrested those who had been imprisoned and managed to stay alive  in German prisoner of war camps, those been deported to work in Germany  \u2013 and anyone else who had seen Europe and could describe what life without communism looked like\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People were spiritually broken before the war broke out. Brainwashing was offered as a kind of consolation and was engineered to promote happiness. Even if life was miserable, one could at least die for one\u2019s country. For the young Russian women, a life as a soldier was not a choice: they had no awareness of what their lives meant or the history they were living in. The individual person, their worries, sufferings, what they had lived through and the after effects of real trauma weren\u2019t acknowledged int the Soviet totalitarian system nor were they allowed. Translations of Sigmund Freud\u2019s work appeared in Tsarist Russia, which would have helped people examine their inner selves, but the Bolsheviks (as later on in Hitler\u2019s Germany) destroyed a much of Freud\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maxim Gorky\u2019s novel Mother (1906) had a large influence on the new state religion where one family\u2019s life with an alcoholic father, under the reign of terror, is depicted. Novels were often used to create a model female hero character, who became the role model for thousands of soviet women \u2013 but any mention of family violence was hidden and silenced. The female hero was required to fulfill the state\u2019s ideal of sacrifice. Through the novel \u201cMother\u201d we can see how ideology uses the Russian woman as a victim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self-sacrifice is always connected with the ego and narcissism. In her work, Alexievich examines the lack of empathy felt by mothers towards their daughters. \u201cI returned to my village with two state awards and medals. I was back for three days, and on the fourth day, early in the morning, when everyone else was sleeping, my mother woke me up from bed and said: \u201cDaughter, I have prepared a bucket for you. Go away. Go away. Your two younger sisters are still growing up. Who will take them for a wife? Everyone knows that you were together with men four years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the Women who went to war just about all of them experienced the same psychological loneliness. They began to live within a predefined role just to bury their pain. Faking it helps to protect a broken identity. \u201c\u201cHow did our country receive us?\u201d I can\u2019t talk about it without crying \u2026 Forty years have passed but right up until now my cheeks are red. The men are quiet, but the women \u2026 they yelled at us: \u201cYes we know what you did! You tempted the young ones \u2026 our men..\u201d Those women faces unspeakable insults \u2026 the Russian language is rich with such words\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe War\u2019s Unwomanly Face\u201d was first published in 1985 with two million copies printed. But  ultimately and without any fanfare, Alexievich\u2019s was only published when the Soviet Union crumbled, at a time when studying history was no longer considered a crime. That is about the same period of time it takes people to recover from their traumas \u2013 a half a century or even more. The reverberations of totalitarian history and the conditions it has created has meant that the door to understanding it remains partially closed. As such, Aleksjivitch is no hero in her country. She is regarded simply as a woman who is watering down history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What really motivates, Aleksjevitch\u2019s writing is a determination to help ensure that horrors of war never repeat. Sadly, we can no longer be sure of that either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IMBI PAJU\u2019S \u201cSISTERS ACROSS THE GULF OF FINLAND\u201d (with subtitles)<\/h5>\n\n\n\n