Heroes, Lovers, Victims — Partisan Girls during the Great Fatherland War

Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, Fall-Winter, 2000 by Juliane Furst

An analysis of documents from the spetsotdel of the former Komsomol Archive

The most famous names in Soviet partisan mythology belong to young girls. Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, Liza Chaikina, Ania Lisitsina, Marite Mel'nikaite and Zinaida Portnova were barely old enough to be enlisted in the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), let alone old enough to die the horrific deaths which were brought upon them by the German occupation forces. Honoured as `Heroines of the Soviet Union' and etemalised by endless documentary and fictional accounts, their lives and deaths became part of every Soviet pupil's curriculum. They shed their earthly personalities and were born anew as ideal Soviet girls. They became symbols of the emancipation of Soviet women. They stood for equality and progress. And they served as a justification of the system that reared them -- the Soviet Union itself.

However, the flood of Soviet partisan literature, the many films celebrating heroic partisan deeds and the countless war diaries and memoirs obscure, rather than reveal, the reality of partisan life and, in particular, the life of women in the units. Despite strong emotions and rich descriptions of warfare, the emerging picture remains strangely unsatisfactory. With the exception of a few candid diaries and personal accounts, such as the writing and letters of Ina Konstantinovna before and during her partisan life and Nina Kosterina's account of the time leading up to her decision to join the partisans,(1) the main tone of most Soviet accounts is one of sweet idealisation and sentimentalisation, leaving the heroines' personalities blank and one-dimensional. The Soviet overproduction of wartime memories quickly ceased to be taken seriously by postwar youth, the very people for whom it was most intended. This is hardly surprising given that the haste with which heroes such as Zoia Kosmodem'ianskai, Lisa Chaikina and the members of Molodaia Gvardia were presented as role models in films and literature led to great historical inaccuracy.(2)

Lisa Chaikina had the honour of being chosen by Mikhailov, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol himself, as a role model for future female partisans. His book, published as early as 1942 and devoted to Lisa's life and heroic death, connects the young girl with almost every Soviet virtue and communist deed. Despite the fact that Lisa has only completed four years of school, she is described as an ardent reader of classics and texts of Lenin and Stalin, the first Komsomol member in her village, the founder of the first Pioneer organisation, active in eradicating illiteracy, a leader in the collectivisation process of the region (which happened in 1933, when Liza was barely 15) and as counsel and confidant to her fellow kolchosniki.(3) Her character and real life became completely obscured by the public Soviet ideal. Aleksandra Brunshtein admits in her foreword to the film script `Kto ona?', based on Zoia Kosmodem'iankaia's life story, that Zoia's individual personality was, indeed, of no importance. Instead, she was just one of many representatives of the new Soviet generation: `The inner world of Zoia, the composition of her thoughts and feelings, her dreams and ambitions are not coincidental: they are the products of her environment, her school, and her life.... Zoia's life is inextricably linked with the construction of the Soviet Union ... Such a girl as Zoia, who has been raised by her country, her people, Stalinist five-year plans, Soviet thought and the fire of Soviet emotions -- such a girl could not behave differently to the way in which Zoia behaved.'(4)

Such observations are not intended to question the achievement of partisan heroines. These girls and countless others fought a brave struggle against an infinitely stronger enemy. But it should be noted that Soviet printed sources about the partisans tell us more about the ideas and intentions of the institution, which published them than about the real life and struggle behind enemy lines. As Katherine Hodgson concludes in her study on the representation of women in war poetry: `The poetry speaks most eloquently of official attitudes which paid homage to a sacred image of Woman, safely set above the ravages of war, while the country's women who could not escape reality were expected to model themselves on this impossible ideal.'(5) The intense glorification of partisan existence led to the muting of partisan girls' own voices by volumes of sentimental and conformist stories, creating the mythology of the partizanka. Yet for decades both Soviet and foreign historians have taken these official accounts at face value, ignoring an unreliability which manifests itself less in deliberate distortions of the truth than in their selective choice of content. The problem rests not with what they tell, but with what they chose to ignore.

While we know a great deal about the military operations of the partisan units, their structure and their commands at the regional and national levels, the rest of partisan life remains shrouded in mystery. In fact military operations only occupied a small part of partisan time and, especially in the later stages of the war, partisans spent weeks on end living in the woods simply sustaining their camps and the territory around them. The structure and social framework of this society, however, seldom appears either in Soviet or Western sources on partisans or in the diaries and memoirs of its inhabitants. Furthermore, we know little about the hierarchy of these `closed communities' or the personal relationships between their members. While the military operations were, in essence, extraordinary experiences in extraordinary times, partisan social life reflects the reality of ordinary lives in extraordinary times. The partisan communities were microcosms of Soviet life in a hostile environment. They featured several peculiarities which make them interesting objects of research.