Women in the Russian Armed Forces: A Marriage of Convenience?

Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, Fall-Winter, 2000 by Jennifer G. Mathers

`History demonstrates that the number of women in the armed forces increases when society is in extreme conditions. The current situation in Russia exactly corresponds to that definition ... In such a situation it is completely intolerable to ignore the desire of many Russian girls and officers' wives to serve in the armed forces. The benefits from this are reciprocal: the army gets the necessary specialists and the women, who today have difficulty in finding: work, get jobs.'(1)

Society in Russia is indeed in extreme conditions, suffering from a crisis of identity and undergoing a drawn-out and painful political and economic transition, although the end point of the transition process is still unclear. The condition of the Russian armed forces is no less extreme. In addition to the astonishingly rapid deterioration in its effectiveness as a fighting force, the military in Russia is increasingly alienated from society. Fewer and fewer young men are willing to comply with conscription orders, while the officer corps is experiencing a dramatic decline in its numbers. The prestige and status of the army as an institution has reached a low point difficult to imagine during much of the Soviet period. The military has become Russia's pariah, shunned by many of its people, who seek to protect their sons from its clutches, and denounced by its political elite for its past mistakes and present shortcomings.

There is, however, one group in Russian society whose members are evidently eager to join the military: women. Ever since contract service was introduced in the late 1980s in an effort to fill some of the gaps created by shortfalls in conscription, women have made up a significant proportion of the new volunteers. Within a decade, women soldiers comprised approximately one-half of all those serving in the military on contract, and nearly 10% of the total personnel in the Russian armed forces. There have so far been few attempts to address the topic of Russian women's military service and the many issues it raises in scholarly work published in either English or Russian.(2) This paper represents an effort to gather together available information on this subject, chiefly from Russian military publications, and to provide some analysis of this unexpected and largely unexplained phenomenon.

Women Soldiers in Russia in the 1990s

For more than a decade conscription has failed to bring young men into the Russian armed forces in the required numbers. Ever since the glasnost of the Gorbachev years began to reveal the dire conditions and senseless cruelties which conscripts suffer, more and more young men are willing to pay bribes, pull strings and do anything necessary in order to avoid answering their country's call for military service. If anything the tendency towards draft evasion is on the increase: according to information provided by the Russian General Staff, during the October-December 1997 conscription campaign, approximately 40,000 young men evaded military service. This represents almost one-quarter of those called up during this campaign, and compares with fewer than 31,000 incidents of conscription avoidance in the previous year.(3) Subsequent conscription campaigns have been declared successes only because of the reduction in the size of the armed forces as a whole and related cuts in the targets set for recruitment through the draft.(4) The scaling down of the manpower needs of the military has permitted the Defence Ministry to meet its recruitment targets--just--and now has the luxury of rejecting candidates for conscription who are in poor health, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or who have criminal records.(5)

It was against this background that contract service was introduced, as a volunteer or `professional' element which would help to make up the numbers. But instead of the flood of strong, patriotic young men which the Defence Ministry evidently expected to respond to the invitation to voluntary service, most of the applications for contract service came from the least employable section of the male population, and from women.

Although women have had the legal right to volunteer to serve in the military throughout the post-1945 period, the influx of women into the armed forces did not begin until contract service was introduced. By the early 1990s the number of women soldiers stood at approximately 100,000, which then represented about 3% of the personnel of the armed forces.(6) By the end of the decade, the number of servicewomen had increased. It is difficult to determine precisely how many women soldiers currently serving in the Russian armed forces, with estimates ranging from 115,000 to over 160,000.(7) Even using the lowest available estimates, the proportion of women serving in the Russian military represents nearly 10% of the total armed forces personnel as a result of the reduction in the size of the military establishment.

Many of the women who have volunteered for contract service already had some connection with the armed forces. When contract service began, approximately 46,000 women were among the first wave of volunteers (out of a total of over 270,000), but nearly twice as many women (about 82,000) who joined the military at that time had already been employed by the armed forces as civilians. By signing a contract their status changed, but, for the most part, they continued doing their previous jobs.(8)