Durham, NC - Soviet military records from World War II contain evidence that women can be as effective front-line soldiers as men, says Duke University historian Anna Krylova.

Krylova will give a presentation Friday, Oct. 20, that explores the mass volunteering of Soviet young women for combat in 1941, their integration into the armed forces and the implications that their performance have on gender roles in the military and Soviet society at large. The talk, "Beyond Gender: Women in Combat at the Soviet Front, 1930s-1940s," will be from 4 to 6 p.m. at the National Humanities Center in Durham and is part of the Triangle Seminar in the History of the Military, War, and Society.

Krylova, who grew up in Moscow before coming to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in history, said 800,000 women served in the Soviet military during WWII, 350,000 of them in combat.

"My goal is to make these numbers speak, to find out what kind of cultural and psychological developments in Stalinist society prepared young women to volunteer for the front and what kind of soldiers these young women made," said Krylova, whose talk is based on a chapter from her upcoming book on women in combat.

According to Soviet records and memoirs written by men and women, Krylova said women between the ages of 17 and 27 turned out to be quick learners in the martial arts and became effective as bomber and fighter pilots, snipers, machine-gunners, anti-aircraft fighters and combat engineers, as well as platoon and company commanders.

"Women snipers, because they were extremely well trained, were often much more effective than male snipers," Krylova said. "The snipers who graduated from the Central Women's Sniper School in Moscow proudly reported over 11,000 Germans soldiers killed."

The female sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko, who in a year and a half killed 309 Germans, was as well-known as the famous male sniper Vladimir Pchelintsev, said Krylova, the Hunt Assistant Professor of History at Duke.

"If we look at comparable male and female night bomber regiments, the women's regiment proved superior to the male regiment in terms of their statistics of accuracy of target-hitting," she said. "In the Fourth Air Force Division, for example, the female night bombers were known for extreme accuracy of their hits and they were assigned to the most demanding missions.

"The conclusion that one could come to is that, as far as combat performance and combat endurance are concerned, the variations within sexes are very wide and if we actually wanted to pick the best soldiers, then it would make sense to take the best out of those who are willing and best suited to fight. And, in that case, we would inevitably end up with a mixed group of men and women," Krylova said.

"The Soviets derived those conclusions but they did not let women stay in the army," she noted. "They demobilized women after World War II because they lost a lot of men and it seemed more urgent to have women out of the military giving birth than in the military as career officers."

Krylova said that in contemporary debates the argument against women's presence in the military is based on evidence that men "freak out and cannot fight together with women because, while in combat, they get disoriented and want to protect women instead of being combatants. The Soviet case is interesting because such reactions were indeed present during the first encounters between male and female combatants. But what the Soviet case also illustrates is how, over the four years of combat, male and female combatants managed to learn how to fight together. Even female platoon and company commanders were, in the end, accepted by male soldiers and other officers.

"The Soviet memoirs and archival documents tell many stories about overcoming gender-based stereotypes and hostility," she said.