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Women Under Suspicion
Fraternization, Espionage, and Punishment in the Soviet Union During World War II
Regina Kazyulina
“An insightful and original contribution that combines a nuanced reading of Soviet attitudes toward women with the experiences of women under wartime occupation. Kazyulina impressively sets aside old moral frameworks of ‘collaboration’ or ‘fraternization’ and shows how complex ideas around gender, citizenship, wartime participation, and loyalty shaped Soviet opinions of women.”
—Nicole Eaton, author of German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad
Examining the choices women faced under Nazi occupation
For two years during World War II, Nazi forces occupied large swaths of the western Soviet Union. In response to devastating losses on a contested front, Stalin first permitted and then encouraged women to join the Red Army and the resistance. Simultaneously, female civilians in occupied territory found themselves in an untenable position: they could resist the occupiers and face the possibly fatal consequences or engage in sexual barter, with all the risk, shame, and disapprobation that entailed. In Women Under Suspicion, Regina Kazyulina probes these “choiceless choices” with sensitivity and nuance.
Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,”a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official oversight, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation.
Regina Kazyulina is a program research associate at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Salem State University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Terms
A Note on Transliteration, Place-Names, and Terms
Introduction
1. Soviet Women Between the Wars: A Story of Contradictions
2. Comrades or Spies: Women in the Red Army
3. Scouts or Assassins: Women in the Partisans
4. The Diary of a Komsomolka: Fraternization and the View from Below
5. S“ocially Dangerous” Women and Retribution After Liberation
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Larger images
June 2025
208 pp. 6 x 9
1 table
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