Slitherine

bru888 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 17, 2020 8:02 pm What a topic for a major movie production!

koopanique wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 10:30 am Her portrait is nice but her nose seems a bit... flat, with only nostrils remaining!

Erik2 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 12:38 pm I doubt a WW2 tank commander thought much about this kind of lighting as long as the sun were not disturbing the outlook from the hatch
But she is lovely.

TripleCP wrote: ↑Wed Aug 19, 2020 4:17 am Her husband Ivan Boiko also survived the war. They divorced in the 1950s but continued to meet at veterans' gatherings. He passed away in 1995, a year before she did.

A higher-ranking female Soviet tanker was Captain Aleksandra Samusenko. She served in a Soviet tank battalion which US Army Sgt. Joseph Beryle encountered and briefly assisted after he escaped from a POW camp (one of the very few instances of an American serving directly alongside the Red Army). It is not entirely clear if she was the battalion's deputy commander but she had apparently had briefly been the acting commander of one in the past after its commander was killed in an ambush. Samusenko was killed in action in the war's final weeks during the East Pomeranian Operation after her detachment was ambushed (sources conflict whether she was mortally wounded by German fire, captured and executed by the German defenders, or crushed by a Soviet tank in the dark as it hastily withdrew).

Mascarenhas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 19, 2020 6:16 pm I think we should regard these events with the eyes of the past. Very often we use to evaluate historical facts disregarding cultural and other aspects that continually change. In the women's case, this was also probably true in every other military structure at that time. Regardless that, though, I think they deserve not only our admiration and reverence, but our gratitude.

Mascarenhas wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 1:36 am What is really obvious is that your political conceptions are distorting the discussion. I was talking about fighting women which got killed, wounded or captured due to their direct involvement in combat. It doesn't seem to me mere propaganda. They earned their medals and recognition, and no one needs to be communist to recognize this.

terminator wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 7:08 am Portraits of women of the Red Army

When the USSR is invaded by Nazi Germany and that immediately arises the question of its survival, the mobilization of women, it does not make problems as in democracy. The revolutionary principle and policy of equality of women’s rights and rights having been affirmed by the Bolshevik revolution. This mobilization of women in the USSR at war was so massive, in the war effort as in the fight, so that, unlike democratic countries, it has not the object of intense propaganda and it is paradoxical. Women represented nearly 9% of the workforce in the Red Army, 40% of the personnel Infantry medical was female. In fact nearly a million women would have fought in the Red Army.
During this conflict, many women distinguished themselves in fighting units - infantry or airwomen.

In aviation:
Faced with catastrophic losses suffered by the VVS (Air Force Soviet Union) during the summer of 1941 following Operation Barbarossa, Stalin asked one of his best aviators, Marina Raskova, to Establish three female pilot regiments. Soviet women in fact occupy almost all the same positions men’s combat. They are even quite unique case in this war, three exclusively female aviation regiments, of the Engineer to the pilot of bomber or fighter aircraft. Far from the figuration, these women fight gloriously on all fronts and many of them are decorated with the supreme order of heroes of the Soviet Union.


Capture(3).JPG



Women Snipers:
During the Second World War, there were several thousand Female snipers in the Soviet Army.


Capture(1).JPG


The place of Russian women in industry during the war:
The Soviet woman, according to the very principles of Marxism-Leninism, is considered a full citizen. She won the right to vote in 1918. Abortion is free and free, divorce, an administrative formality may also be a reality with 10% of marriages thus broken before the war. Education up to the university level, in no case excludes girls. This feminism, for many leaders, even went too far and the "family code" instituted in 1936, exalting a "socialist maternity", abolished free abortion and complicated the modalities of divorce. Certainly this promotion of women is relative, so in spite of equality theoretical and by definition communist, their salaries are there too lower than those of men, and the jobs held are quite often subordinate.

Nevertheless, when the war comes, the Soviet woman is politically, socially and psychologically better suited than other countries at war to mobilize economically and militarily.
But it is the Soviet women who go in proportion to the men contribute to the war effort, in the industry 15% in 1939 they increase to 52% in 1942, in agriculture on the same dates from 52% to 71%. Thus a propaganda poster of a kolkozian perched on a huge agricultural tractors, only translate a reality. In plants as in the fields , it’s very hard and all the more trying that the famine was terrible ( Ukraine , granary has wheat in hand of Germans since autumn 41) making the USSR the country that suffered the more privations in the world at war.



Capture(4).JPG

Not only doctors, they were ...But they deserve all the credit, no less than men, for their heroism, stoicism and the sacrifice.

Mascarenhas wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 10:44 am Yep. this discussion has leaned well out of topic. I've not written a word about my own views about the political and social circumstances prevalent in Russia during soviet era, I just tried to separate fact from ideology. But as always, when this kind of polarization arises, it goes to a dead end. I rest on this too.

kondi754 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 9:34 am EDIT. Raskova accepted Litvak for military service indeed
These regiments, which they write about in Wikipedia, eventually landed in the deep rear of the front and were stationed as anti-aircraft cover for large factories several thousand kilometers from the front lines
Litvak and her 3 friends were the only ones who served in fighter front units and fought with the enemy.