Authors

Liudmila Lyagushkina¹;  ¹ University of Nottingham, UK

Discussion

This report focuses on the shift in the gender aspect of the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s known as the Great Terror and the next wave of repression during the Great Patriotic War. This research identifies the reasons for the twofold increase in women’s political arrests by analyzing a database with biographies of 444,000 victims of terror in the USSR, augmented by a sample of archival investigative files. Before the war, women were seldom perceived as actors capable of committing independent political crimes. One of the main, albeit not predominant reasons for their arrests, was that they were wives of ‘traitors to the Motherland’. Other factors which seemed to increase the likelihood of women’s arrests during the purges of 1937–1938 included their ‘foreign’ nationality, social origin, and religious beliefs. During the Great Patriotic War, more women were arrested individually, apart from their family members. Women were significantly more often convicted of crimes connected to their professional activity. There were fewer women with tertiary education or Bolshevik Party membership, and the proportion of women having ‘suspicious’ social origins or religious beliefs decreased. Such a shift in the scale of the arrests of women contributes to a better understanding of women’s social emancipation during the war. The conflict allowed women to take on men’s responsibilities, but this increase in social mobility and elevated status came at a price.