Heroines of the Soviet Union

Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to give birth after learning about Auschwitz and Dachau. But as it turned out, she was already pregnant. Anastasia Voropaeva, a corporal and searchlight operator, recalled a pretty Russian girl in liberated territory who had been raped and impregnated by her German ‘boss’ and had hanged herself after victory rather than give birth to a ‘little Fritz’. Albina Gantimurova remembered nearly shooting an adolescent member of the German Volkssturm in Berlin before he burst into tears and took her hand.

Svetlana Alexievich finished The Unwomanly Face of War, the first of her astonishing oral histories of Soviet life, in 1983. After some interference from censors who accused her of having read too much Remarque and ‘making our victory terrible’, she released it in 1985, the same year Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary.