With or Without the State\u27s Consent: Female Sexuality in the Soviet Union During WWII

This Independent Study illuminates the female sexual experience during World War II in the Soviet Union. Focusing on three varying areas of sexuality – on the home front, on the front lines, and in German-occupied territories – this thesis hopes to draw a more accurate picture of the sexual interactions of Soviet women, and the varying nature of such relationships, in order to show what these encounters looked like during the Second World War. While I emphasize consensual relationships over forced, “consensual” refers to unforced sexual interactions, there is some discussion of forced encounters, i.e. sexual harassment or rape that is necessary to include especially in the second and third chapters. Three main sources are utilized in this thesis: cinema, memoirs, and historiography. Cinema and memoirs are relied on greatly, due to the lack of scholarship on the topic, in order to construct a more comprehensive work of the Soviet female sexual experience during The Great Patriotic War