Non-statutory Relations between Commanders and Female Military Personnel in the Red Army during the German-Soviet War: Intimate Aspect
Abstract
The purpose of the research paper is to study intimate non-statutory relations between command and female personnel in the Red Army at the front, their negative impact on servicemen, discipline, and morale of the troops; to reveal the causes of their emergence and the strategies employed by the army leadership to counteract them.
The scientific novelty is in the study of the intimate sphere of human privacy in a militarized society, namely sexual harassment by commanders, coercion of women into intimacy through blackmail, the emergence of the institute of ‘campaign wife’ (PPZh) at the front, and the attitude of the army’s rank and file and command staff towards that.
Conclusions. The Soviet authorities, having mobilized women into the Red Army, faced the problem of the spread of non-statutory relations in the intimate sphere between representatives of both sexes in the troops, which sometimes led to tension in the relationship between commanders or commanders and subordinates, and a decline in morale of the troops or a lack of necessary experts in units due to the presence of incompetent mistresses in their positions. The army leadership typically qualified such actions of subordinates mainly as casual debauchery and endeavored to influence the situation through various educational, disciplinary, administrative, and party methods, but they did not yield any results. Severe penalties for that were exceedingly uncommon, usually serving as one of the aggravating circumstances in accusing commanders of failing to comply with the directives issued by commanding officers.
The most prevalent form of non-statutory relations among the military was the creation of temporary civilian military marriages, which usually broke up after the war. Such marriages arose under the pressure of various factors, and their participants, by consent, fulfilled certain obligations to each other for the period of hostilities, and, for the most part, such marriages were mutually beneficial.
Such relations threatened the morale of the troops, so the leadership of the Red Army tried to fight them with various methods, but could not eradicate them completely. In order to avoid intimate harassment, women were forced to resort to various methods of protection, which did not always work.
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