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Some 500,000 women fought with the Red Army in the Great Fatherland War, 1941-1945. Based on a selection of women veterans’ memoirs published since the demise of the Soviet Union, this article looks at what these women choose to remember about the war, and how, and equally what they choose to forget or remain silent about. The paper seeks to illuminate shared or disparate collective and individual memory and experiences. A particular objective of the paper is to assess the degree to which these written recollections coincide with or deviate from the predominant patriotic, heroic, masculine paradigm of the Great Fatherland War and its historiography. The overall objective of the paper is to humanise the female faces behind the masculine mask of the Red Army at war against Nazism.

The demise of the Soviet Union and with it Marxism-Leninism as the officially endorsed paradigm for the social sciences in general and historical research and writing in particular left a yawning theoretical and methodological gap facing post-Soviet historians in Russia and elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite the material and intellectual obstacles to historical careers and scholarship during the 1990s, some younger historians began to fill this paradigmatic gap with new approaches, at a time when there were unprecedented opportunities for archival research, particularly on the Stalin era. While many historians of the Stalin period quickly embraced the "totalitarian" model largely derived from Western political science, others turned to researching Soviet cultural history, namely, popular perspectives, attitudes and behavior under Stalinism. Such research has proceeded under a number of rubrics: "everyday life," "historical psychology," "mentalites" and, increasingly, "historical anthropology."' Among the foremost practitioners of this genre of cultural historiography are Elena Zubkova, author of Russia after the War, and Elena Seniavskaia, author of The Front Generation.2 Research of this cultural genre is not