The Unwomanly Face of War

What the Women Remember

The Soviet Union mobilized over a million women for World War II—as snipers, pilots, tank drivers, surgeons, nurses, partisans, and anti-aircraft gunners. They served in every capacity that men served in, and in some capacities that men did not. What they were not permitted to do, afterward, was remember it in public.

Alexievich began interviewing these women in the late 1970s, when many were in their fifties and sixties and still carrying a lifetime of compulsory silence. What she recorded was testimony unlike any war literature that existed: not the heroic narrative of victory, not the strategic analysis of campaigns, but the sensory and bodily experience of war as women lived it. What it was like to shoot a man and see his face. What it was like to find the body of a close friend in the snow. What it was like to be so hungry you ate grass, to be so cold your hands stopped working, to dream of dresses and dancing while standing in a trench.

The range of roles represented is extraordinary: an aviator who flew 900 missions describes the sensation of releasing a bomb and watching it fall; a sniper describes the first kill in terms that no military memoir has ever used; a surgeon describes operating by the light of a flashlight while artillery fell nearby. The accumulation of specific, physical, irreplaceable testimony creates a portrait of war that official Soviet history—which celebrated the victory while suppressing the cost—was constitutionally incapable of producing.

The Double Silence

These women were silenced twice, and Alexievich names both silences precisely. The first silence was imposed by the war itself: the official Soviet narrative of the Great Patriotic War was a narrative of heroic collective sacrifice, of the Soviet people rising as one against fascism. This narrative had no grammatical space for the specific experiences of individual women—for fear, for physical suffering, for moral confusion, for the moments when the war felt meaningless. The women were heroes; heroes do not describe the smell of the battlefield.

The second silence was imposed by Soviet society after the war. Women who returned from combat were expected to re-enter femininity as if they had never left it—to become wives and mothers, to put their uniforms away, to stop talking about what they had done. Many report that their wartime service made them unmarriageable: respectable Soviet men did not want women who had spent years among soldiers, who had seen and done what soldiers see and do. Some were told directly that their service was a shameful thing to have done, not a heroic one.

The women Alexievich records had lived with these two silences for decades. Some had never told their children. Some had told their husbands and been asked not to speak of it again. The act of telling Alexievich—and of having it published—was, for many of them, the first time in their lives that their experience had been acknowledged as real.

Banned in the USSR

Alexievich submitted The Unwomanly Face of War to Soviet publishers in the early 1980s. The manuscript was held for two years by political authorities who found it insufficiently heroic—the war it depicted was too costly, too physical, too morally complicated to serve the purposes of Soviet commemoration. The book was finally published in 1985, after Gorbachev’s accession and the beginning of the Glasnost period, and it immediately sold millions of copies. The suppressed need for this testimony was that deep.

The book stands as the opening work of what Alexievich calls her ‘Voices of Utopia’ cycle—five books that together constitute the most comprehensive oral history of the Soviet experience ever assembled. The Unwomanly Face of War establishes the method: not interviews but conversations, not data but experience, not history from above but life from inside. Everything Alexievich would go on to do in Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys, and Secondhand Time has its root here.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A founding document of literary oral history and a recovery of voices that official history had buried. Essential, harrowing, and irreplaceable.