An Unlikely Refuge: Latvian and Jewish Women Volunteers of the Red Army in World War II

This work highlights the historical case of several hundred women who served primarily in the Latvian national divisions of the Red Army during the Second World War. The paper highlights the argument that women’s motivations for volunteering for service include the fact that the Red Army was an unconventional means to escape the onslaught of the Germany army into the Baltics as Soviet Russia was closing its borders to refugees. Some of women were communist sympathizers who had gotten involved with Soviet Latvian structures, while others were Jews who sought a means to escape Nazi persecution. In the Red Army, women served not only as nurses and medics, but also on the front lines, as snipers, combat engineers, and machine gunners.

 The Latvian and Jewish women volunteers of the Red Army in World War II are unruly actors in the dominant historical narratives of both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras in the region. They fail, this paper suggests, to play the historical roles expected and accepted for both their gender and ethnicity, violating the historical scene as set by hegemonic narratives of the past in the post-war Soviet Union and the post-communist Latvian Republic. The goal of this work is to offer an empirical narrative of this group of historical actors, who have been marginal in World War II histories, and to theorize the concept of the unruly actor as an analytical tool for understanding the marginality of some groups of actors in national historical narratives.