Marking the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory. “Energy of our women is unfailing”

March 8 is a good occasion to recall the enormous contribution of women to the Victory during the Great Patriotic War.

The tradition of celebrating International Women's Day in our country has long history. The Constitution of the RSFSR of 1918, adopted after the October Revolution, enshrined women's equal rights as a state policy which is described in detail by a number of publications presented on the Presidential Library’s portal, for example, the brochure Rights of a Working Woman under Soviet Laws of 1925.  

The Great Patriotic War equalized women with men and in the duty to defend their homeland. Hundreds of thousands of girls and women went to the front. Even more of them remained in the rear - to work for the benefit of the Red Army and victory over the enemy. The role of women in approaching the day of the long-awaited Victory is spotlighted in the collections of the Presidential Library Memory of the Great Victory and The Defence and Siege of Leningrad.  

Leningrad factories operated under the most difficult conditions, supplying military products to the front near the city border. Lidiya Vasilievna Khvalovskaya, who survived the siege as a teenager, recalls how she started working as a turner in November 1941: “We work in 2 shifts, from eight to eight with an hour break for lunch. 11 hours you work on your feet at the Kerger machine. I cut off brass blanks for cartridges. The switch is located very uncomfortably at the bottom left, all the time you have to bow. The first days I came home - I lay down, the impression is that my legs are “buzzing”. ”The "Diary entries and memories about the siege of Leningrad of Lidiya Vasilievna Khvalovskaya (Zhukova)" are available  in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library. The institution’s portal provides access to the book of 1941 by I. Brower Soviet patriots at the machine tools forge victory over fascism.

Thanks to the close cooperation of the Presidential Library and the St. Petersburg House of Scientists in the study of siege cards, previously unknown information about their holders was found. For example, it was possible to establish the identity of Tamara Korosteleva, who appeared on the pass to the dining room of the Gorky Leningrad House of Scientists. The study revealed that Tamara Korosteleva survived the siege. She lived these terrible 900 days in her room in a communal apartment in building No. 13 on Zhelyabova Street.

Her apartment neighbor Igor Alexandrovich Kornilov told how they survived the siege together. Once she arranged a holiday for them: “Tamara Korosteleva invited neighboring children to celebrate New Year from the 41st to the 42nd year. There were three of us. When we were exhausted from hunger, she gave us a "feast". There was millet porridge and a piece of sugar on small saucers. I think that it was her portion of food in the very dining room of the Gorky Leningrad House of Scientists”.

In the story-memoir of the honorary citizen of the city of Murmansk, holder of the Order of Lenin, Maria Ivanovna Vaganova The situation in the Murmansk Commercial Port on February 28, 1943 from the collection of the Presidential Library The Defence and Siege of Leningrad her impressions of the bombing of the Murmansk Commercial Sea Port by Hitler Aviation are reflected.

When the course of the war was reversed, the mood rose among people and especially in our courageous women who did not lose their presence of spirit. The Presidential Library’s portal spotlights the manuscript Diary of Zinaida Antonovna Ryzhkova: "01/22/1944. In the morning there was a cannonade. At first we thought it was anti-aircraft guns, because the fire was visible in a southerly direction. And then we realized that it was our troops who moved to break through the siege of Leningrad. The workshop gathered women - wives of war veterans. My heart sank from the feeling of something special, big and exciting, happening at that moment. We were with our defenders with all our hearts”.  

Overtime shifts at industrial enterprises and hospitals, sowing and harvesting in the fields, hard work at defense plants - all this with the outbreak of war fell on fragile female shoulders. “Our women do a lot. But their strength is inexhaustible. They grow every day... To help them in every way. Consult with them. To teach them. It’s more courageous to put forward to leading posts”, - says the issue of the newspaper “Red Banner” dated March 8, 1942.

“The history of the Great Patriotic War in all its manifestations remains the most important event in the historical memory of our people”, - Elena Getmanova writes in the abstract Everyday Life of Women in Stavropol Territory during the Great Patriotic War. “It was on the lot of girls and women that they experienced separation from loved ones and years of painful expectations, hard work in the rear at defence enterprises and in agriculture”.

Women on equal terms with men fought on the front line. The aforementioned work says that in the early days of the war, in the Circassian Autonomous Region, women submitted more than 120 applications, and in Karachayevsk - 100, including 50 from goryanka girls, and all of them asked for voluntary admission to the ranks of the Red Army and direction to the front.

The Presidential Library’s collections are a unique repository of materials on the history of Russian statehood, a part of which has become the so-called “women's issue”, considered in various historical, including military, periods. Yes, the war did not have a female face, but where the fair sex appeared - on the front lines or in the metal dust of the workshops - there was a hope that life would overcome death and victory would come.