Neither Erased Nor Remembered: Cultural Strategies of Forgetting in Soviet Russia, 1940s-1980s

In this chapter, [the author] explores the cultural steps that Soviet society took, between 1941 and the 1980s, to turn Valeriia Gnarovskaia, a female infantry private and medical orderly, and over 120,000 more young women combatants and commanders of the Second World War into self-sacrificing noncombatant nurses. [The author is] particularly interested in cultural processes that made alternative gender discourses of the war period incomprehensible to Soviet postwar generations. What informs [the] inquiry here is the mechanism of cultural erasure that does not entail the complete disavowal of a fact but hinders the possibility of perceiving it on its own historical terms. [Author]