‘Yesterday the general-major told us we were the most beautiful girls’, senior navigator and air-force Lieutenant Evgeniia Rudneva wrote to her parents on 17 October 1942. ‘Don't think that your snub-nosed (kurnosyi) daughter has changed somehow. No, I remain just as I was, but now beauty lies not in lipstick or a manicure, not in clothes or hairdos, but in what we do. And he is right’, Rudneva continued, ‘our desire to destroy the Germans quickly and our practical labor to that end makes us beautiful’. Rudneva reassured her parents that her feminine qualities had not disappeared at the front, nor had they hindered her skill and thirst for combat. As she reiterated in a March 1943 letter, ‘your daughter uses all her strength to crush the wrongdoer’. Femininity and bloodlust were not incompatible. On the contrary, as Rudneva and her commander discovered, they melded together into something uniquely beautiful. Rudneva felt sure she would remain a ‘snub-nosed’ girl while reconfiguring herself into a soldier, underscoring the malleability of both identities.

Rudneva was one of hundreds of thousands of frontovichki, Soviet women serving on the frontlines. Scholars estimate between 520,000 and 800,000 uniformed women served in the Soviet armed forces during the Second World War. This figure does not include some 28,500 female partisans (partizanki) who fought in guerilla battalions behind enemy lines nor the many thousands contracted to service roles. In the medical corps, women comprised roughly 47% of military doctors and 70% of nurses. All told, the number of Soviet women in official uniform, partisan units, anti-aircraft units, and auxiliary roles approaches one million, making theirs the largest instance of women's military participation in history. Even so, their numbers are dwarfed by the millions of Soviet women who toiled on the home front.

Recently, historians Anna Krylova, Robert Markwick, Euridice Charon Cardene, and Brandon M. Schechter have offered new documentary evidence and scholarly insight on Soviet women's substantial contributions to the war effort. Drawing on their research, this chapter focuses on the issue Rudneva raised in her letter: the war's impact on notions of Soviet womanhood. Using personal accounts of those in combat, medical and auxiliary roles at the front, this chapter explores how individual women witnessed gendered aspects of their lives and identities shift by virtue of their war service. Specifically, this chapter examines the perceived notions of Soviet womanhood women evoked while relaying their war experiences.