Women in the Russian and Soviet military

After the abdication of Nicholas II of Russia in March 1917, she convinced interim prime minister Alexander Kerensky to let her form a women's battalion.

Over 800,000 women served in the Soviet armed forces in World War II, mostly as medics and nurses, which is over 3 percent of total personnel; nearly 200,000 of them were decorated.

These regiments with strength of almost hundred airwomen, flew a combined total of more than 30,000 combat sorties, produced over twenty Heroes of the Soviet Union, and included two fighter aces.

[citation needed] The Soviet Union also used women for sniping duties, and to good effect, including Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya and Lyudmila Pavlichenko (who killed over 300 enemy soldiers).

Women served also in non-combat roles as medics, nurses, communication personnel, political officers, as well - in small numbers - as machine gunners, tank drivers.

Manshuk Mametova[4] was a machine gunner from Kazakhstan and was the first Asian woman to receive the title Hero of the Soviet Union after she refused to retreat with the rest of her regiment.

In 1967, the Soviet Universal Military Duty Laws concluded that women offered the greater source of available soldiers during periods of large scale mobilization.

[citation needed] At the end of 1992, when conscription of noncommissioned officers and enlisted personnel was converted to volunteer or contract recruitment, women were given equal rights with men to join the Russian Armed Forces.

[6] Smirnov (2002) cited a September–November 1999 survey that he and colleagues conducted amongst a representative sample of 993 servicewomen, indicating that female soldiers generally had a much higher educational level than their male counterparts, their average age was about 30 and they had achieved considerable experience.

[10] 8.7% of women soldiers stated that their labour rights had been violated in some way, such as being 'passed over for promotion' (33.2%), 'appointed to positions affording less monetary support' (31.6%), and 'deprived of prospects for solving the housing problem' (41%), while 57.1% weren't sure whether they had been discriminated against or not.

[11] Single mothers, married women, divorcees, and widows were far less likely to be promoted to higher positions 'because their superior officers [were] firmly convinced that family concerns would prevent them from carrying out their official duties.

'[12] Only 3,300 women (2.9%) were commissioned officers, mostly in junior positions, and usually tasked to carry out administrative duties 'that men ignore[d] for some reason', forcing servicewomen 'to be content with assignments that are not the most prestigious.

Lt. Col. Yelena Stepanova, the chief of the social processes monitoring department at the Russian armed forces' sociological research center, said.

'[16] By 2010, the motivations that servicewomen gave for working in the armed forces had also shifted markedly: 67% of women served out of financial necessity[17] (up from 53.9% in 1999[10]), while only 6% were focused on military service as their professional career[17] (down from 29.2% in 1999).

[17] As of September 2020, conscription was only mandatory for males aged 18–27; members of the State Duma have at times suggested to include females, but such proposals were not adopted.

[17] In response, the Ministry of Defence mounted an aggressive campaign against draft evasion amongst men to increase coverage levels to 90~95% by 2020, but 'made little apparent effort to enlist women' in doing so.

[17] Despite a 2014 announcement by Deputy Defence Minister Tatiana Shevtsova to enlarge the number of servicewomen in the Russian Armed Forces to 80,000 by 2020, this goal was not achieved (it was c. 41,000 in May 2020).

[18] Russian military spouses "are posing a subtle but significant challenge to Vladimir Putin’s handling of the war in Ukraine by engaging in a form of political activism best described as ‘patriotic dissent’.