Stalin's Amazons : The Untold Story of the Red Army Female Snipers in Wolrd War Two

The USSR was the only nation to employ women in battle.It has been written that, in what the Soviet historians called the Great Patriotic War, between 800,000 and a million women from all over the USSR took up arms, out of a total 10 million soldiers, sailors and aviators involved.

What's more, 200,000 of them were decorated. The employment of such a quantity of women combatants by the Soviet Union was due, also in this case, to several factors: the equality between men and women sanctioned by communism; the multitude of paramilitary activities offered free to students and workers between the two world wars and in practice up until the fall of the Berlin Wall; an ardent patriotism diffused by omnipresent and incessant propaganda; the frightening losses incurred by the Soviet Armed Forces with the German invasion.

The women combatants paid a high price in blood for the victory: many were wounded, remained invalid, were killed, taken prisoner and tortured by the Germans or disappeared and never returned home.

However always very little is said about them. Still less has been written on the subject of this book, the women-snipers, an aspect that was totally exclusive to the Red Army in the last war.

There amounted to be a little less than two thousand highly skilled markswomen that sowed panic among the German ranks and that killed (according to some estimates) 20,000 enemy soldiers.

In the West very little has been published on these Red Army sniper women.