SEXUAL ASSAULT AGAINST WOMEN IN SOVIET PARTISAN UNITS

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to do the research on the issue of sexual assault among Soviet partisans and against the civilian population, to clarify its moral and psychological foundations and behavioral models. The methodological basis of the study is a combination of interdisciplinary research tools in the field of gender studies and history of everyday life. An appropriate, special conceptual apparatus has been used. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the formulation of the problem, methods of solving it, conclusions, and the complex of sources used. The Conclusions. The existential nature of World War II had various manifestations and forms, covering all spheres of social existence. The destruction of the established legal field under conditions when several military political powers fought on the territory of Ukraine occupied by Hitler's troops (German occupation units and garrisons, “red” partisans, participants in the Ukrainian national liberation movement, Polish nationalist underground), the civilian population was in an extremely difficult situation, having no protection from various types of violence, including sexual assault. War causes the spread of legal nihilism, a sharp lowering of a moral threshold, trivialization of coercion and armed violence. Women become the least protected category of participants and contemporaries of war. Enshrined in tradition and specific stereotypes of mass consciousness, gender behaviour models among the Soviet partisans doomed women to stigmatized social roles, when in the absence of gender parity, they were assigned the function of a subordinate, secondary, serving cohort. The image and status of the Soviet “people's avengers,” formed (largely owing to the Bolshevik propaganda), de facto secured for them a position that was often interpreted as permissiveness and impunity for any actions, including those that were prosecuted under the Soviet criminal law. If male partisans, prone to deviation, abuse and sexual violence, were guided by purely physiological reflexes (less often by the desire for punishment or satisfaction), the behaviour patterns of the majority of potential and actual victims of sexual assault were motivated by survival strategies. The efforts of the military political leadership of the USSR to eliminate sexual assault were not entirely successful. A large number of women became victims of severe physical and psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder for many years after the war.

Keywords: German-Soviet War, Ukraine, partisans, gender relations, sexual assault, civilian population.