Roza Shanina: Russian Sniper WWII

Roza Sanina was born in April 1924 in a small Russian farm community, her mother was a milk maid and her father a logger. She had 5 brothers, one sister and she was named after a Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Roza went to a local primary school near her home and then a middle school that was a 12km or 8mile round trip walk from her home.

In 1931, when Rosa was about 7, the Central Committee of the Communist party made military training compulsory for all elementary school children, this included shooting skills. It was kind of like Boy Scouts or Girl Guides with guns. This program had three stages, “Little Oktoberists” ages 7-9, “Young Pioneers” from 10-14 and then the Komsomol (Or Young Communist League) from 15-28. A lot of the future WWII Russian snipers would go through this program.

At 14, because she wanted to continue on with her schooling and there was not a school nearby, she walked 200 km that’s 124 miles, to a train station and she eventually met up with her older brother in the city of Arkhangelsk. According to Google it takes 41 hours to walk 200km.

She ended up completing high school and continuing her military training in the Young Communist League – then in 1941 when she was 17, she began working in a kindergarten. That same year, one of her older brothers was killed in a battle. So Roza joined the military training program and completed the 150 hours of marksmanship training. In 1943 she enlisted in the Red Army and attended the Central Women’s Sniper school for 7 months.

Let me just zoom out a little and touch on the topic of Russian women during WWII. The concrete numbers of how many women served in WWII is quite contested. It seems to range between 500 000 to 800 000 women. Some of the roles that they took on were, pilots, scouts, commanders, gunners, doctors and nurses, mechanics, drivers, cryptographers– coding and decoding messages and of course snipers. When I first read the following quote, I actually thought that this was written in the 1950s or 60s during the Cold War. The sentence hints of both sexism and anti-communism. “Soviet women served in combat alongside men as snipers, tank drivers and pilots. Some countries used women as test pilots, but only the USSR sent them into combat.” It turns out that the book was written in 2005 by a collaborative of 8 male historians. The entire book had a staff of 24 and only 3 of them were women, one a picture researcher, one an editor and one an indexer. So that is just a little mini lesson on what the perspective of the publishing company might be.

Anyway, back to our snipers. Another young woman who attended the Central Women’s Sniper school explained the training, “The programme included training in tactics, firearms, parade drill, physical deployment and politics…We had to know how to camouflage ourselves and sit in hideouts for lengthy periods… and to crawl on our elbows. There were special exercises to improve our powers of observation, sharpen our vision and develop firmness of hand… We fired at both moving and stationary targets. We fired standing, sitting lying and kneeling.”

After graduating sniper school, Roza was sent to the 3rd Belorussian Front. And shortly after, Roza’s picture began appearing on the front of Russian magazines. By September 1944 stories of the “Red Army Girl, Unseen Terror of East Prussia” were gracing the pages of western newspapers. But let’s not pause too long at the propaganda, and let’s dig deeper into what it was really like for a Russian woman on the front.

Although it was not permitted for soldiers to keep a diary in the Red Army, Roza Shanina did. After she was killed in battle, it was passed on to her friend, a war correspondent, who kept it and eventually published an abridged version 20 years later in 1965.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks that I came across when trying to find translations of the diary, was the translator’s perspective and motive. None of the translations were in their entirety. Each historian would publish sections of the diary that suited the narrative that they wanted to tell. The male translator seemed to publish much of the military tactics and the battlefield descriptions and completely omitted some of the days where Roza wrote about the sexual harassment and assault that her and her fellow female snipers experienced at the hands of the male soldiers. So, although both translations had similarities, and were very interesting to read, there were a few omissions in both diaries, but reading both gave me a fuller picture.

The diary highlights the emotional toil that being at the front lines takes, not just because of the horrific gore, death and killings taking place, but also the constant lewd remarks and sexual advances from the male soldiers must have been exhausting.

I will start with the emotional rollercoaster. In one entry Roza declares, “My heart is too cold to care… I’m cold-blooded about everything…I am now able to kill not only Germans, but anyone I am ordered to.” She does not go further into what orders she was given. Then there was the violence and gore, “People all around were hit and torn to pieces; I nearly vomited at all of the body parts.” In another entry she explains her emotional state, “I have been sitting crying for the last 3 hours, it’s midnight. Who needs me? What good am I? I can’t be of any help.”

The reason for her weeping becomes increasing triggered by the behaviour of the men.

“I remember weeping in the battalion, offended that they had seen fit to tell a rude joke In my presence.” Look, there is no telling what exactly that rude joke was, but I can only imagine that must have been quite offensive for her to cry about it. She really did dislike the disrespectful way that the soldiers spoke of women, lamenting “I often hear dirty talk. For what do I deserve such useless torture?”

But it was not just inuendo, often she was the target of both verbal, sexual abuse and groping. “Some guys throw dirty compliments at me.” Other more harrowing accounts are when she is attacked by male soldiers, “The chief of the regiment headquarters started to harass me, being mean to me for nothing, grabbing at me as if I were a prostitute.”

She wrote of a different soldier, “He disgusts me even more, because he acted very badly… he wanted to get me drunk and take advantage of me.” And on another occasion, “He stuck close to me, ‘Let me kiss you’ he was drunk. I was in the middle of changing. He just walked in without permission and wouldn’t let me put my pants on. He twisted my arms around, threw me down on the couch, kissing me… I was in tears.” Luckily the Colonel walked in and stopped the situation, but the Soldier justified his actions by saying, “I don’t want German women, they’re infected, and you’re a clean pretty girl.” That does imply that the poor German women were also suffering much abuse.

She also mentions on two occasions the danger of being raped.  “I’m afraid of getting into trouble because some of the girls were raped, so now I don’t stay overnight.” And a recount of an incident with another girl. “One of our girls was raped, which was not her fault… If only it were someone she loved, not someone she was hardly familiar with! And she had fought off so many attacks.”

These diary entries tell a very different story to the glossy propaganda photos that graced the covers of magazines and newspapers. Her experience is so much more complex than the heroic female assassin fighting off Nazis and seeking vengeance for her brother’s death. Yes, she was brave, yes she was a good sniper, but she was  also a young woman, who only just made it out of her teenage years and one of her biggest challenges was battling with the sexual harassment fear for sexual abuse that was served up to the women, who wanted only to serve their country.

I don’t want to use Roza Shanina’s diary as my only source for this behaviour. I first heard about the gross sexual misconduct of some members of the Red Army by a holocaust survivor I met at a Courage to Care exhibition. She told her harrowing tale of survival during the holocaust only to be raped by the Red Army rescuers and infected with a venereal disease. She was still a teenager at the time. Additionally, upon further research I found many academic articles that describe the horrific alcohol fuelled sexual assault crimes that the Red Army committed against German and Yugoslavian women with testimony from a Soviet War correspondent. After being told of these war crimes, the Soviet leader Stalin. Was reported to have said, “What is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?”

However, there is not a lot of testimony from serving Russian women. After they returned to their normal lives, they were accused of behaving like prostitutes in the army and felt silenced and alone with their experiences.

I will leave you with a quote from Roza’s diary, that sums up the battle she fought as a woman at the front.

“I wish I was born a boy- then no one would have paid attention to me.”