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Women in the Russian Armed Forces: A Marriage of Convenience?
`History demonstrates that the number of women in the armed forces increases when society is in extreme conditions. The current situation in Russia exactly corresponds to that definition...In such a situation it is completely intolerable to ignore the desire of many Russian girls and officers' wives to serve in the armed forces. The benefits from this are reciprocal: the army gets the necessary specialists and the women, who today have difficulty in finding work, get jobs.'(1)
Society in Russia is indeed in extreme conditions, suffering from a crisis of identity and undergoing a drawn-out and painful political and economic transition, although the end point of the transition process is still unclear. The condition of the Russian armed forces is no less extreme. In addition to the astonishingly rapid deterioration in its effectiveness as a fighting force, the military in Russia is increasingly alienated from society. Fewer and fewer young men are willing to comply with conscription orders, while the officer corps is experiencing a dramatic decline in its numbers. The prestige and status of the army as an institution has reached a low point difficult to imagine during much of the Soviet period. The military has become Russia's pariah, shunned by many of its people, who seek to protect their sons from its clutches, and denounced by its political elite for its past mistakes and present shortcomings.
There is, however, one group in Russian society whose members are evidently eager to join the military: women. Ever since contract service was introduced in the late 1980s in an effort to fill some of the gaps created by shortfalls in conscription, women have made up a significant proportion of the new volunteers. Within a decade, women soldiers comprised approximately one-half of all those serving in the military on contract, and nearly 10% of the total personnel in the Russian armed forces. There have so far been few attempts to address the topic of Russian women's military service and the many issues it raises in scholarly work published in either English or Russian.(2) This paper represents an effort to gather together available information on this subject, chiefly from Russian military publications, and to provide some analysis of this...