Mother Russia: The Politics of Gender and Childbearing in Russian Combat Films

WWII has been harnessed by the Putin government as an internally-facing national myth -- a story of Russian national becoming, in which women play a narrow and unimportant role. This is accomplished via monuments which shut women out of combat roles, parades which fail to count women among the dead, and films which: 1) Identify childbearing as women’s natural and greatest possible contribution to the war effort; 2) Use rape and sexual violence to convey coercive information about sexual purity and the societal role of women; 3) Portray women and soldiering as incompatible (and thus confine women symbolically to a domestic sphere, at a remove from power and profile); 4) Define Russian womanhood via the persistent use of two filmic tropes: the femme fatale and the sympathetic "good girl."

Russia uses patriotic war films to disseminate WWII as an origin story, and to portray the West as aggressive, threatening, and Russophobic. Russian combat films are widely propagandistic in nature. Situated as they are in a highly controlled creative environment, individual filmmakers have little agency. Their films reflect a top-down political agenda of natalism, anti-Westernism, all-Russianism, and ‘traditional values,’ a euphemism for homophobia and misogyny.