The origins of this translation project stretch back several years—before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and before I personally knew much about the volatile, and often brutal, history shared by these two nations since the end of World War I.
Olena Petrenko tells this history through the eyes of Ukrainian women, zeroing in on their experience in the underground resistance movement during and after World War II. Women were essential to the underground: They were spies, couriers, propaganda workers, nurses, teachers, and armed insurgents. Other women acted as agents of Sovietization, including some whose allegiances shifted over time.
The Soviet regime demonized female insurgents as fascist “bandits,” or as morally compromised victims—while Ukrainian nationalist historiography has sometimes swung to the other extreme by casting them as selfless, angelic heroines. The reality, of course, was far murkier, and often involved impossible choices in extreme situations: arrests and interrogations, double crosses, family separations, violence and terror.
These women’s stories were inevitably defined by a persistent gender hierarchy: “Organizational categories like ‘wife,’ ‘mother,’ and ‘sister’—along with the sexualized category of ‘seductress’ and the enemy image of the ‘traitor’—neutralized the role of women as women as co-fighters, underscoring their primarily reproductive function and ‘dangerous’ sexualized characteristics (seducing men and undermining discipline). These characteristics meant that women, even in the nationalist underground, were perceived as potential traitors, like the ‘treacherous,’ ‘enemy’ women on the opposing side.” (166)
I’m so happy that Olena Petrenko’s work can now find an English-language audience, and I’m especially grateful to Richard Ratzlaff and the staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press for shepherding the project in its final stages.
