Introduction: “The Pressing Inner Voice That Repeated Over and Over Again: ‘To the Front’”

The war memoirs of Tamara Sycheva begin with a scene at a Young Pioneer Summer Camp in the vicinity of Lvov, a week before the German troops will cross the nearby Soviet-German border. Sycheva – a camp organizer in her early twenties – and her husband – a young platoon commander at the recently established border post – argue about her war plans. As a Komsomol member and a skilled sniper, as Sycheva introduces herself to the reader, she could imagine herself “only at the frontline” of the future fighting. She interrupts her account of the conversation with her husband, Grigorii, to passionately explain herself: “It was not for nothing that I, a young woman, was a Komsomol member [Komsomolka]. It was not without reason that the ideal of my youth was woman-revolutionary Dolores Ibárruri…I even gave the name of Dolores to my daughter – in honor of the Spanish woman Communist.”

To add more weight to her only-at-the-frontline self-image that summer day, Sycheva reminds her husband of the film Wartime Girlfriends. To her, the most memorable scene in the movie concerns a young woman in winter camouflage using a sniper rifle to kill a Finnish soldier during a close-in encounter. The restrictive context of the scene – the young woman is a nurse defending wounded soldiers under exceptional circumstances – does not factor into Sycheva's reconstruction of it.