Historiographical Review of the Problem "Woman of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War - Hero or Victim?"

This article by Kazakhstan authors is a critical review of the literature on  women in the USSR during the Second World War. The authors argue that researchers often addressed various aspects of the Second Wold War, for Russians the "Great Patriotic War," but the problem of "women and war" has rarely attracted their attention. Depending on the theoretic-methodological and conceptual approaches, the specifics of the sources involved, the range and depth of the problems raised among the whole set of available publications, the authors of the article examine three main types in historiography: "Soviet," "modern Kazakhstan" and "foreign" (Russian and Western) historiography and identify the  main trends that characterize each of these groups. The article concluded that in Soviet and Kazakhstan historiography many layers of problems were out of the research field: women never became objects of study.