Batinić, Jelena Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 562 confessions to link leading officers to foreign, especially Nazi, intelligence. Although Whitewood notes repeatedly that ‘The military-fascist plot had no basis in reality’ (p. 268), he insists that Stalin believed Ezhov’s dark fantasies. Here one encounters the central problem of this study. Although Whitewood uses newly available documents, very few of these originate from the highest levels,whichremainclosedtoresearchers.ItishardtoknowwhatStalinhimself was thinking or planning, and he was not one to share his reasons. Whitewood resorts distressingly often to conjecture, not all of which is persuasive. In one single, short paragraph he tries to explain Stalin’s motives, using the following phrases: ‘it suggests’, ‘[he] appears hesitant’, ‘he seems to have waited’, ‘Stalin presumably wanted’, ‘Stalin faced little choice but to opt for’, ‘it is reasonable to suggest’, ‘perhaps even from a sense of panic’, and ‘the military purge may have sparked the mass operations’ (pp. 271–72). As Winston Churchill said in a different context, ‘the terrible “ifs” accumulate’. Whitewood does not explain how Voroshilov can be faulted for failing to root out enemies, when by Whitewood’s own admission these enemies were phantoms; nor does he explain why, if he can so clearly discern that the ‘military-fascist plot’ was unfounded, then Stalin himself could not see this. Whitewood does not adequately address why, if Stalin actually believed that a number of his leading officers were treasonous, the dictator considered it necessary to widen the purge to consume more than 24,000 officers. The closest Whitewood comes to explaining this is to argue that Stalin wanted to break up networks of supporters that Army officers had built to insulate themselves from Moscow’s power. If eliminating these networks was indeed the dictator’s motive for mass arrests, then Whitewood has not offered ‘an entirely new explanation for the purge’, but rather a very old one. That Stalin purged the army and society in order to dismantle regional power bases was a staple of 1950s analysis by scholars such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, the very sort of ‘Cold War’ author that Whitewood believes he is refuting. Department of History Steven M. Miner Contemporary History Institute, Ohio University Batinić, Jelena. Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, NY, 2015. x + 287 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £64.99: $99.99. Jelena Batinić’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance is a seminal study on the role women played in the Communistled Yugoslav Partisan resistance. The author expertly highlights thematic, REVIEWS 563 analytical and methodological intersections, furthering, or perhaps simply unveiling the general historical understanding of women’s pro-active role in Yugoslav wartime. This well-structured and thoroughly researched book exposes a story about the weaving of the new and old, of the institutional and the individual, and the situating of gender norms at the centre of such intersections. From a methodological perspective, the strength of the study comes from the extensive array of primary and secondary sources. Batinić explores diverse sources such as media, illustrations, diaries, military records, as well as cinematography. In terms of secondary sources, Batinić draws from an interdisciplinary group of historiographical trends (i.e. gender and war studies, women and Communism, comparative Communist studies and the workings of the modern state). Nonetheless, Batinić does not get lost in the large array of methodologies or source types. In fact, these historiographical categories sustain Batinić’s ambition to present the narrative through a threelevel perspective: political rhetoric, institutions, and daily practice. The first chapter reveals how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) was able to recruit women as supporters and fighters. Batinić delves into political rhetoric, the uses and abuses of folklore and memory in order to mobilize female participation in war within the CPY’s political and social borders. Through this, the chapter establishes the study’s leitmotif of the weaving of the traditional and the modern, as the CPY combined modern perspectives of gender equality and heroic imagery found in traditional epic folklore. The second chapter explores the institutional dimensions of the partizanka, by detailing the development and workings of the Antifascist Front...