The inclusion of eastern Poland into the Soviet Union by the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact initiated a long and bloody resistance of local Ukrainian population to Soviet rule. Even after the end of the Second World War, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) persisted in their fight for an independent Ukrainian state. The continued confrontations between the Ukrainian underground and Soviet security service lasted until the late 1950s. While existing scholarship has focused mainly on the political aspects of this conflict, women’s participation in opposing Sovietization remained largely ignored.

Women in the Ukrainian Underground foregrounds women’s experience in the resistance movement during the conflict with the Soviet secret service between 1944 and 1954. Olena Petrenko describes various methods and waves of women’s mobilization in the OUN and the UPA, and examines women’s role as agents in the underground struggle. The book also focuses on female sexuality as an instrument of power, and particular gendered experiences of violence. Part of a larger effort among scholars to create a more complex and gendered picture of the nationalist underground struggle, Petrenko’s examination of archival records challenges stereotypes of female insurgents as “bloodthirsty,” “easily compromised,” or” unthinking subordinates.” Further, the book dwells on changes in memorialization practices, demonstrating how the perception of women’s activities in the nationalist underground has been shaped by competing historical views – in the USSR, among Ukrainian exiles, in post-Soviet Ukraine, and in Russia.

Drawing on both Soviet and underground documents, as well as oral histories, Women in the Ukrainian Underground depicts the fates of the individual women involved in fighting communism and considers their cultural representation in film and literature.