Othello and the Heroine, Desdemona in William Shakespeare’s Tragic Play Othello We See a Very Exceptional Woman in the Person of Desdemona, Wife of the General. She, as Cassio Says, Is a “Paragon” of Virtues, Unlike the Essay

Jitka Nouzova
Women in the Units of the Czechoslovak Army in the USSR

The First Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion
The signing of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Agreement of the 18th of July 1941 created the conditions for the organization on the Soviet territory of independent Czechoslovak military units as a part of the Czechoslovak Army abroad. The town of Buzuluk in the Ural foothills in the Orenburg region was designated as the place for arranging the unit. The basic team of instructors was made up of officers and NCOs who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia after the 15th of March 1939 through Poland and who, in the ranks of the Czech and Slovak Legion, had gone over to the Soviet Union, following the fall of Poland in September 1939. As early as December 1941 Lieutenant Colonel Svoboda took over from General Anders’ Polish army the centres later to be used by Czechoslovak soldiers. On the 17th of January 1942, Soviet Radio broadcast an appeal to Czechoslovak citizens on the territory of the USSR to join the Czechoslovak Army.
The first volunteers came forward at the beginning of February 1942. They came, including women, to Buzuluk from various parts of the Soviet Union. The women were not only emigrants who had fled from the Republic for racial or political reasons, but also those from Czech and Slovak families settled long term on the territory of the USSR. There were girls from Carpathian Ruthenia, who had been arrested by the Soviet authorities and sent to work camps for illegally crossing the border. After the outbreak of the war many Czech families had been expelled from their homes and interned as citizens of a foreign state, and now they applied on mass to join the military unit.
Five centuries after their part in the Hussite armies, Czech women appeared in our army again. Indeed, it was by appeal to the old Hussite tradition that the presence of women in the unit was justified in the press the Czechoslovak unit published for its own needs. The...