Gender aspects of collaboration in the territory of the Lokot District Self-Government.

The article analyzes the forms, motives, and socio-psychological characteristics of women's participation in the activities of the Lokot District Self-Government – the largest collaborationist formation operating in the occupied territory of the USSR from 1941 to 1943. The subject of the study is the involvement of women in the administrative, economic, sanitary, and educational structures of local government, their professional, family, and domestic roles, as well as the impact of women's labor on the sustainability of the occupied society and the stability of its social institutions. The work is based on materials from fund 2608 of the State Archive of Bryansk Region, including orders, directives, correspondence, reports, statements, and personal applications from residents, which allows for a detailed reconstruction of the real mechanisms of women's participation and adaptation in wartime and occupation conditions. Using microhistorical and gender analysis, the functional roles that women occupied within the occupation government are examined – ranging from clerical and sanitary to educational and economic. It is shown that women's participation in the self-government system was not an expression of ideological loyalty to the occupying power, but rather a forced form of adaptation and survival in conditions of a destroyed social and moral order. Women acted as intermediaries between administrative structures and the population, supporting the functioning of sanitation, education, supply, medical, and domestic infrastructure. It was through their everyday labor that basic forms of social organization were preserved, creating an "invisible framework" for the life of the occupied society and allowing people to maintain a sense of normalcy. As a result, the study reveals female collaborationism as a complex socio-psychological phenomenon, intertwining coercion, labor necessity, a sense of duty, and individual self-preservation strategies. The work fills a significant gap in domestic historiography and emphasizes the necessity of incorporating a gender dimension into the analysis of the experience of war and occupation.

female collaboration, Great Patriotic War, German occupation, gender history, everyday life, adaptation, Lokot self-government, collaboration with the Germans, World War II, the USSR in the war