The effects of tension and compression along a crack on the plastic zone in a finite anisotropic body under plane strain are studied. The formation pattern for the plastic zone with increasing load is established by numerically solving a boundary-value problem for each of the cases. In particular, a new plastic zone is revealed. It occurs at the crack face under a compressive load of certain magnitude. How this plastic zone interacts with that at the crack tip is established Introduction. Loads acting along a crack have always attracted particular interest of experts because analytic solutions obtained within the framework of classical fracture mechanics lead to paradoxes. For example, the calculation of ultimate loads for the Griffiths-Irwin, Dugdale, Barenblatt, Leonov-Panasyuk cracks has revealed that loads acting along a crack do not affect the fracture characteristics. This fact contradicts experimental data [4,10]. Therefore, several nonclassical approaches have been developed to solve the problem. One approach, based on the concept of local buckling at the crack periphery, is outlined in [4,8]. The other approaches are analyzed in [10]. Recently various models of the plastic zone at the crack front have been actively developed [10,11], which urgently require solutions of the corresponding boundary-value problems. A great many boundary-value problems on plastic zones near a crack in an isotropic body were solved in [5, 6, etc.]. The plastic zone near a crack in an anisotropic body, however, has been studied inadequately [7]. It was the subject of few studies of which [12] is noteworthy.The object of study here is an elastoplastic anisotropic body of finite dimensions with a crack regarded as a cut of zero width. We will use governing equations written in terms of the components of the displacement vector and examine, by way of a specific example, the influence of tensile and compressive loads along a crack on the formation of a plastic zone (the compressive load is assumed to be less than the critical load that causes local buckling at the crack periphery).1. Basics. The discussion below is based on the results obtained in [12] in formulating and solving a boundary-value problem for an elastoplastic anisotropic body described by nonorthogonal curvilinear coordinates x 1 , x 2 , x 3 .1.1. Tensor-Linear Constitutive Equations. The following tensor-linear constitutive equations [2] relating the contravariant stress tensor S and the covariant strain tensor D are used in [12]: