Guarding the Soviet Arctic was the title of a small front-line newspaper brought to Vera Barakina’s unit. The situation here at the Karelian Front had been deadlocked since the spring of 1942, when the Russians failed to push the Germans back across the border. The Germans, on the other hand, never succeeded in taking Murmansk. It was a stalemate that lasted until October 1944.
Vera Barakina’s own life mirrored the front’s immobility. She went out to hunt every second day – a stagnant front line was the ideal situation for using snipers. The commander of 715 Infantry Regiment was delighted to be sent a sniper squad, and the girls were only too happy to be in his regiment. No one misbehaved towards them.
When they first arrived, they had been staying at divisional headquarters, in a boarding house where they washed their clothes in a swimming pool, but were under constant siege from randy staff officers. The sentries kept the doors locked, but the officers used every trick they could think of to try and beguile them. They had plenty to offer the girls: food, perfume. This could be seductive because the girls, like all the other soldiers, were constantly hungry, fed on “herring and crusts”. Only those who wangled themselves a cosy job at headquarters, Vera and her comrades were certain, people who, they supposed, sat trembling with fear, not daring to stick their noses out of the door or see a day’s fighting, were guaranteed medals and officers’ rations.280
On their second day in 715 Regiment, the commander allocated pairs of girls to the battalions and sent them to the front line to shoot. “It was not frightening in the least,” Vera remembers. They had been taught everything they needed to know at school: “Take cover and wait!” Shoot at anyone you see, not just officers and observers. The order from their commander was, “If you see a German, shoot the bugger!” By the time they left the front in Karelia, Vera had killed nine Germans. The Germans, and particularly the Finns, had snipers too, of course, but Vera’s squad were lucky and none of them were shot in the Arctic. However, two girls died after stepping on a mine when, in spite of strict orders, they strayed off the trail to pick blueberries during a march. They were buried there and then, in a clearing in a pine forest. Such incidents were not uncommon. The chief of staff of a regiment on the Leningrad Front recalled how “a wounded soldier we met had fallen victim to his craving for cranberries.”281
The girls were looked after reasonably well. They lived four or five to a dugout, were issued warm, new uniforms, and, as spring came to an end, their felt boots were replaced with strong new leather ones. Under their men’s underwear they wore panties and bras brought from home. The one major problem they did have was with their periods, because the regulations made no provision for those. The regiment’s male nurse, a middle-aged Jew known as Uncle Sasha, would grumble when he saw a girl coming, “I know what you’re here for,” but did hand out cotton wool. The quartermaster was not unkind, and promptly issued new trousers, leg wrappings and a greatcoat to a girl called Nastya when hers caught fire while they were being heat-treated to kill lice.282
The political instructors explained their mission while they were on the defensive, and prepared them for the future offensive. Neither were defensive measures against men neglected. Unlike the German army, which solved the problem by having official brothels, the Red Army left its men to their own devices. One time Vera was alone on duty in the dugout, an officer appeared whose intentions were soon apparent. When Vera turned him down he started threatening her, but Vera, completely unflustered, immediately yelled, “Back off or I throw this grenade in the stove!” For this she was disciplined, but only by being put in the guardhouse for one night. When she was released the next day, the girls showed her the officer’s grave: he had been killed in a mortar attack. Vera felt sorry for him.
She did like Senior Lieutenant Anatoly Lyubilkin, who was seven years her senior. He was handsome, had a pleasant personality, was not as obviously out for only one thing as many of his comrades, and wooed her to the best of his ability. Everything he could offer from his officer’s rations, he did, including sugar, and biscuits. For Vera, who had once nearly starved to death, as for everyone who had survived the Siege of Leningrad, few things in life were more important than food. “God grant that we stay here till the war is over and don’t end up in the thick of the fighting,” Vera thought.
Close by, on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, girl snipers from the second cohort attached to 125 Infantry Division were immediately drawn into the fighting. Taya Kiselyova opened her tally in July 1944 at Narva. “Your first one is horrible,” she recalls. “It was only targets in the school, which is quite different. Shooting at a person is dreadful.” Taya hit a German signals technician out repairing their communications. Before the assault on Narva she managed to take out another three.283
Their squad had been fighting since spring. Captain Sagaidak, the regiment’s new chief of staff, met them in the summer when they had already won awards and were battle hardened. After the storming of Narva, there were still ten of them. No one had even been wounded.
Sagaidak came to 749 Infantry Regiment from the navy. Unlike the infantrymen, he sported a beard, wore a striped vest, and a cap with a badge that looked like a crab. He also smoked a pipe. After twice crossing the River Narva and capturing the city during summer 1944, almost everyone in his 2 Independent Marine Battalion had either been killed or severely injured and it was first withdrawn and then disbanded. The captain was haunted by the memory of the icebound river dotted with dead and wounded in their black marine jackets. One evening as he waited for his new appointment Sagaidak was stiffening his resolve with “front-line brandy” concocted by a friend from the chemical section from a selection of unimaginable ingredients. They also had a zakuska to eat along with it, a “delicious” frozen onion. At this point a lieutenant colonel they did not know appeared out of nowhere, wearing spurs, and informed Sagaidak he was being transferred – horror of horrors! – to an infantry regiment.284 He was, however, permitted to keep his beard. Sagaidak saw the war through to victory with 749 Infantry Regiment, wearing his striped sailor’s vest under his tunic.
After the capture of Narva, the regiment advanced until it came to a ridge of hills heavily fortified by the enemy. They halted to “freshen up” and get ready for an assault. The enemy was firing constantly at their positions. Coming back from the medical unit, where he had a bandage on his arm changed, the Beard, as he was now known to 749 Regiment, heard folk couplets being sung in a dugout towards the rear of the regiment. He had not heard that at the front very often, and never sung by girls, so he dismounted from his horse to investigate. He drew back the blanket that served as the dugout’s door, went in, and at first could not believe his eyes. “Whatever next! A large dugout with bunks, and on bunks and benches what looked to me to be twenty young girls.” There were “fair-haired, dark-haired, big girls and small”, and they were singing and cleaning their weapons. At the sight of an officer they stood up and greeted him. Sagaidak looked at the weapons: five-chambered 7.62 rifles equipped with a telescopic sight! He finally realised who they must be.
He knew that a group of ten girls had been sent from sniper school, but while the regiment was fighting there had been no time to meet them. The sniper pairs had been assigned to battalions, and up there on the hills life for the Germans became far less relaxed. “All their troops were suddenly crouching down and going underground.” The girls looked out for spotters, range-finders, and ordinary soldiers, just waiting to glimpse a helmet or the glint of the lenses of a stereo telescope or a pair of binoculars.
Many years after the war, the Beard would forget the names of most of the girls, but two he did remember: “a sniper called Bella and her partner Muza Bulgakova” (in fact, Bulatova), because they had beautiful names and were themselves very pretty. Taya Kiselyova also liked them very much. Bella Morozova was rather haughty, but Muza (“the Muse”) was funny and talented. Her mother was an actress, and Muza, who could already do all sorts of tricks, hoped to join a circus after the war. She was a year or two older than the other girls and had a child back home, but told them little about it, or about why she had gone to the war. Later, Taya heard it was her mother who had told her to enlist. Most of all, though, Taya liked the personable and clever Marina Shvetsova, who was several years older than the rest of them.285
After breaking through the fortifications outside the city, the attack on Tallinn advanced very rapidly, in an attempt to cut Army Group North off from East Prussia. “We need to hurry before the Germans can board their ships,” their Young Communist League organiser explained. Muza Bulatova was killed during that offensive. Always a hothead, she had leapt into a tank which was later hit by a shell. All those inside were burnt alive, and Muza could be identified only from her rifle. “One of your snipers has been burned in a tank,” someone told the other girls, who were driving behind in a truck. They were heartbroken. It was the first death in their squad and everybody had loved Muza.
In Tallinn, the girls were given a rest in a school, all of them together in one room. They had a shower and a bath, which seemed unbelievable after so many months on the march when you had to “break the ice in a stream to wash your hair and your private parts”.286 In the evenings they remembered Muza, the would-be circus star, dried their eyes and sang songs.
After several months of fighting, they felt they were real soldiers. When the staff commandant gave instructions that the girl snipers were to wash the headquarters floors, “No way!” was their unequivocal response: that was work for soldiers on fatigue duties. What did this commandant take them for? Sagaidak had to intervene and “apply appropriate sanctions against the mutinous snipers”. They were all sent to the guardhouse, but spent their time there agreeably enough. The regiment’s female cooks demonstrated sisterly solidarity by serving the miscreants splendid meals.287 They were not incarcerated for long, because soon the regiment was put on trains and sent to Lithuania in preparation for the offensive on East Prussia.
*
Kalya Petrova still has a photograph taken that summer of six girls in pretty summer frocks in a flower-filled meadow. It is a good-quality picture, quite unlike those taken at the beginning of the war. Soviet soldiers were by now making good use of captured cameras and film. The friends have floral wreaths on their heads and you would never know the photo had been taken while a war was raging, or that the girls were Soviet snipers who had shot dozens of Germans.
Roza wrote later about this photograph, “There the six of us stand in Lithuanian folk costumes. They were a troika too. Tanya was killed, Lyuda wounded, and [Valya Lazorenko] is alone now.”288
Going into houses whose owners were hiding from the Red Army in the woods, Kalya and her friends helped themselves to food and clean underwear. They no longer washed those that were dirty but simply threw them away.289 They also took clothes that could be used for leg wrappings, cutting up strips of whatever came to hand. Their only regret was that they could not take a supply of spares with them to replace those that got wet.
This became an established pattern from then until the end of the war: as they were advancing they took food and clothing from abandoned houses. Finally, in Germany, they would open wardrobes and help themselves to underwear, panties and lisle stockings, five or six pairs of which nicely replaced the leg wrappings in their boots.290 When Tonya Zakharova changed clothes in this manner for the last time she was out of luck: the clean underwear in the cupboard, tied with ribbons, was much mended. But nonetheless she returned to Moscow in it and wore it for several years after the war, because there was no other underwear to be found, and nothing to make it from.
It was not just underwear, but also dresses and hats that the girls took from deserted Lithuanian houses. Not because they planned to carry them around in a knapsack, where every extra item meant more pain on marches covering many kilometres, and not to send them home, because that could be done only later, but because they wanted, if only for a short time, to change into civilian clothes and feel like a girl. “I succumbed to one weakness: I had an extraordinarily strong desire to put on a dress and have at least some slight resemblance to a woman,” wrote Galya Dokutovich, a navigator in the women’s night bomber regiment on 19 February 1943 as she rested after a night-time sortie.291
The clothes here really were beautiful. There had been no fine dresses for most of these girls before the war, and would be none in their penurious lives after it. All they wanted was to dress up, take a photograph, and send it back home to give everyone a surprise and themselves something to remember. Such a photograph could also be sent to a young man, if you had one to write to. It did not matter that for the rest of the time you were wearing boots and army uniform and had your hair cropped to keep the lice at bay. In that photograph you were a pretty girl in a pretty frock.
Unfortunately Roza Shanina’s diary of that summer has not survived. In Lithuania she had a thick notebook she wrote in almost every day, but things left in the baggage train often disappeared and perhaps that is what happened to the notebook.292 The fact that her later notebooks survived is a miracle. From them we have a detailed account of Roza’s life at the front from September 1944 until her death in January 1945.
“I’m used to having Sasha and Kalya around and feel lost when they are not there. I have great respect for them, more than for the other girls. With friends life is more fun. The three of us are from quite different families and have quite different personalities, but something we share is our friendship. It is unshakeable. Kalya is a good person, brave and without a trace of selfishness. I really value that in someone. Sasha is very sensible: she seems to understand everything and has an amazing memory. Sasha, Kalya and I are ‘The Runaway Troika’. How will I live without them when the war is over and we all go off in different directions?” she wondered.293
*
On 30 July, the Third Byelorussian Front broke through enemy defences along the River Neman. On 1 August, German troops pulled out of Kaunas, but their resistance was gradually stiffening and the Red Army was able to advance only slowly and with substantial losses. Communications became stretched and there were shortages of ammunition. The enemy launched several counter-attacks, and in mid-August several infantry regiments were surrounded.
Klava Panteleyeva could not remember where exactly her regiment found itself in that situation. It was not a complete encirclement, “more like a horseshoe”, with a small opening on their unit’s left. She remembered a two-storey house on a farmstead with “a staircase from top to bottom”.294 They were ordered to bind up their mess tins and shovels so nothing would clatter, and were led slowly past the farm. If the Germans had been nearby, though, the local people would certainly have informed on them. There were several women on the staircase of the big house, watching the unit pass by. One of them let fly a barrage of abuse about the Soviets. No one reacted. She was allowed to have her say, although they could easily have shot her.
*
By 20 August 1944, the advancing Soviet troops were exhausted and just over a week later the Soviet Supreme Command ordered them to adopt a defensive position in the vicinity of Suwałki. The borders of East Prussia, enemy territory, were only a few kilometres away. The German population began fleeing, no longer believing the assurances of Gauleiter Koch that all was going to be well and that the German army would never surrender East Prussia. For the Third Byelorussian Front, Operation Bagration had come to an end.
The political instructors began preparing the army for entry into enemy territory, recounting atrocities the Germans had perpetrated in the Soviet Union. “Soldiers see signs of the bloody villainies of the Germans every kilometre of their victorious advance,” the Political Section of 31 Army reported. Examples were detailed in talks.
Subdivisions of 1162 Infantry Regiment passed through the village of Vidritsa in Shklov district, Mogilev Region. Five hundred metres from the village at the edge of the forest lay a girl approximately twenty years of age. The Germans had captured this Soviet girl and, because she was in contact with the partisans, inflicted twenty knife wounds and bruises, having first stripped her naked and raped her. Not one house remained standing in the village. The Germans burned the entire village, where there had been 147 homesteads. It now exists only as a place name.295
An Official List of Atrocities was read to the units, inciting the soldiers to “rush into battle with even greater fury to wreak vengeance on the fascist fiends”.296
*
Klava Panteleyeva well remembers the brief respite accorded her army in late August to early September 1944. She and her comrades finally had time to write, on captured enemy paper, a lot of letters home to their families. Until this point there had been a terrible shortage of paper, and they would ask their relatives to enclose a sheet with their correspondence. Klava would include poetry in her letters, copied from the Soldier’s Newsletter – not the little one Zina Gavrilova made for their platoon, but the big divisional newsletter, their own front-line newspaper. Poems were always being printed there, and Klava especially liked those by Konstantin Simonov, one of the most popular Soviet poets of the time. These poems would make her parents and sisters cry. Her elder sister, who thought Klava had written the poems, preserved all Klava’s letters, and wanted to send her poetry “to someone to publish”. When Klava came back from the war and was told about it, she found it very funny. “Come off it, I’m not clever enough to write poetry. I find it hard enough to copy it out!”297
After their period of rest and recuperation, Klava’s platoon was split into three squads and “dispersed over different units”. She found herself in a different unit from Marusya Gulyakina, who had just returned after being wounded. At the time Marusya was killed she was paired with Katya Ulianova, and it was only some time later that Klava learned she was dead. She was very upset, but not as heartbroken as she was over Marusya Chigvintseva. Her “third Marusya”, Klava’s next partner, was yet another Marusya, but managed to survive until the end of the war. Once it was over, this Marusya, Marusya Kuzmina, married their political instructor Ivanov and gave birth to a boy who, as far as Klava could tell from the photographs, was “the spitting image” of his father.298
*
In August or early September, Slavnov’s regiment was also moved back from the front line for rest and reinforcement. Its numbers were considerably thinned. Soon General Glagolev, the commander of 31 Army, came to review them. Learning of his arrival, arrangements were hastily made to line up the soldiers, and Slavnov noticed for the first time that his regiment looked distinctly sloppy: the men were not lined up in order of height and their tunics were sweat-stained and worn. Good enough for going into battle, but the general was not going to like it.
In the event the general made no remarks about their appearance but was surprised by something else. Going over to the soldiers, he asked who they were and where they had fought, and if he saw anyone with no orders or medals, he wanted to know why. Slavnov explained that after the fighting the regiment had received more medals than it had men left. Few of those lined up in front of the general had fought with the regiment before: most were from other units and had been sent to him from hospital. The general gave orders that those who had been wounded were to be given priority for awards.299
Shortly afterwards, they were issued new uniforms, had their worn-out weapons replaced, and on 12 September, a warm, sunny day, the award ceremony was held. There was folk singing and dancing and long tables were laid for the soldiers.
A few days later a circus even arrived. But before long the regiment was again in defensive posture, drawn occasionally into skirmishes with groups of “shaggy, hungry, feral German soldiers as vicious as wolves” who were trying to break through the encirclement and make their way west.300
Before the offensive on East Prussia, their neighbouring division, in which Kalya Petrova and her comrades served, was withdrawn for a brief rest. On the very first day, they were getting ready for a visit to the bathhouse and the barber when a stray shell hit Tanya Kareva in the toilet. “They’ve killed her!” one of the girls shouted as she ran back from the scene.301 It was terribly upsetting and hard to take in. The front line was not that close, so they had supposed that for a time they were safe.
Roza Shanina could not relax. She kept demanding to be sent to the front with some other unit. “I don’t want to rest!” She was constantly writing in pencil in a notebook with heavy covers. This uneducated young girl was drawn to learning, to literature, and aspired, when the war was over, to study at university. Her fellow snipers were able to read her front-line diary only many years later in the Soviet magazine Yunost (Youth).
Kalya, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong with taking a break. She had her hair permed by a barber for the second time in her life. The first had been at the station in Moscow before they were sent to the front, when almost the whole section had had the same thing done. Kalya set about putting the house where they had been billeted in order and the other girls joined in. She begged gauze from the medical company and dyed it yellow with acriquine, a drug fairly ineffective for treating malaria but very good at staining everything it came into contact with. “‘The malarials’ were all walking around bright yellow” Kalya recalled. It was just what was needed for dyeing the curtains.302
The girls’ platoon had bonded well after months at the front. If anyone got hold of food they would share it with the others. If boys tried piling into the snipers’ house the girls would giggle but very soon show them the exit. If any men became tiresome, the snipers would not complain to their superiors but turn to their friends for help. United they could conquer.
They felt no particular compunction to obey orders from their commanders while they were resting. Why should they? After all, they were now battle-hardened soldiers, snipers who had taken out a dozen or two Germans, as recorded in their little grey record books. There was in any case very little drill while they were resting. What the commanders really liked was to inspect the girls’ shooting skills. This was usually less a test than a demonstration for a particular audience: take a look at the kind of snipers we have! They would line up tin cans for them, throw a bottle in the air, and get them to shoot with all manner of weapons. Kalya vividly remembered an anti-tank gun she wanted to fire out of curiosity. It had such a recoil that her shoulder was bruised for a week afterwards. By this time the reconnaissance scouts had presented most of them with small, ladies’ pistols they had captured, and the girls enjoyed firing them. They would come in handy later for those who took part in street-fighting in towns. Easiest of all was firing assault rifles, which they also practised. They were often invited to dances by lads from other units, and a dozen of them would go together and, at some point, demonstrate their sharpshooting.
During that rest period they were awarded their first orders and medals. For shooting five Germans they got a medal “For Merit in Combat”, for ten they were given awards such as “The Red Banner”, “The Order of the Great Patriotic War” or even the “Order of Lenin”. It was around this time that the army held a women’s rally, generously supplied with long tables of vodka and canned meat. At the end there was dancing and Kalya, who was not usually keen, even danced a waltz with another girl. She was tempted to change into shoes her uncle, who was a general, had sent from Moscow, but was embarrassed and left them in her knapsack. The shoes soon fell apart anyway and she threw them away.