“One day my mother went to fetch water,” veteran sniper Irina Izmestieva recalled. “On the way back, she saw in the distance a little soldier had turned in to their street. It was me, in a tunic, in canvas boots, with a half-empty rucksack.”480 The girl snipers were coming home.
Klava Loginova’s mother knew from letters that her daughter had been demobilised, and constantly went to the station to meet the trains that brought soldiers home. While Klava was away at the war, her mother always prayed and lit candles for her. Her hope was that Klava would not come back a cripple, because then, she believed, it would be better for her to have been killed. One time she saw a girl in army uniform at the station with a terribly burnt face. She had a terrible fright, thinking it was Klava.
When Klava did get out at their station, it was already evening and she knew she would not be able to get home that night. Instead she went to the factory where her sister worked and phoned her from there since the working day was over. Her sister came to collect her on horseback, and immediately started phoning round all their relatives: “Klava’s come back. She’s alive!”
Her mother did not immediately let Klava return to work. She wanted her to have time to settle down again. She was right, of course. Magnesium carbonate was mined in the town, and the ore was sometimes blasted out even at night. Often, when she heard the explosions, Klava would jump out of bed and grab her greatcoat, ready to run. Like most who had fought at the front, she wore that greatcoat for many years since it was impossible to buy anything else.481
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Katya Peredera spent a whole year in hospital and underwent five operations: her heel had been pulped and numerous small bones shattered. There were many other people in the wards with her, and Katya, who was by nature kind and sociable, realised that even though she was ill and could not walk, she could still help them: if not by doing things for them, then by talking to them. She decided to become a doctor, and viewed the future with optimism. Her foot was not always going to hurt, but she found she could only walk with difficulty, using a stick.
In her first months at the hospital in Kropotkin it struck her what a wonderful family she had. Her parents cared for her as if she were a little girl again, all but spoon-feeding her, and not letting her help with household chores. In her home town, however, Katya immediately sensed animosity: animosity towards a sniper seriously wounded at the front, a disabled soldier! “What, did you go there looking for a husband and not find one?” someone who had known her before might ask. (In the south of Russia, people are not always good at guarding their tongues.) She often heard people sniggering behind her back: “Front-line wife!”, or “Disappeared without trace!” It made her feel like crying. At the front she had twice fallen in love, but neither time had this led to intimacy. First, at Taman, she had met Lyova, the young sergeant with whom she only once managed to outwit “One-and-a-half Ivans”, her ever-vigilant commander, and spend twenty minutes with him.
The second boy was Alexander Vinogradov, and he was the love of Katya’s life. Handsome and cheerful, a former pilot who, after being wounded, was retrained as an artillery observer, his unit soon left the quarry and he really did “disappear without trace”. After the war, Katya thought of looking for him, but how many Alexander Vinogradovs were there in the U.S.S.R.? Hundreds, thousands?
In Krasnodar, where she went to study at medical school, she also found people looking down on her. They would sometimes not let her go to the front of the queue, even though they could see she could hardly stand, leaning on her stick and in her soldier’s greatcoat. Back home, Katya would get into a bath of cold water to ease the pain in her foot, and cry.
Thankfully, she did have some kind classmates, both girls and boys. Most were younger, and many helped Katya a great deal, doing her laundry, shopping for food, and those who lived locally would bring her some food from home. Her mother bought her a pink synthetic-fibre dress, and her sister Nina also helped with clothes and food when she started working. Katya began to get her life back together.
She even tried to wear high heels, pulling the shoe on to her crippled foot with great difficulty. The trouble was that sockings on that foot wore out quickly and they, like salt, were improbably expensive. When the time came to choose a medical specialisation, Katya saw she could not do work that involved a lot of standing, so she became a medical microbiologist. She married and had two sons, and as she had once promised her friends on the front line, took her boys to Sapun Ridge to show them where she had fought, and where her friend Zhenya Makeyeva had died.482
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A few years after the victory, a plaque was put up in Taya Kiselyova’s old school in Kharkov, listing the former pupils and teachers who had fought in the war. It included all the boys in her class, but she was the only girl. Almost all the boys had been killed.483
How many people did the Soviet Union lose in the war? A book edited by Grigoriy Krivosheyev gives figures of 10,008,434 “irrecoverable” losses and 18,190,693 “medical” losses.484 485 Historian Yelena Senyavskaya estimates that only 3 per cent of men born in 1923 survived the war.486 There are other estimates at great variance with these, which is not surprising. The reliability of Soviet statistics is often dubious, they routinely tried to play down the scale of the casualties suffered by the Soviet side, and there are even wildly divergent numbers for the total pre-war population.
The present book has not been about the big picture, but about the particular; it has not been about statistics, but about the people who make up the statistics. In 1943, along with Vera Chuikova, two other girls – both called Tonya – left the village of Prokhorovskoye near Yaroslavl (which no longer exists) for the front. All three returned in the autumn of 1945. Of the young men who went to the war from this village of seventy-five homesteads, not one returned: no one born in 1923, no one born in 1924, no one born in 1925.
Shortly after returning, Vera and one of the Tonyas went to a dance in the village. The other girls there were younger than them, and had grown up while they were at the front. They danced in some new way that Vera did not know, and sang songs that had become popular while she was away. The boys were all several years younger than Vera and none of them asked her to dance, and she and Tonya felt hurt somehow. Some of the younger girls began insinuating that because they had been in the army they should not be there. Vera rounded on one of them and asked straight out, “What do you think I was doing there? Do you think I was a prostitute?” The girl backed off.
A couple of years later, Vera married a man four years her junior, but before that she kept hoping a boy she had met at the front, a tank driver called Slava Gondar, would come and find her. He had said he loved her, but his unit was urgently marched off and Vera never saw or heard from him again. Had he been killed? Had he lost her address, or found someone else and forgotten her? Vera still had his mother’s address in Ukraine, but did not write to her. Somehow she got sucked into the harsh routine of life on a collective farm with no men.487
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Of the 120 men and boys who had gone from Lida Larionova’s village to the war, only five came back. Lida, who had left with a bundle over her shoulder, in a much darned and re-darned skirt, came back in some style by village standards. Now she was wearing warm stockings, a new, tailored tunic and skirt, a jacket and canvas boots that actually fitted. She brought other possessions back with her, and had seen other countries, but the existence awaiting her after the war was just as dreary as before, and now she had almost no hope of getting married. Just as before the war, they were robbed by the state, forced to work for next to nothing and pay unaffordable taxes. Just as before the war, their only salvation was their private plot of land where they planted potatoes and other vegetables, and livestock. Just as before the war, there were years of famine: the late 1940s were yet more terrible than the 1930s. Even after the conflict, village people were not given an internal passport so, like serfs under the tsars, they could not escape from their village to the local town.
For fighting in the war Lida was, for a long time, paid no pension, and before long she saw it was best not to mention she had been a woman at the front.488
Male veterans were treated with a degree of respect, but women continued to be regarded with suspicion or hostility; but never with respect. Some were advised by their husbands, others by parents or friends, that the less they mentioned their front-line past the better. They learned to stay silent. Even later, during the era of Brezhnev, who himself was a frontovik, when war veterans were suddenly back in the limelight, when reunions began to be held and they were invited to give talks to school-children, many women who had been at the front preferred to steer clear of it all.
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“After the war I tried for a long time to forget all the monstrous sights I had seen. I felt constantly burdened by a sense of irrational guilt towards my fallen comrades: why was I alive when they had been killed?”489 Many women who fought at the front would identify with these feelings. Still very young, they bore a terrible legacy they could not share. People who had not fought in the war could not understand them, “and somehow you felt very uncomfortable among people who had not the faintest idea of what we had been through,” a man the same age as Anya Mulatova recalled.490
And yet, some women found it easier to cope than their male counterparts: how could you give way to depression if you had children to bring up, if you had to worry every day about how you were going to feed your family?
Anya Mulatova’s mother-and father-in-law soon came to love her as if she were their own daughter: she was hardworking and cheerful and had a warm personality. They all went off to their jobs in the morning, and she would cook for them, keep the place tidy, bring in firewood from the shed and keep the big stove fuelled. While the weather was warm, she and her husband slept in the woodshed: there were a lot of those at that time in Mariina Roshcha. Later in the year there was nothing for it but to move into the single room all together: the parents slept in the bed, and the young couple moved chairs up to the sofa and put a duvet on top. In 1946, their son, Valerik, was born, and in 1947 Anatoly graduated from the military academy and was given an appointment in Byelorussia. They had a grim time there at first, living in hunger and poverty, with an income insufficient to buy even potatoes on the black market. Parcels from Anatoly’s parents in Moscow with dried bread rusks and bagels were the saving of them. Anatoly was cashiered under Khrushchev, who purged the army of the old front-line soldiers, and they found themselves back with their parents in their 15-square-metre room. Anya worked as a school administrator. She would have liked to become a teacher, but it never happened. She longed at least to complete her ten-year secondary schooling at night school.
A decade after the war, she did manage to begin studying, but her husband raged that she was not keeping the house tidy and she had to abandon her studies. Anatoly, like the husbands of many of her front-line comrades, was by this time drinking heavily.491