Having lived in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, for almost ten years, I imagined that Moscow, the capital of the USSR, would be similar. However, Moscow seemed from the first to be completely different: big, majestic, austere. The strength and might of our huge country had found in Moscow its perfect incarnation. The streets and squares in the city centre were amazing in their exceptional dimensions and the same was true of the buildings with their height and their distinctive and impressive architecture.
It was not all that long ago – only half a year – that a great battle had been fought at the walls of Moscow. The Red Army had conducted defensive engagements here from 30 September to 5 December 1941 and went on the offensive through the winter right up to April 1942. The Nazis had planned to take our capital without stopping to draw breath, but failed at the first assault. They then devised an operation under the code name ‘Typhoon’, whereby they proposed to dismember the Soviet defensive forces with three strikes from their mighty tank groups, encircle them and annihilate them. This plan did not come off either, even though the enemy enjoyed a numerical superiority, with many tanks, ordnance and aircraft. At the cost of immense losses, they managed at the end of November and beginning of December to get through to the Moscow canal in the area of the town of Yakhroma, to cross the river Nara near Naro-Fominsk, and approach Kashira. But then our fighting units delivered a crushing blow against the Fritzes. As early as December they had liberated several population centres: Rogachov, Istra, Solnechnogorsk, Klin, Kalinin and Volokolamsk.
I recall how in Sevastopol we waited impatiently for reports from the Moscow front. The first news of the routing of the Nazi German forces at the walls of the capital aroused tumultuous joy and gave us confidence that the German military machine could be defeated. With the Nazi assault on the main naval base of the Black Sea Fleet, which began in the morning of 17 December, the defenders of the city that repelled the furious attacks reminded themselves of the need to follow the Muscovites’ lead. Their example inspired us.
The enemy had now retreated from the walls of the capital, but it was still a front-line environment. I saw anti-aircraft guns in public gardens and at crossroads. There was a barrage balloon team along the road. Pulling on long ropes, the soldiers were restraining a huge balloon which resembled a prehistoric beast. Shop and residential windows were crisscrossed with broad strips of white paper. Some buildings (for example, the Bolshoi Theatre) were covered with camouflaging colours, which distorted their dimensions and enabled them to merge with the city background.
My destination was Maroseika Street and the headquarters of the All-USSR Young Communist League’s central committee. In the spacious vestibule some objects stood out as unusual in administrative premises: boxes of sand, spades, picks and tongs for dealing with incendiary bombs. They were used to arm soldiers in the fire-fighting teams who kept watch on the building’s roof. The sentries asked to see my documents and I took my Young Communist League card from the breast pocket of my tunic.
The secretariat of the central committee occupied the fourth floor. In the reception area for the first secretary people had already assembled for the talk – the young participants in the defence of Sevastopol like me, who had been decorated and had come to Moscow from Krasnodar at the direction of the general staff of the North Caucasus front. We were received by Nikolai Mikhailov, first secretary of the Young Communist League central committee, a pleasant and very charming man of about thirty-five with brown eyes and dark hair. He congratulated us on our safe arrival in the capital, sat down with us at a long table in his fairly roomy office and began the conversation.
The first secretary conducted proceedings skilfully. The Sevastopol veterans soon felt at ease and began to talk about the recent events in the Crimean peninsula. Mikhailov listened attentively, asked questions, made the occasional joke and told the odd story from his Young Communist League experience. Over all, the meeting proceeded in an unconstrained and friendly atmosphere. Then it was my turn to speak. I did not intend to share my memories of my own achievements, but I did want to pay due tribute to the memory of my regimental comrades who had lost their lives in the struggle against the Nazi German invaders: Lieutenant Andrei Voronin, who led our company into attack at Tatarka; the commander of the 1st Battalion, Captain Ivan Sergienko, who had distinguished himself in the bloody battles at Ishun; Junior Lieutenant Alexei Kitsenko (I called him a sniper); and that valiant senior sergeant from the machine-gun company, Chevalier of the Order of the Red Star Nina Onilova, who had died from wounds on 7 March 1942, in a Sevastopol hospital.
Mikhailov seemed to like my contribution. He was, incidentally, an experienced Party worker and propagandist. Having started work at sixteen as a manual labourer, he was then transferred to Moscow’s ‘Hammer and Sickle’ factory, where he was employed as a roll-bender operator and then joined the Communist Party and began to write articles for the widely distributed factory newspaper. From 1931 he worked as a journalist, first for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda and then for Pravda. He was nominated as first secretary of the Young Communist League central committee in 1938 and it was said that his promotion was approved by Stalin himself, who placed a high value on his organizational talents and devotion to the cause of constructing socialism in a single, separate, country.
The meeting concluded in quite a conventional way – with the presentation of valuable gifts. But Mikhailov approached me with a request. He said that my speech was grammatically correct and of a good literary standard, I had a loud voice, knew my material superbly (the events of the siege, that is) and therefore he suggested that I go in two days’ time to a meeting at the ‘Compressor’ factory, where I would give the young workers a similarly simple, honest and vivid account of the way events had unfolded at Sevastopol.
‘I’ve never spoken at meetings and I don’t know how,’ I responded.
‘Don’t be modest, Lyudmila. I found what you had to say very interesting.’
‘Well, that was here, in your office.’
‘Never mind, you’ll get used to it. You have the makings of an orator. People need to be told about this awful war. Only it has to be told with an optimistic note.’
I would not say that Mikhailov’s suggestion was to my liking. However, like many of those who had survived front-line combat, I experienced feelings of guilt about those regimental mates who had perished in the hellish fire. By repeating their names over again, I somehow restored them from oblivion. They were kept alive through our memories.
Within the army things were not going too badly either. On a visit to the city commandant’s office, I received coupons for dry rations and accommodation in the hostel of the People’s Commissariat of Defence on Stromyn Street. There I was assigned a room of 16 square metres. I then presented myself to the new senior command in the Guards Parachute Division. I was sent to a training centre as a sniper instructor. I had under me a group of thirty soldiers who had been selected from divisional detachments on the basis of their marksmanship results in a learners’ squad. I had a month to teach them the basic skills of sharpshooting, run a short course in ballistics and camouflage, and, three times a week, conduct practical exercises at a shooting range on the centre’s premises.
Despite all this I was completely alone in the big city of Moscow, with no relatives, friends or acquaintances. There were only meetings with Mikhailov, which occurred fairly regularly. I had to go with him in his chauffeur-driven car to various public functions. Nikolai Alexandrovich was no longer concealing his partiality for me, but I was not altogether happy about that. I was living on the memories of my late husband. In my heart nobody could live up to my dear, unforgettable Lyonya, who was lying in the Fraternal Cemetery in a city now seized by the invader.
Resorting to alternative ways of expressing myself, I explained to Mikhailov that it was not appropriate for a junior lieutenant to respond to courting by a general, that is, by the first secretary of the Young Communist League central committee, and it would be better for us to remain just friends, if indeed he wanted to maintain this friendship. Comrade Stalin’s favourite was very surprised at what I said. But, as subsequent events showed, his friendly attitude towards me was to continue and played a decisive role.
In army service matters I also kept to myself, did not flirt with anyone, did not stay behind for the usual officers’ parties and hurried back to my room in the hostel. Here I indulged in my sad reflections, read and re-read my favourite novel, War and Peace, and wrote letters to Udmurtia. I complained to Mother about my dreadful homesickness and asked her to come to Moscow, even just for a month. I asked my elder sister Valentina about the health of my precious Morzhik and how he was doing at school.
However, Mikhailov soon brought a new element of variety into my life. It was in the first secretary’s office and at his initiative that I became acquainted with Boris Andreyevich Lavrenyov, classic Soviet writer and author of novels, novellas, short stories, plays and scripts for films which were shown on our country’s screens before the war. Lavrenyov told me that the Red Army central board of political propaganda – or, to be more precise, its press and information department – was required to issue a pamphlet about the sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko as part of the popular series ‘Frontline Library of Red Navy Mariners’. He had undertaken to write this account and he wanted to talk to me about it.
Of course, I knew the name of Boris Lavrenyov, had read his interesting novella The Forty-First and had even seen the film based on it, which was shot in 1927 by the director Yakov Protazanov. However, both the characters in this film – the shy factory girl Maryutka, a soldier in a Red Army detachment, and her prisoner, the refined intellectual, book-lover and Tsarist army lieutenant Govorukha-Otrok – as well as the whole conflict between them, seemed to me to be a little contrived. The question of how to deal with an enemy trying to escape would not occupy a real rifleman more than half a minute. It would be resolved simply – by pressing one’s index finger on the trigger of one’s rifle.
Standing before me now was a man of about fifty, tall, bulky, wearing round iron-framed spectacles and a grey tweed suit. He had a fine head of grey hair. Lavrenyov looked me up and down with a fixed gaze and casually said that he saw in me an exact replica of the heroine from his novella The Forty-First, the girl called Maryutka, and therefore he had a good understanding of my character. If I could answer a number of his questions now, the work would be ready in a week and submitted for printing. The pamphlet would come out in November 1942. That way everyone would know about me and that would be very nice.
This was a red rag to a bull. In the first place, I was not a dumb factory girl, but a student at Kiev State University and, as well as that, an officer of the Red Army. Secondly, the situations were very different: that fool of a girl had fallen for her prisoner lieutenant and, judging by the story’s text, become his lover, while for me the Fritzes always remained simply targets and aroused no personal feelings. Thirdly, I took no pleasure in my name and life story becoming known to thousands of people I was not acquainted with. Fourth, I had had experience of interacting with writers and journalists and it was negative. The esteemed Boris Andreyevich could go and write about somebody else. There were many heroes today who were boldly and courageously defending the motherland.
The renowned writer did not expect such a rebuff and lost his composure. Perhaps romanticized images from the Civil War had got the better of him and prevented him from viewing reality objectively. In the years 1920–1 Artillery Lieutenant Boris Sergeyev (Lavrenyov was his pseudonym) had switched from the White Volunteer Army to the Red side, fought the Basmachi Muslim rebels in the steppes beyond the Caspian Sea and even commanded an armoured train. Then, along with the writers Konstantin Trenyov and Vsyovolod Ivanov, he had been the founder of a genre of heroic romantic revolutionary drama. But there was little of the revolutionary romantic in the events of our people’s resistance to German Fascism with its numerous European allies.
I imagined that my acquaintance with Boris Andreyevich would conclude with this. However, Lavrenyov showed persistence. He complained about my unacceptable behaviour to the Red Army central board of political propaganda. They promised to take measures and they took them: strict orders were issued by the head of the board, Colonel General A.A. Shcherbakov, and Lavrenyov was given the telephone number of the defence commissariat hostel. He telephoned and I agreed to another meeting.
The pamphlet Lyudmila Pavlichenko was duly written by B.A. Lavrenyov and came out at the end of 1942, published by the naval publishing house of the USSR People’s Navy Commissariat. A little earlier, in August, he had offered the text to the newspaper Izvestiya, which published it in issue 209(7895) for 5 September 1942 under the same title. I will quote an excerpt from the beginning of this work:
The morning was warm, a fine July morning. The sky above the old trees on the boulevard on Commune Square shone clear and blue, as in the Crimea. We went down a side path and sat on a bench. She took off her forage cap. The wind rustled her close cropped fluffy hair, which seemed as soft as that of a child. A silken lock of hair fluttered over her clear, prominent maiden’s brow. Her delicate, nervous face breathed with an expression of impetuous insatiability, of a profound passion of character. It could be best summed up by Lermontov’s lines:
He knew the power of one idea alone,
A single, but a burning, passion.
It was a face that bespoke noble human integrity, a character capable only of direct action, unwilling to brook any compromises, to countenance bargains. Her dark brown eyes with their golden spark nestled under her narrow brows. They even seemed gloomy. But after a minute they lit up with a certain joie de vivre, with such a child-like transparency, that they illuminated everything around: ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I remember.’
This was the most truthful part of the account.
For the rest, the writer interwove separate facts from my biography with his own inventions and quotations from the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, retelling the history of the Ukraine. For example, he did not mention when and how I joined the Red Army. On the other hand, the pamphlet contained a colourful description of the bombing of Kiev, which I could not have witnessed because in June 1941 I was in Odessa, and it also related a touching conversation with my mother, who had already set off by train for evacuation in Udmurtia. He devoted a lot of attention to my conflicts with teachers at No. 3 School in Belaya Tserkov (which never occurred) and attributed them to my character’s hooligan tendencies. Apart from that, Lavrenyov incorrectly stated my starting dates at the Arsenal factory, Kiev University and the two-year sniper’s course, but made up something to the effect that, once graduated, I had put away my diploma and forgotten about it because I disliked the military and had dreamed all my life of studying the history of my native Ukraine.
With a print run of 50,000 copies, this phantasmagoria was quickly distributed throughout the country. Lavrenyov’s colleagues, the staff of central and local newspapers and magazines, subsequently used it as a source of reliable information about me when compiling their own articles. I would compare this whole saga to the crooked mirror that smashed to pieces in the Hans Andersen tale The Snow Queen, whereupon its fragments, which harmfully distorted reality, ended up in various towns and villages.
However, the Red Army central political authority did not only rely on eminent writers and their exotic fantasies, and sent two rank-and-file propaganda staff to see me as well. They said that, in addition to the pamphlet, it had been decided to issue 100,000 leaflets bearing my portrait and a call to all soldiers of the Red Army: ‘Shoot the enemy and don’t miss!’ They composed the text of the leaflet themselves after a conversation with me of about thirty minutes. It was very simple, but comprehensible and, on the whole, conveyed my thoughts and feelings accurately:
‘Death to the German invaders!’
Valiant sniper, Lyudmila Mikhailovna PAVLICHENKO.
A true daughter of the Leninist–Stalinist Young Communist League, she joined the Red Army as a volunteer during the first days of the Great War for the Fatherland.
With her rifle Lyudmila Pavlichenko wiped out 309 Germans at Odessa and Sevastopol. ‘This is the right and proper attitude to adopt towards the Germans. If you don’t kill them at once, you’ll have no end of trouble,’ she once wrote to her mother.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s courage and high level of military expertise are inspiring thousands of Red Army snipers – the Stakhanovites of the front – to further feats. Soldiers of the Red Army! Destroy the enemy as mercilessly as Lyudmila Pavlichenko!
SHOOT THE ENEMY AND DON’T MISS!
When I walked along the streets of Sevastopol, kids would always stop me and ask me earnestly: ‘How many did you kill yesterday?’
I would give them a detailed report of my operations as a sniper. One day I had to tell them honestly that I had fired at the enemy for several days.
‘That’s bad,’ said the children in one chorus.
One of them, the smallest, added sternly: ‘That’s very bad. Nazis should be killed every day.’
He spoke the truth, this serious little citizen of Sevastopol. Since that memorable day when the Nazi thugs burst into my country, every day of my life has been filled with one sole thought, with a single desire – to kill the enemy.
When I first went to war, I felt only anger at the Germans for disrupting my peaceful life, for attacking us. But what I saw later engendered within me such an inextinguishable hatred that it was difficult to express it in any other terms than a bullet through a Nazi’s heart.
In one village retaken from the enemy I saw the body of a thirteen-year-old girl. The Nazis had butchered her. That was how they demonstrated their ability to wield a bayonet – the brutes! I saw brains splattered on the wall of a house, and beside it the body of a three-year-old child. Germans had lived in that house. The child had played up and cried, preventing these beasts from getting some rest. They did not even allow the mother to bury her child. The poor woman went out of her mind . . .
Hatred teaches you a lot. It taught me to kill enemies. I am a sniper. At Odessa and Sevastopol I annihilated 309 Fascists with my sniper’s rifle. Hatred sharpened my vision and hearing, made me wily and dexterous, hatred taught me to camouflage myself and to deceive the enemy, to anticipate his cunning and his traps. Hatred taught me to pursue enemy snipers patiently for days on end.
It is impossible to quench the thirst for vengeance. As long as there is a single invader on our land, I will think of one thing only: killing the enemy. And I would only talk about one thing to my friends in battle and my fellow-citizens: kill the Nazi!
Junior Lieutenant Sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Published by the Red Army central political authority, 1942.1
My life in Moscow continued its usual rounds and on 3 August 1942 I met my mother, Yelena, at the Kazan station. She needed a special pass to come to the capital and I had applied to the divisional command. The pass was issued and I sent it to the village of Vavozh, Udmurt Autonomous Republic. After our long separation Lenusya hugged me on the platform with tears in her eyes and said I had changed a lot and grown up. I had earlier requested a car from the commander and our journey from the station to the hostel on Stromyn Street was exceptionally quick. Lenusya liked my room, even though the toilet and shower were at the end of the corridor. But in the village of Vavozh they lived in a cold dilapidated shack, with a well in the yard and did not even dare to dream of an improvement in their living conditions, while in the hostel the kitchen had taps with hot and cold running water. Mother viewed this achievement of civilization as a great miracle and was genuinely overjoyed.
I know now that on that very day an event occurred which abruptly changed my army career. It was also on 3 August that the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, sent the supreme commander-in-chief, Comrade Stalin, a telegram from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which he reported that, from 2 to 5 September, Washington would host an international student assembly, where delegations from the four Allied powers – the United States of America, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and China – were due to play a leading role. The US president expressed his desire for the assembly to be attended by a Soviet student delegation of two to three people, preferably those who had taken part in combat against the German Fascists.
Many different papers demanding an immediate decision ended up on the desk of the man who was chairman of the state defence committee, to which all institutions in the country were now subordinate, supreme commander-in-chief of the USSR armed forces, and people’s commissar for defence. Roosevelt’s telegram with Russian translation attached awaited its turn. It was only in the evening that Stalin read it again and thought about what the American president was proposing.
The two powers exchanged dispatches quite often. For example, two weeks earlier the Kremlin had received a letter from the Allies refusing to open a second front against German in Western Europe that year. These were extremely unpleasant tidings. In the summer of 1942 the situation on the Red Army fronts was becoming difficult. During the first few days of July Sevastopol fell and the Crimea was completely in German hands. The Nazis were preparing to throw their newly available forces against the Caucasus and seize the oil fields. As well as that, they were planning to occupy the fertile areas of the Don, the Kuban, and the Lower Volga. The German 6th Army was already advancing on Stalingrad under the command of Generaloberst Paulus.
Now the Allies were intending to convene some international student assembly in North America for reasons which were still unclear to our supreme commander-in-chief. Seemingly, they had no other important matters to deal with. What could young people talk about, especially Soviet young people, during such harsh and anxious times? Only the struggle against Fascism, the united efforts of all progressive humanity against the aggressor who had unleashed bloody slaughter in the fields of Europe. In this context, it would be possible – indeed necessary – to raise the question of the second front. If this topic was to be raised at the student assembly, then by all means . . .
Stalin demanded clarification of the programme for the American function. A reply came from Washington: yes, a declaration would be adopted calling upon students, as the most progressive element of young people, to speak out against Fascism. Then followed agreement on conditions for the Soviet delegation’s stay in the USA and a discussion of the route for the trip, for it would only be possible to reach North America by plane via a circuitous route, through Iran, Egypt and across the Atlantic Ocean. The staff of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs worked hard on it.
Meanwhile, the Red Army central political authority was hurriedly looking through hundreds of forms from students who had been called up for service. It was considered to be completely impossible to find and call up anyone from distant front-line units in the course of a single week. They decided to confine themselves to the Moscow military district. The first secretary of the Young Communist League central committee, Nikolai Mikhailov, put in a word. He had some candidates. He insisted that not only serving military but also Young Communist League personnel should be able to go to the USA, since at the assembly it would be necessary that they clearly follow the line of the USSR Communist Party.
The membership of the delegation was finally decided: Nikolai Krasavchenko, head of delegation, secretary for propaganda within the Young Communist League’s Moscow city committee, member of the USSR Communist Party, twenty-six years old, active in the partisan movement (he had nearly been captured by the Germans at Smolensk, but managed to cross the front line); Vladimir Pchelintsev, senior lieutenant, Hero of the Soviet Union, member of the Young Communist League, twenty-three years old, formerly a student in his third year at the mining institute in Leningrad, now an instructor at the Central School for Sniper Instructors in the town of Veshnyaki near Moscow; and Lyudmila Pavlichenko, junior lieutenant, Chevalier of the Order of Lenin, member of the Young Communist League, twenty-six years old, formerly a student in her fourth year at Kiev University, now commander of a sniper platoon in the 32nd Guards Parachute Division.
As Mikhailov later informed me, the proposal to include a woman in the delegation aroused the most discussion. At one session of the Young Communist League central committee both opponents of this idea (women are difficult to control) and supporters of it (if they are good-looking, they will present the USSR in the most favourable light) had their say. Nikolai Alexandrovich, who had added my name to the list, vigorously defended his decision. But, of course, it was Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin who had the last word.
Mikhailov went to the Kremlin to report on the situation, with detailed forms, photographs and service particulars of the delegation members. The supreme commander-in-chief unhurriedly leafed through all three files, held mine in his hands and asked the first secretary of the Young Communist League central committee if he was confident of this choice. Mikhailov confirmed that he was, completely confident.
Unaware that anything of the sort was going on, I had just been relieved after a twenty-four-hour shift that day and gone to bed. The shift had been a busy one. Around eleven o’clock in the evening four trucks of ammunition and relatively new weaponry – Degtyarev-Shpagin (DShK) 12.7mm-calibre machine guns – had arrived. The unloading had to be organized, documents made out, and the accompanying crew accommodated in barracks.
I did not hear the knocking on the door straight away. But it was repeated, became louder and more insistent: ‘Comrade Junior Lieutenant, you are wanted on the telephone!’
‘One minute.’
I did not feel at all like getting up, putting on a tunic, going to the phone at the end of the corridor and talking to somebody while I was half-asleep. But duty was duty, and this was particularly the case in the Moscow garrison; the senior command was just too close.
‘Lyudmila, how are you?’ Nikolai Mikhailov’s bass voice boomed through the receiver. ‘Get your act together and come and see me at the central committee headquarters on Maroseika Street.’
‘What for, Nikolai Alexandrovich?’
‘Duty calls.’
‘Can it wait till tomorrow?’
‘What are you saying, Junior Lieutenant? It’s an order from Comrade Stalin! Every hour counts. Is that clear?’
In the first secretary’s office I encountered two young men. One was a big, brown-eyed, dark-haired man in civilian dress and Mikhailov introduced him to me first: Nikolai Krasavchenko, head of the Soviet delegation which was setting off to the international student assembly in Washington. The second man, tall and thin as a beanpole and clad in a military uniform showing the triple squares of a senior lieutenant on raspberry-coloured tabs, was familiar to me. Vladimir Pchelintsev and I had already met in Veshnyaki at the sniper school where I had been on business.
We now exchanged not particularly friendly glances. For the 100 Fritzes he had annihilated on the Leningrad front, Vladimir had become, in February 1942, the first sniper in the USSR to receive the title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’. For 100 Romanians killed around Odessa in the autumn of 1941, I had received an inscribed sniper’s SVT-40 rifle. Over twelve months of service he had been promoted three times: to junior lieutenant, lieutenant and senior lieutenant, while his tally now amounted to 154 Fascists. I, who had served since June of the previous year and had 309 dead Nazis in my tally, was able to obtain only the rank of junior lieutenant from the benevolent Ivan Yefimovich Petrov.
Such is the importance of good relations with one’s seniors, both in the rear and at the front. I should have thought about this earlier, instead of arguing bluntly with Battalion Commander Dromin, Commander Matusyevich of the 54th Regiment, and Military Commissar Maltsev, instead of challenging Major-General Kolomiyets and other senior comrades by explaining the particulars of sniper operations, defending my subordinates and demanding better supplies of ammunition, weaponry and equipment for my platoon. And, all in all, I should have been born a man instead of a woman. Then the youthful senior lieutenant with the Hero of the Soviet Union gold star on his new and still-unruffled tunic would not be looking at me so haughtily.
Mikhailov’s speech made us forget everything else for a moment. It turned out that we three were to be the Soviet delegation setting off to the USA for the international student assembly due to be held from 2 to 5 September in the city of Washington. Thus, in the early morning of 14 August – in two days’ time – we would fly out from Vnukovo aerodrome on an Li-2 cargo plane to the United States via Iran and Egypt.
To be honest, for the first few minutes I did not believe my ears and resolved that it was a tasteless joke, for Nikolai Alexandrovich was a jovial man and liked to joke. All around us were war, destruction, death and bloodshed for millions of completely innocent people, and, instead of really helping our state, the British and Americans were devising some strange distractions.
However, subsequent events convinced me that a delegation really had been put together and really would fly across the ocean. From Mikhailov’s office we moved fairly quickly to the office of Alexandrov, head of the propaganda section under the Communist Party central committee. He set us a really challenging test on the history of the Party and the Young Communist League and enquired about our biographical details and service in the Red Army, involvement in military engagements and our assessments of the current policy. Judging by his reaction, Comrade Alexandrov was happy with our responses.
The afternoon was also spent productively. We were received by Gheorghy Mikhailovich Dimitrov, general secretary of the executive committee of the Comintern (the Communist International, the international organization uniting workers’ and Communist Parties abroad). This eminent Bulgarian revolutionary had been the hero of the Leipzig trial in 1933, where, accused without foundation of the Reichstag fire, he succeeded through his superb command of German in making an indictment of German Nazism. In the Soviet Union Dimitrov was known as a dedicated fighter for the cause of liberating the working class, a man committed to Communist ideals.
Our conversation with Dimitrov went on for over three hours. He spoke about youth organizations in the capitalist countries, class warfare and how we should conduct ourselves at the sessions of the international student assembly. In the evening we were taken to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. We ended up in its basement, which was like a large department store, but without any customers. In shop windows and under glass counters lay objects of male and female attire which had not been freely on sale in Moscow for a long time.
I was accompanied by a young staff member, and I felt a little uncomfortable at choosing the things I needed in his presence. But he gave very reasonable advice, without the least embarrassment, and soon both of the large suitcases that had been issued to me on the spot were full to the brim. Dresses, blouses, skirts, jackets, underwear, stockings, socks, handkerchiefs, hats, gloves and scarves in various colours and fashions, even footwear – all these were issued, carefully packed and signed for in a lengthy list.
That was not all. Pchelintsev and I were in military service and they decided to equip us appropriately. So we ended up in the experimental sewing workshop of the People’s Commissariat of Defence on Frunze Embankment, which was popularly known as the ‘general store’. While Pchelintsev’s parade uniform was put together within an hour, for me nothing worked out. There were no women’s parade tunics in stock and nobody would be able to sew one in twenty-four hours. It was decided to reshape a general’s tunic of pure fine wool gabardine, the markings were removed, and they promised to deliver it directly to the Young Communist League central committee headquarters on the morning of the following day. Because there was also a shoemaker’s shop on hand, they brought out some boots, which were very beautiful, with high varnished tops in a bottle shape, and fashionable square toes. But the age-old problem of size arose. I had to agree to a size 37 as they did not make anything smaller. Footwear for snipers is a serious matter, given the many kilometres they have to travel. But I had never before worn such light, comfortable boots, so easy on the foot.
It would be misleading if I did not mention the special consultations which the staff of competent authorities held with us. We learned a lot of new things about the present-day policies of the Allied powers, their leaders and the state structure of the USA. We were told what situations could arise, warned about possible provocations (which did indeed take place, organized by those opposed to rapprochement between the peoples of the Soviet Union and the USA), and advised how to behave in such situations. Apart from that, we were given prepared notes for addresses. Some we were advised to memorize, others we were permitted to write down. All this subsequently came in very handy during the course of our visit to the USA, Canada and England.
The question of language was quite a difficult one. Interpreters would be provided to the delegation, nobody doubted that. But it was better to have at least some knowledge of our own, because contact with ordinary people at meetings would be possible – and they were very important. Nikolai Krasavchenko honestly admitted that he did not know any foreign languages. Vladimir Pchelintsev had studied only German at his mining institute. I recalled my lessons at home with Mother and the high standard of foreign-language teaching at university and mentioned that I knew a little English.
Our foreign passports were brought from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. They looked nice and solid: oblong in shape, hard bound, with a covering of red silk and the crest of the USSR embossed on them. Inside, the text was in both Russian and French, with a small photograph below.
At their own initiative the People’s Commissariat staff designated my family status as ‘unmarried’. Also appended was a description of distinguishing features. I learned that I was of average height, had brown eyes and a straight nose, and my hair colour was brunette. Other than that, the delegation was provided with foreign currency: $2,000 each. Back then that was quite a decent sum. It was issued in small denominations and the thick pack of greenish American money bearing portraits of their presidents took up a lot of space in a suitcase.
Everything was happening too fast for us to appreciate fully how complex and unusual this mission was. We were not given time for reflection and, severely disconcerted by the kaleidoscope of sudden events and what we had seen and heard in the last few hours, we again ended up late in the evening at the Young Communist League central committee headquarters on Maroseika Street, at the corner of Serov Street, in Nikolai Mikhailov’s office on the fourth floor.
He seemed to be the only one who understood what emotions were plaguing us and what thoughts were going through our heads. He said that we were young, but we were not children, that we had war experience, and war was a wise, albeit harsh, instructor. The Americans knew nothing of the present war and we had to convey our knowledge and perception of it in such a way that they realized that it was a life-and-death struggle for the future of all humanity. We would not have to make anything up. The main thing for each of us was to be ourselves. Of course, it was a challenge: to find oneself suddenly in a completely foreign world. But here in Moscow everything possible had been done to prepare the members of the student delegation well for it. We listened to his advice in silence.
We should probably have responded to the first secretary immediately, assured him that we would not let him down, do our best, justify the high level of confidence placed in us. However, the words would not shape themselves into sentences and I looked pensively out of the window at the Moscow summer sky: lofty, clear and glittering with thousands of stars. Down south on the Black Sea the sky at night was darker and the stars were much brighter. How many times had my lonely task begun under those stars! How many times had they illuminated a winding path for me through the enchanted Crimean forest!
‘Lyudmila, do you have a question?’ Mikhailov’s confident voice reverberated.
‘No. But I have to tell you: I’m worried that I’ll make a lot of mistakes.’
‘Nonsense, Comrade Junior Lieutenant!’ Nikolai Alexandrovich laughed merrily. ‘I have no doubts about your success. Just be yourself.’
Mikhailov invited us to a last supper. He had the right idea: to gather the travellers and their closest relatives around the table in a relaxed, almost domestic, atmosphere. Vladimir Pchelintsev’s wife Rita was brought in from Veshnyaki, as was my mother from the hostel on Stromyn Street, and also Krasavchenko’s wife, a good-looking young woman named Nadyezhda. Supper was served in his office, simply and modestly. There was vodka and wine. Mikhailov proposed the first toast. Suddenly, on the first secretary’s desk, the telephone rang – a special white one with the crest of the USSR printed in the centre of the dial. Nikolai Alexandrovich instantly grabbed the receiver and, in a voice of profound respect, if not fear, responded: ‘Mikhailov speaking . . . Yes, I understand . . . We’ll come right away.’
Moscow in the first hour after midnight was empty and dark. However, the Borovitsky Gates through which Mikhailov’s car travelled into the Kremlin grounds were illuminated from both sides. Standing on guard were submachine-gunners in the uniform of the NKVD internal forces and soldiers with Tokarev self-loading rifles. Our documents were thoroughly checked, but they had a list of the midnight guests and the lieutenant in charge of the watch saluted Mikhailov and gave the order for the car to be let through.
Our steps echoed in the long corridor. One turn, then another, up a staircase and there we were – in the reception area, outside the office door. The secretary of the supreme commander-in-chief, Poskrebyshev, opened it and I beheld the great man himself. He was dressed in a simple tunic with a turn-down collar but no signs of distinction – not as tall as he had appeared to me previously, lean, rather swarthy, with faint pock-marks on his face and holding a telephone receiver in his left hand. What drew one’s attention were his dark, tiger-like eyes. One sensed that he possessed enormous inner strength.
We were probably in Stalin’s office for about twenty minutes, although we were unaware of the passing of time. Time stood still for us. Mikhailov introduced us one by one, with me last. Joseph Vissarionovich merely said a few sentences about the responsible mission of the Party and government, the Allies, who were unwilling to open a second front, and the American people, who needed to know the truth about our struggle against Nazism.
‘Do you have any requests, Comrades?’ he asked.
Krasavchenko and Pchelintsev were in a state of profound paralysis and a pause hung over the office. I was not affected the same way. I experienced something different: an unprecedented enthusiasm. I wanted to hear words from the supreme commander-in-chief which were addressed specifically to me.
‘Yes, Comrade Stalin, I have a request,’ I said softly. ‘We really need an English–Russian and Russian–English dictionary, with a grammar textbook as well. Because it’s important to know your allies well, just like your enemies!’
‘Well said, Comrade Pavlichenko.’ The leader of the world proletariat smiled. ‘You will receive the books. From me personally.’