I am extremely grateful to Klavdia Kalugina (Panteleyeva) who was until 2012 the head of the Moscow group of veterans of the Podolsk women’s snipers school. Not only did she share contacts of other snipers, but also her personal recollections of the front and of her dead friend Marusya Chigvintseva. Without her I would have achieved very little.
Taisiya Ilnitskaya (Kiselyova) in St Petersburg also put me in touch with her former comrades-in-arms and gave me some precious photographs and documents from her archive. I will hand all of this over to a museum of Soviet female soldiers as soon as such a museum is set up.
The families of some of my heroines were extremely kind to me. Despite very late notice Yuri and Irina Morokhovets found photographs of Kaleriya and her friends in the family archive. Aleksandr Khovantsev has given me precious relics from his family archive: photos and letters of his great aunt Zhenya Makeeva.
I am grateful to historians Anatoly Chernobaev and Viktoriya Petrakova for their invaluable advice. My colleague and friend Artem Drabkin was, as always, extremely generous with materials and contacts. Journalist Vyacheslav Dranitsa in Altai made several attempts to interview Vera Zubchenko for me before, eventually, he succeeded. My cousin Nadya Trofimova found Vera Chuikova’s house in a village near Yaroslavl and finally persuaded her to speak with me. And Marina Chertilina from the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents has helped me to find some really great photographs.
Many thanks to Arch Tait for the clever translation and the title, which was his idea! Thanks to Josh Ireland for making the text digestible for the western audience. To Katharina Bielenberg for taking care of the whole publishing process. And I am forever grateful to my agent and friend Andrew Nurnberg for his attention, encouragement and support, and for his patience in providing answers to any tricky questions that I might have.
L.V.