As they left to join the army, the prospective snipers took only their oldest clothes with them. They knew they would have to throw them away at some stage. After several days in quarantine, the new cadets were led to the bathhouse by women in uniform, the section commanders. The girls were dressed in whatever had come to hand and had absolutely no idea how to march. They had shawls on their heads, and boots, half-boots, or even ordinary shoes on their feet. Yulia Zhukova thought they looked like gypsies. They broke ranks, and talked loudly to each other as they walked along, sharing impressions of their new situation. Nobody paid any attention to the commanders, who were struggling to maintain at least some semblance of order.79
Local women were standing on the pavements, looking on pityingly as the future snipers passed. Some of them were keening, or made the sign of the cross over the girls, but most just stood there silently. Many of the girls pulled off their hats, scarves or mittens as they walked along and threw them to the crowd, not wanting to waste them when someone else could make good use of them. They were told that they would get their army uniforms after washing at the bathhouse. Some of the girls held on to their warm things, and were wise to do so: woollen socks and mittens came in very handy at the front. A red scarf Sasha Shlyakhova kept as a reminder of home, though, was to compromise her camouflage and cost her her life.80 At the bathhouse their army uniforms were waiting, and they were “a right spectacle” as they tried to find items the right size.81 There was also “a whole brigade of hairdressers” waiting to cut their hair short. Anya Mulatova felt a pang of regret when her locks were cut off and fell to the floor like heavy sausages, but took it in her stride. Goodbye then, sausages. Klava Panteleyeva just found her comrades’ and her own new look comical: their boys’ haircuts, with a short forelock, and then the men’s uniforms, which were too big for them, made them look like clowns. On the day of the shearing, Klava’s partner, Marusya Chigvintseva, was ill and escaped the cropping. When they were marched through the streets of Podolsk, some children standing at the roadside shouted, “Mummy, why are there all uncles and only one auntie?”82
Anya Mulatova found herself in the second cohort of the Central Women’s Sniper Training School. With over 700 trainees, it was the largest of the three cohorts that had studied at the school. The first cohort had graduated and had been sent to the front in June 1943. There were rumours that an entire sniper platoon, thirty-three girls, had drowned when their launch sank on Lake Ladoga.83 That summer, girls were being sent to the school from all over the U.S.S.R.: municipal enlistment offices selected those with excellent eyesight, giving priority to any who already had shooting practice, and sent them to Veshnyaki in groups of around ten. Not all were accepted on arrival: there was another commission to examine them at the school. And of the twelve “keen-eyed girls in good health” who left Dzhambul in Kazakhstan with Klava Loginova, only nine were selected. The rest were sent to specialise in other areas and were upset: they believed they had been specially chosen for the course as active Young Communist League members with experience of sharpshooting.84
There was nowhere suitable at the sniper school for a shooting range so a new location had to be found. The students spent the summer camping in the village of Amerevo, some of them living in a shed, while others, like Anya Mulatova, lived in tents in groups of ten or eleven. Anya made friends with her new colleagues in the company, tall girls, “Queens” like herself. The girl snipers were grouped by height from the outset, and some of the companies immediately acquired an unofficial name, coined either by Nora Chegodaeva, who had been in charge of the women’s sniper courses which preceded the school, or by “important generals” on the Personnel Committee, one of whom, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, laughed as he looked at a girl of diminutive stature, “Where do they get these little pencils from?”85 From then on, some were Pencils, some were Queens, while girls in between had no permanent nickname. As a result, the schoolmates they remembered tended to be girls of similar height to themselves, with whom they lived and studied. Of her friends at the new Podolsk school who became posthumously famous, Anya Mulatova remembers only two, both tall: Roza and Tanya. Tanya Baramzina was a “not particularly likeable village girl, very ideologically minded, who never stopped talking”.86 Everyone was surprised that she wore spectacles while shooting. Anya and her friends discussed how, given her poor eyesight, she could possibly have been selected for sniper school, and agreed it could only have been because of her work for the Party or Young Communist League. Anya heard in 1944 that Tanya had been killed, but learned the details only after the war. Tanya Baramzina had been redeployed as a signaller when her vision became even worse, and met her fate as she defended a bunker with wounded soldiers against a Nazi assault. If we can believe the account of an injured soldier said to have miraculously survived (the Germans shot the others, but he pretended to be dead), the Germans tortured Tanya and then shot her with a grenade launcher. To begin with, the name of this communist martyr remained unknown, and she was simply called “the girl in a greatcoat”.
The second sniper in their company of Queens who fought and died heroically at the front was Roza Shanina. Roza was a nursery school teacher from Arkhangelsk, a very tall, energetic, rosy-cheeked, blonde girl. She had big, limpid eyes, a pleasant face and a mane of hair, but Anya felt she was completely unfeminine. She had a rolling, masculine gait and was rather coarse, talking loudly with a strong regional accent. Anya was surprised to see an article in a front-line newspaper in 1944 that described Roza as a beauty, but kept her feelings to herself.87
Klava Panteleyeva, on the other hand, was small and belonged to the Pencils’ company, the 7th. Being a short girl, Klava remembered only thin little Aliya Moldagulova of those who died heroically.88 Aliya, an exceptionally active girl, was remembered by people in other companies too. Klava Loginova recalled encountering her on the first day. No sooner had they been brought to Amerevo than Aliya ran up and asked if they had had anything to eat. When she heard that they hadn’t, she “ran off so swiftly” to find out what was going on.89
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The trainees began settling into their new routine, their army uniforms and masculine hairstyles. Each girl now had a partner. They trained together as a pair, sat next to each other in the canteen and slept next to one another on bunk beds. The combination of being so far from their families at such a young age, and the tough new conditions into which they had been thrown, underlined the importance of having a friend who could cheer you up, and brought these girls very close to one another. At the front partners would often sleep together on one greatcoat and cover themselves with the other one. And if one of them got killed the other was likely to experience this as the biggest tragedy of the whole war.
From the first day of their life in the army they were shown no mercy. After reveille at six in the morning, they were taken two kilometres to the river to wash. The girls soon learned that relaxing in the canteen was a luxury they could no longer afford: the order to get up from the table was invariably given before any of them had really finished eating.90
The teaching was intensive. In the barracks there was theory, which included ballistics and the characteristics of their equipment. Drill and shooting practice took up the rest of their time. The girls spent a lot of time outdoors, whatever the weather. They were taught to dig different types of foxholes, to camouflage themselves and sit for long periods (as they might ahead of an ambush), to navigate terrain and crawl on their bellies. There were lessons in the additional skills needed for sniping: observation and the ability to commit the details of the landscape around them to memory, sharpness of vision and keeping one’s hands steady. They were also taught unarmed combat techniques and how to throw a hand grenade.91
When they began training on the firing range, the young snipers had first to excavate deep trenches and emplacements, set up firing points, and build primitive defensive earthworks. How much soil they had to move using crude entrenching tools! Next came the actual training in shooting: they dug themselves in, camouflaged themselves, learned to move around by crawling and by dashing from one piece of cover to another, and they fired and fired and fired. “We were shooting at targets which were full height, from the waist upwards, from the chest upwards, targets that were running and fixed, in full view and camouflaged; we fired standing, lying and kneeling, supported and unsupported; we fired while moving and when stationary.”92 They were given as many cartridges as they needed, but after the firing had finished they had to pick up every single spent cartridge case. The girls were often crawling around together on their hands and knees in the mud, searching for missing cases to help one of their comrades. When they had learned to handle their weapon passably, their standard guns were replaced with sniper rifles.93
In September 1943, the school was moved from Amerevo to the former estate of Count Sheremetiev near Podolsk. The girls repaired the dilapidated buildings with their own hands. Klava Loginova and her comrades were allocated the former orangery. They mixed clay, carried bricks, and created quarters that began to feel acceptable. After the war, Klava put the experience to good use and built herself a house.94 Bunks were installed, and each squad had their own “storey”. “We lay side by side, like toy soldiers in their box,” Yulia Zhukova remembered, but at least each of them had their own mattress and pillow (though they were only stuffed with straw), their own coarse grey army blanket, and even calico sheets and a waffle towel, always cleanly laundered.95 For many village girls, this was a level of luxury that they had never experienced.
In the large family of Anya Mulatova (her father was a craftsman, so they had a better standard of living than most of their neighbours), all the children slept together on the floor on a purple homespun wool blanket that was a great favourite with fleas. Her mother and father had a bed behind a curtain. There was no question of bedlinen. Their mother sewed clothes for them from whatever piece of cloth was available, and was forever altering old clothes. One time Anya tore a piece out of a new dress while she was playing hide-and-seek and her mother beat her. Footwear was a constant problem. As soon as her sister Liza came home from school, she would take off her half-boots (which had heels), and their brother would put them on because he had none of his own.
In the mornings their mother usually made soup from millet, which they all ate from a shared bowl. Their mother added milk to it, their father began supping, and then the children were allowed to start. For dinner, they also had soup, potatoes, and sauerkraut. There was very rarely any meat, and on those rare occasions when there was, the first to eat would be her father and those of her siblings who were already working. The rest ate what was left.96 By 1940, things were just beginning to improve, but then in 1941 the war began.
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Deputy platoon commanders were, as a rule, also very young women who had done well in the first cohort and been kept on at the school. They drilled the girls diligently. Anyone who had not made their bed perfectly could expect extra fatigue duties: the straw mattress and sheet must be without a wrinkle, the pillows perfectly aligned, towels folded into triangles, with the bases of the triangles in a straight line.97 If they failed to get dressed within the allotted couple of minutes, they would be ordered to “Stand down!” and the procedure would be repeated from the beginning.
Reunited after the war with women whose deputy platoon commander she had been, Zinaida Melikhova recalled various amusing moments and episodes, but the women remembered the time quite differently – her sternness, the drill, the extra fatigues . . . Melikhova never did go to the front. She was a very beautiful girl with a good figure and, in the opinion of her subordinates, “flirty”. Without taking too much trouble to be discreet, she would kiss Odintsov, an officer she went on to marry, and got to stay at the school.98
They remembered the men as being very strict too. The platoon and company commanders were usually officers who had been wounded at the front. As far as they were concerned it was their duty to turn the girls, who had just come from civilian life, into soldiers. Klava Panteleyeva and her comrades were afraid of Panchenko, the director of tactics, who moved during exercises from one platoon to another. The moment the girls started to relax, they would hear, “Panchenko approaching!” Their task was to blend into the background so seamlessly that they could not be seen, and Panchenko kept them hard at it. Many years after the war was over, he came to a reunion of those who had graduated from the sniper school and admitted, “Girls, I had so much respect, and felt so sorry, for you.”99
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For some reason, what seemed most to lodge in their memories were episodes involving singing as they were marching. When they were tired, the girls would disobey orders and refuse to sing, whereupon they would be forced to do so. Anya Mulatova’s company commander was Almazov, “a tall, handsome man, very stern”. Not infrequently, terribly tired after marching the seven kilometres in each direction to the firing range and spending the whole day toiling away, they would be on their way to the canteen bareheaded and without mittens, dreaming only of covering the 300 metres to the warm hall, eating their dinner and after that getting back to their quarters and lying down, when Almazov would order, “Sing!” The exhausted girls would remain silent. Then Almazov would instead order, “Halt! To the right, to the left, five paces. Down!” And they would have to fall flat on their faces in the deep snow and crawl in the prescribed manner to the point indicated by the commander. Snow would be scooped up into the broad tops of their boots. Women in shawls and quilted jackets would stand by the roadside watching the young trainees and sighing sympathetically. If Almazov turned his back for a moment, the girls would get up and scuttle a couple of paces closer.100
Probably every girl who completed the course at sniper school could remember being punished for failing to sing on the march. An officer by the name of Ivanov, Taya Kiselyova’s platoon commander, also had no time for insubordination. On one occasion, the girls were coming back tired from the firing range and remained silent when ordered to sing. They heard the order, “Down! Crawl!” This time the commander really had got a bee in his bonnet. Reluctantly they obeyed. There was rain and sleet, the girls’ mess tins were clanking against their belts. At first they giggled, but then they started wailing. They were saved on that occasion by Kolchak, the school’s director, who clearly thought that they had had enough. When their course ended, Ivanov, just like Almazov, made no attempt to conceal his affection and concern for them. “My dear, good girls,” he said as he bade them farewell, “you take care of yourselves now!”101 The harsh drills, these former front-line soldiers believed, would prepare their wards for the front, where their trials would be even harsher. They were right, and the girls would soon come to realise this for themselves.
There were, of course, some who just enjoyed humiliating other people. After the war, Yulia Zhukova really wanted to see her former platoon commander, Lieutenant Mazhnov, at one of their reunions and look him straight in the eye. Mazhnov did return from the war, but never showed up at any of the reunions. He must have known just how much the girls loathed him. He was a very ordinary, uneducated peasant and humiliated his subordinates, presumably to make himself feel big at their expense.
Out of all the merciless drilling and bullying, one episode stuck more than all the others in Yulia Zhukova’s mind and made her really hate the platoon commander. One cold autumn day when they were out in the field on tactical exercises, the girls were “running through clinging mud that squelched underfoot and stuck to our boots”. Mazhnov gave the order, “Down, forward on your bellies, crawl!” Yulia saw a huge puddle right in front of her, quickly sidestepped it and started crawling through the mud. But it was not to be. “Cadet Zhukova, stand up, return to initial position!” She flopped down straight into the icy puddle and started crawling.102 Afterwards, their platoon commander explained that he was treating them in this manner for their own good. If Zhukova had behaved like that at the front, she would have been dead by now. To an extent he was no doubt right, but for the rest of her life, whenever she recalled the episode, Yulia Zhukova seemed again to feel “the cold, slimy mud seeping into the tops of my boots and into the sleeves of my greatcoat”. Forcing her way through the thick mud, she swallowed tears of impotent rage and humiliation.
Their sergeants were mostly the best cadets from the first cohort. They were now to train the next cohort and go to the front with it as its officers. They were mostly a year or two older than the others, and responsible for maintaining order and discipline in the platoon. They were also answerable for property and firearms. If you had a good sergeant, life in the army could be just about bearable. She would help with your uniform if something was missing, and teach you to wind your leg wrappings properly, would understand if someone was unwell and, when necessary, say a kind word. Anya Matokh, who was killed in 1945, just days before victory was declared, was very popular in her platoon. A plump, calm girl from the Urals, she was a couple of years older than the rest of them, tried to make life easier for them, and did not neglect political indoctrination (important for the commanders but not so much for the girls themselves).103 Anya Mulatova’s platoon was less fortunate. Their Sergeant Shatrova was “small, dark, always looked angry” and treated her fellow soldiers abominably.104 She too had been kept on from the first cohort to help with the second, and when they finished the course Shatrova went with them to the front. There she behaved no better than at the school. The girls under her command confirm that she treated them very cruelly, often finding fault for no reason. She was soon killed, and those who had been at the front with her asserted she had been shot by her own girls.105 Anya Mulatova believed she might well have been.
People did witness or hear of similar incidents. Masha Maximova was not the least bit surprised when she heard the lieutenant who had been in command of their platoon at the school, “a really nasty bit of work”, was killed by a bullet from someone on their side almost as soon as they got to the front. At the school, while harassing the girls crawling on their bellies, he was quite likely to step on someone’s backside with his boot, remarking, “Lower, press yourself down lower. At the front this is going to be where you get wounded.” “Serves him right,” was all Masha thought.106
Sergeant Vashchenko was another woman greatly disliked by her subordinates. They considered her coarse and thoroughly unpleasant and, needless to say, often ignored her orders to sing on the way to the canteen. If she called out the name of one of the girls and demanded that she should sing, the reply might well be that she had lost her voice. Vashchenko would then lose patience and command, “At the double!”, or find a way to spite them on the way back to the barracks. When they were nearly there, only a few metres separating them from warmth and rest, Vashchenko would suddenly order the girls to wade through a ditch and then proceed by crawling. “Stand up! Get down! Crawl!” The commands would rain down on them. They were all delighted when, one time, her bullying was witnessed by Commissar Nikiforova, who had arrived on a visit, and gave the sergeant a taste of her own medicine. Nikiforova very properly did not dress Vashchenko down in front of the trainees, but gave the order, “Dismissed!” She kept Vashchenko behind and made her give a thorough demonstration of how to crawl on your belly. Needless to say, this was instantly relayed throughout the school by a couple of highly amused witnesses.107
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The food at the school was excellent, and they were to look back on it nostalgically at the front; most would continue to do so after the war. Though they couldn’t expect any great delicacies, the portions were generous: soup and porridge and bread. They were at last able to eat their fill after the hungry years of war, seeing for the first time in a long while butter, sausage, cheese, sugar, and even real tea. For many, it was the first time in their lives that they had enough to eat. Many of them, indeed, had been on the verge of starvation in peacetime.
Those on duty in the kitchen would scrape clean what was left in the pot and give it to girls from their platoon. Quite often they would take this out to local women, who were starving and came begging for food with their children.108 Some, like Klava Loginova and her sniper partner, Valya Volokhova, so wanted to have photographs to send home that they skimped on food for themselves in order to have something to barter (the trainees received no wages). Klava and Valya found a photographer in Podolsk and took sugar and bacon fat to exchange for photographs. They had intially tried taking him butter, but it melted, and the photographer himself tactfully suggested they might find it easier to bring lumps of sugar rather than the granulated variety. At first he was embarrassed and looked at the ground, urging them to eat it themselves, but eventually succumbed to temptation.109
And then there was Vera Barakina, blonde, blue-eyed, with delicate features, who each day after dinner collected every last scrap of bread from the table. She always felt they were underfed at the school. The mothers of girls who had gone to the front from Moscow or Moscow Province would come to visit and bring them something to eat. “How can they not share it?” Vera wondered furiously.110 She was constantly hungry, having survived two winters of the Siege of Leningrad. During the first her father had been sitting on a chair in the kitchen when, without any warning, he died. His wife and her daughters held on. Vera, like her mother, was working in an arms factory and they received a daily ration of 250 grams of bread. They shared it with Vera’s sister, who received only 125 grams because she had been wounded during the shelling and was unable to work. At the factory they were given soup made from flour, and they made soup at home with a mixture of flour and mud, while it lasted, which Vera dug up from the bombed-out ruins of a food depot on the bank of the River Neva. When stirred in the pot the mud, heavier than everything else, would gradually sink to the bottom after releasing the scraps of flour from the depot which had been hidden within it.111 By the end of the second winter their strength was almost gone and they couldn’t wait for spring, when the goosefoot and nettles that saved so many people from starving to death would emerge. Suddenly, a miracle occurred. Their mother came home from work one day to tell them they were all being evacuated, along with the factory. The girls were emaciated and indifferent to everything, but now showed signs of animation. Were they really going to get out?
Their mother died on the journey when, after crossing the frozen Lake Ladoga on a truck, it seemed they had reached safety. Vera and her sister dragged the body to a pile of others, and “we got back in the trucks and were taken on, to live.” Until so recently that had seemed a forlorn prospect. At Manturovo railway station in Kostroma Province another miracle occurred: Vera and her sister were spotted by a distant relative who worked at the restaurant there. She went to meet all the trains bringing Leningraders. They stayed with her. Her relative got Vera a job as a cashier at the national savings bank but, just as she was getting used to having a full belly again, she was summoned to the enlistment office and told she would be joining the army. “I’ve been in the Siege,” she protested. “Makes no difference,” the officer said, and she could only murmur, “All right, then.” After the war, when the others who had been in her regiment proudly said they had volunteered, Vera Barakina made no bones about it, and said openly that she had been far from pleased to have been sent to the front. She probably would have gone eventually to the enlistment office to volunteer, but then, in May 1943, she was still far too weak to even consider it.
After her experiences in Leningrad, even the front did not seem all that terrible. Many horrible things happened there: people were killed by shrapnel or bullets, her comrades were blown up by mines, and she herself was wounded twice, but Vera always said nothing in her life had been more dreadful than the Siege.
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Their course was coming to an end, and during the political indoctrination sessions there was already talk about going to fight at the front. Vera Barakina was astonished when her sniper partner, Tonya Bulanenko, applied to be transferred to signals because she could not face being a sniper.112 Tonya was a real sharpshooter but could not countenance actually firing at people. Vera had little doubt that being in signals would be a lot more frightening, crawling over open ground under fire, trailing a telegraph cable!
Many of the trainees dropped out in the course of those six months. Not everyone could cope with such a change in their way of life, or endure the heavy physical toll of trekking so many kilometres to the firing range and back in full gear (in the winter they had to make the same journey on skis), or life in the barracks. Many could not believe they would soon be fighting in the war and, moreover, as snipers. Back in the summer, when they were still at Amerevo, Zoya Nakaryakova from Perm went mad (or pretended to). First she began yelling at night, and then one afternoon on the road to the firing range she suddenly started shrieking, “Mama! Mama!”113 At that she was promptly consigned to a psychiatric facility, and from there, it was said, to the secret police. Klava Loginova heard that after the war Zoya had been seen in Perm.114
Zoya was not the only one who did not make it to the front. There were others whose nerve failed. Two girls in Vera Barakina’s company ran away. They were soon caught in Moscow, tried as deserters, and sent off to fight in a penal company. Vera heard no more of them. Another girl, on sentry duty at night, shot herself by taking off her boot and pressing the rifle trigger with her toe. “That would take some doing, shooting yourself with your foot!” the others whispered. They were all certain the girl must have done it because she was so afraid of being on guard on her own in the dark. They were all frightened of being on sentry duty, but many felt that members of the Young Communist League and future soldiers should be fearless and so were too ashamed to admit it. The dead girl was evidently no exception. Yulia Zhukova found guarding the ammunition store the worst detail at the school. Standing there at night by yourself was terrifying. The ammunition shed was some distance from the school building, in empty wasteland. There were bushes around and a deep ravine, also overgrown with bushes. At night when they were rustling you felt sure someone was sneaking towards you. Many years later, Yulia wrote, “You would lose your nerve, spin round, raise your rifle and shout, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’”115 The fear did not let go even after she had satisfied herself there was no one. “You would press your back against the wall and stand, peering into the darkness, waiting. Then you would force yourself to move away and walk round the store, a chill would run down your spine, and again you would be sure there was someone behind you. We were at war.”