Greetings from the front. Hello, my dear mother!
I got a letter from you today, which I hasten to answer. I should be able to write to you more often now.
I have no special news to tell you. I am by the sea, which is splendid. Life is varied, we do not stay long in one place, on the move all the time. It is good that the rain has not started yet. Although it is autumn, it is very hot here. So far all the girls are alive and well. My health is good enough too. Hello to everybody.
Your loving Zhenya.116
Zhenya Makeyeva’s mother, like Katya’s, was illiterate, and so the letter had to be read to her by Zhenya’s younger sister.117 Zhenya wrote to her mother in Kropotkin on 9 October. She and her comrades had only been at the front for a couple of months, but had already learned how to write home and let their families know where they were and what was happening to their unit without incurring the censor’s wrath. When they read “by the sea”, her family would have guessed Zhenya’s unit had reached the Black Sea. “We do not stay long in one place” meant they were on the offensive. Soldiers often wrote that it was “hot” or “very hot” at the front, hinting that there was heavy fighting, but possibly Zhenya really was only writing about the weather. The most important news in the letter was that she and “all the girls” were safe and sound.
They got as far as Taman in the second wave of the offensive, without experiencing any fighting. After the Blue Line was broken, the Germans retreated from the Taman Peninsula, putting up practically no resistance. The Red Army was pushing forward, clearing the Northern Caucasus of Germans and preparing for the liberation of the Crimea. Along the way, Katya Peredera became ill with malaria and, until she could be taken to hospital, periodically fell asleep while they were on the march, simply drifting out of consciousness. After treatment she caught up with the rest of them.118
They halted at Taman, preparing to cross the Kerch Strait. Although there was no longer anything permanent in their lives, the girls wasted no time before decorating their dugouts, which had been excavated in a gully, adorning their temporary quarters with what was to hand: little yellow flowers and tumbleweed.119 They needed only a very short break, a lull in the routines of wartime, for youth and life once more to come into their own.
On 5 November, the sniper platoon was issued 300 rounds of ammunition per person and rations to last them five days. Where they were being sent nobody, of course, would say, but it was fairly obvious. The Germans had retreated over the Kerch Strait, and now it was time to pursue them.120
On 6 November they marched, carrying heavy loads, the thirty kilometres to the shore of the strait. Trucks were driving past with inscriptions on their sideboards reading “On to Crimea!” Soviet artillery was firing from the Chushka Spit in support of the Crimean landings, the army having been crossing the strait for several days already.121
The task facing the troops of the North Caucasian Front was to seize a bridgehead in the Crimea, which would become a base for further operations. The Kerch-Eltigen Landings, the largest amphibious operation on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, had begun on 31 October. The troops had a hard time of it because the Kerch Strait was narrow and shallow, making it impossible to use large ships. They had to be ferried by launches whose firepower was far inferior to that of the German vessels, which was “tantamount to pitching carts against tanks”, as the commander of the fleet, Vice Admiral Lev Vladimirsky put it.122 And, as People’s Commissar of the Navy Nikolai Kuznetsov recalled, “We had often to make use of civilian craft completely unsuited to such operations, even rowing boats.”123
On each of those first days they ferried several thousand troops under fire to the village of Eltigen, south of Kerch, and suffered heavy losses. No reinforcements could be sent to support the landing because two days later a tremendous storm broke, and when it was over, the Germans had blocked the approaches to Eltigen from the sea. “How are our sailors over there?” The girls from the women’s night bomber regiment were very concerned for the marines fighting alone at Eltigen, soon dubbed the Land of Fire. The airwomen had made friends with the marines in October when that unit had been quartered next to their airfield in Peresyp.124
For the girls flying out to bomb the Germans on the opposite shore of the Kerch Strait, it was no distance at all: they could travel there and back in an hour. How far it was, though, for the seaborne troops! Day after day they were knocking rafts together, caulking boats and training, throwing themselves fully clothed and with their weapons into the icy water. When the girls were not able to fly because of bad weather (and there are many such days in Crimea in autumn), their “sailor boys” were invited to come into their heated house to warm up and dry out. Anya Bondareva fell deeply in love, although it is unclear whether that was with one particular marine or all of them at the same time. The other girls took a great liking to these brave lads too. When, one morning, Regimental Commander Bershanskaya announced they were to provide air cover for the marines who had made the crossing to Eltigen, they were only too happy to oblige.125
*
“The enemy is extending his beachhead at Kerch,” the diary of military operations of the Wehrmacht’s 5 Army Corps records on 6 November 1943.126 Among the units making the crossing that day was an infantry regiment which had been allocated a women’s sniper platoon. Their launch took four or five hours to cross, in terrifying conditions. Shells were exploding around their boat, which was carrying some fifty people, as the artillery bombardment continued relentlessly.127 Many of the 570 Infantry Regiment, to which the snipers were attached, never made it to the far shore, drowning in ships sunk by the German artillery.
Alya Moiseyenko was wounded the moment she landed and was left on the beach to await evacuation back across the terrifying strait.128 The rest were ordered to form a line and attack.129 There was fighting to take the factory town of Kolonka. The following morning they were forced to retreat back to the shore when the Germans brought in fresh forces.130 It was said there were a lot of Crimean Tatars fighting for them, which made the Red Army soldiers, furious at such treachery, fight even harder.131
The Soviet forces managed to capture the towns of Kolonka and Adzhimushkai on 14 November “after heavy fighting”,132 but with their resources exhausted they failed to extend the bridgehead. The Soviet troops on the Kerch Peninsula went on the defensive and would not be able to advance further until April 1944. Historians later wrote that the Soviet commanders were wrong in their evaluation of the situation and their adversary’s strength. The objective therefore was not achieved, in spite of the great losses.133 Another girl sniper from Kropotkin, Tanya Kostyrina, was killed in the battle for Adzhimushkai on 22 November. Neither Katya Peredera nor Zhenya knew her from Kropotkin or from the sniper school. Tanya and her friends had fled Krasnodar before the Germans arrived in 1942, and it is not known how she came to the front, but eventually she was trained in the front-line sniper courses. She was wounded twice, and both times returned to her unit.134 In 1944, Tanya was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and each year after the war Young Pioneers would plant red poppies at her grave in Adzhimushkai.
Katya Peredera’s mother grew up in a deeply religious family, and as she watched her neighbours and colleagues receive notifications that their husbands or children had been killed in battle she began to pray for her daughters Katya and Nina to come back from the war alive. After the war, the whole country was to hear of another mother from Kuban, Yepistinia Stepanova, who lost all nine of her sons: Alexander, Nikolai, Vasiliy, Filip, Fyodor, Ivan, Ilia, Pavel and Alexander Junior. The eldest was killed in the Civil War, seven died in the Second World War, and the last returned from the war an invalid, later succumbing to his wounds.135
*
After the assault had stalled and the Russians started to occupy defensive positions, the regiment and its sniper platoon were taken off the front line and rested in the Adzhimushkai quarries. Their rest period soon ended and they were back to active service, but continued to live in the catacombs. The snipers’ routine consisted of leaving the catacombs before dawn, equipped with their rifles, cartridges and knives. They carried water in a flask and some bread, sometimes also dried concentrate of foodstuffs such as millet porridge. As a rule, while on the defensive, half the platoon would be taken to the front line on any given day. Others were to be on duty on another day, or at times in the night, working as ordinary infantry soldiers. Once they reached the front trenches, the snipers would settle and set up a position: the embrasures were usually already there, the sniper just needed to see if the one she chose was properly camouflaged (with grass, tree branches, etc.), otherwise the Germans, who also had snipers, would spot her rifle. Once ready, the sniper just had to wait for a potential victim to appear. The partners in a pair took turns to watch the German front line through telescopic sights, since their eyes tired quickly and it was impossible for one person to be watching the whole time. When they saw a German, fired, and the German fell, another point was added to their tally, as long as the kill had been witnessed by other soldiers in the trench or an observer.
Meanwhile, above them the air battle at Kerch continued night and day. The snipers nicknamed the night bombers “Marina’s girls”,136 aware that the women’s bomber regiment created by the legendary Marina Raskova was at work.
On 1 December 1943, the logbook of the Wehrmacht’s 5 Army Corps recorded, “All is more or less quiet on the ground. There is heavy fighting in the air. Particularly at Altigen and Kamysh-Burun. Planes are dropping supplies to the landing groups.”137 Only experienced pilots and navigators were taken on for the mission of dropping ammunition and food to the landing groups cut off at Altigen. The supplies had to be dropped from a height of less than 50 metres. Commissar Rachkevich addressed the assembled regiment, explained the situation at Altigen, and called for volunteers, but there was no real need: it was their “sailor boys”, cut off from the main task force at Kerch and from the sea, who were dying at Altigen.138
Olga Golubeva kept remembering what an ageing lieutenant, whom everyone called Andreich, had said: “I just want to live till New Year . . . And there has to be a tree for the holiday!” Olga so wanted to see these lads survive, to join them in celebrating the New Year, and for there to be a tree. They brought them “sacks”, each shielded with oak planks and hooped with iron. Actually, it was stretching a point to call them sacks. “A heavy canvas sausage a metre in diametre, packed with all sorts of things, enveloped like smoked sausage in twine. In the middle was a loop for hanging it on the hook of the bomb rack.”139 With this bulky cargo, very heavy for a little Po-2 plane with its weak engine, Olga Golubeva flew with her pilot Nina Ulianenko across to the far, fiery bank of the strait. Putting on her lifejacket, which was supposed to inflate in water, Olga suppressed her anxiety, remembering the advice of Dusya Nosal, who had been killed at Novorossiysk and was the regiment’s first Hero of the Soviet Union: “Leave your fears behind on the ground!” In low raincloud, Nina and Olga flew to the opposite shore. The wind carried them too far to the north, so they had to turn round and search for Altigen. They soon spotted it from the fires and constant plumes of explosions. They managed to drop the sack on their second circuit directly down to the white building of the school.
With each flight Olga felt more confident, and was soon shouting to the sailors as they came in low, “Chin up, lads! Hold on!” or “Look out, down there. Catch this one!”140 Anna Bondaryova would drop love letters to all her sailor boys. When it was clear that no reinforcements would be forthcoming, those who had landed at Altigen fought their way through on 6 December to Mount Mithridat, which was in Soviet hands. The seriously wounded, who could not go with the others, asked to be given weapons and ammunition to cover their comrades’ breakout.141
*
Rock: cold, sharp rock. Wherever you go there are rocks and darkness, impenetrable, black darkness. Underground caverns to right and left, in front and behind, endlessly. Above is twenty-five metres of rock and this huge mass weighs down on you and makes you feel claustrophobic, although there is so much room here that in places trucks and tanks can drive through, except where the vault or walls of the caves have been brought down by shelling.
How can you light up these vast caverns? There is little in the way of lighting. Many army units are billeted here and everyone lights the place as best they can. The ingenious make lamps out of anti-tank shells by pouring petrol into them and making a wick out of rags, or light a torch from kindling. Perhaps, though, it is for the best that many of the underground corridors and halls remain in darkness: any light would illuminate terrible scenes.
The further in one goes, the heavier the atmosphere. A smell of dampness and decay. Strewn on the ground are rags, papers and bones; many unburied human remains. The Red Army returned here only a couple of weeks ago. The walls are covered with writing: slogans, names. Nearly everyone who wrote them is dead now, and the handful who escaped the slaughter have been captured by the Germans.142
Here is a recess full of dead soldiers. They lie in their greatcoats, rifles by their sides. One is sprawled in the middle of the underground gallery, others along the stone walls, one is half-sitting, leaning against the wall, an eerie sight. The man describing this took part in five landing operations, but recalled that he saw nothing in the war comparable in horror with this. “We stood in silence, stunned. And then, in this truly sepulchral silence, Selvinsky143 said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I can’t go any further.’”144
It was impossible to forget the subterranean hospital. At a table sat a corpse in a white coat, as if even in death the doctor was continuing to work. Everywhere were stone graves of those who had died in the early days of the siege, when their comrades still had the strength to bury them.
The main body of the Soviet forces was evacuated over the Kerch Strait in May 1942. Some units, however, were given orders to fight to the last man; those few survivors who would later be able to talk about the tragedy would spend many years in the circles of hell, first in German concentration camps and then, many of them, in the Gulag, punished again for having surrendered.
By the time the caverns in Adzhimushkai had been recaptured, at the end of November 1943, the weather had turned cold and damp. Strong winds blew in from the Sea of Azov and rain turned the clay ground into a morass. The catacombs, to which the girl snipers’ platoon was taken to rest, were, in spite of their ghoulish recent history, a welcome refuge: warm, dry, and very, very quiet. Sliding down an icy slope on their backsides as if on a playground slide, the girls entered a whole new world. All around, “campfires were lit and the air smelled of resin and burnt oil.”145 The shooting and the rumble of artillery fire were barely audible.
Gradually the girls settled in to this strange environment. They lit small fires, got hold of oil or, more often, petrol from the tank crews, for lamps made from anti-aircraft shells, or simply burned the hose of a gas mask, tucking it into a shell case. The hoses burned for a long time, emitting huge amounts of black smoke. “We were coughing up black stuff for the next six months,” Katya recalls.146 They collected flat rocks and made them into a table and even walls, creating a separate room for themselves. At last they were able to grab some much-needed respite, and sometimes they would not emerge from underground for several days at a time.
Water was in short supply. There was little of it even on the surface in Kerch. Whoever was on kitchen duty had to go up to fetch it from a cloudy well nearby. They tried to do so before dawn so as not to be seen by the Germans but sometimes, if there was not too much shooting, would go out when it was light. Katya was on duty with Lida Ryasina from Armavir one day, and Lida took the bucket out of her hands just as she was about to go up, saying, “You’ve been up so many times already. I’ll go this time!” Lida did not come back down. Later, Katya heard she had been found severely wounded beside the well and taken to Kerch. She died there.147
After a week or two of rest, the commanders started taking the snipers up to the surface to hunt. A first group, just a few of them, went up. They were very warmly dressed, in quilted jackets and trousers, felt boots, and mittens that had a separate section for the thumb and trigger finger. They each carried a flask and a supply of bread. The land where their infantry regiment was deployed had been churned up by explosions, something they had not seen before, and Galya Koldeyeva reassured her partner that not every shell crater was a soldier’s grave – they offered valuable shelter. That same first day, Galya and her partner Anya managed to shoot two “mules”, Germans pulling a water bottle on a sledge, and later Galya managed to take out a machine-gunner.148 Katya Peredera and Zhenya Makeyeva opened their tally the following day. The Germans were close here, only 150 metres or so away, and their faces were clearly visible in their sights. The snipers had to stay in their trench (one of the many that had probably been dug back in 1942, and lost and retaken several times) until dark, but could come out at dusk. With their hearts pounding, in short dashes, they ran back to the quarry and safety. “If you make it back to the quarry, you live to see another day,” the girls would say.149
They soon learned that when they made a kill the Germans were likely to retaliate with mortars, in which case you could only lie flat and pray you survived. Once, Zhenya and her partner (that day for some reason, she was not with Katya) were on night duty in the trench and escaped an even more serious threat. A German patrol looking for a “squealer” – a prisoner who could provide intelligence – came very close to their trench and would have captured them or slashed their throats if they had spotted them. Zhenya had fallen asleep but her partner was fully alert. The girls shot two of the group and threw a hand grenade at the rest. More Soviet soldiers arrived and repulsed the attack.150
The months passed with no change: the same strange, debilitating life in the catacombs, where water was so scarce; the same millet or barley porridge; rust-coloured herring; frozen, unpalatable bread.151 One time they met up in the catacombs with Zhenya Grunskaya, Galya Koldeyeva’s best friend from school in Krasnodar.152 Zhenya had just arrived after being seconded as a nurse to the regimental headquarters. She asked to be transferred to the sniper platoon, who had no medical orderly, and stayed with them until she was killed. The girls got filled in on all the news from Krasnodar by Zhenya. She had even attended the trial of Nazis and those of their local accomplices who had committed atrocities in Krasnodar and the Krasnodar region. It was attended by a number of writers, including Alexey Tolstoy.153 When one of the girls asked if it was true they had hanged the collaborators, Zhenya said, “Oh, girls, the things that went on! They brought them to the square in front of the military commandant’s office and stood each of them in front of a noose. They were looking at the ground and shaking feverishly. Then there were speeches, all demanding they should be hanged. Alexey Tolstoy was one of the speakers.”154
In the catacombs they established their own routine. There was a “great hall” in which, following the removal of the limestone, there was a raised area, like a stage, where they held indoctrination meetings and amateur concerts. An accordionist would play and they would organise dances. How Katya and Zhenya loved to dance! Zhenya was the more outgoing, though Katya was far from timid. When the girls were walking through the catacombs, boys would try to chat them up. It was usually Zhenya who responded, in a humorous, friendly, though never coquettish, manner.155 If a boy was really keen on a girl, he’d spare some of his precious water or bread: boys used to put a frozen piece on the parapet in the girl’s trench.156
For International Women’s Day on 8 March they brought out a wall newspaper and arranged a concert. A couple of days later someone called out to Katya, “Peredera, your sister’s here!” A soldier she knew had brought her sister, Nina, through the dark gallery. It was a miracle. They had not been exchanging letters, and all they knew about each other they heard through their mother. Nina’s unit was in fact just fifty kilometres away, and she heard about Katya’s whereabouts by chance from a wounded soldier at their field hospital. She got herself a pass, hitched a lift for part of the way and walked the rest. In the hour they were able to spend together they talked, shared the heel of a loaf of bread Nina had with her, and Katya’s lunch of millet porridge and herring, before Nina set off back the same way. They would not see each other again until after the war was over.
*
The girl snipers had already spent a month in the catacombs without washing. In the catacombs they would use precious drops of water to rinse their faces, although they longed to drink it. “Why wash? It’s dark, isn’t it?” Zhenya Makeyeva, ever the optimist, would laugh at Katya. Zhenya, of course, was in the same boat. Some of the soldiers knew where water could be found dripping in the caves and would collect it in a shallow bowl; occasionally they would share it with the girls, especially the pretty ones. “Quick, Katya, the boys have brought some water!” Zhenya would call, dangling a flask with water splashing at the bottom of it: a few sips to drink and a handful to wash with. Nevertheless, the girls had given up hope of being able to wash properly.
Something had to be done, and their new commander, Captain Seryogin, a teacher from Moscow, a strapping young man almost two metres tall who had grown a black moustache to make himself look more distinguished, informed their sergeant, Rozalia Reznichenko, that he would permit them to organise a trip to Kolonka to get washed. To get washed! It was beyond their wildest dreams!
Lyuba Visnitskaya and Valya Pustobrikova went out to reconnoitre the ruined village and, incredibly, found a house on the outskirts that had survived unscathed and had an old lady living in it.157 She was kind and gladly agreed to help. The next morning the barber did his best to bring their hair back under control, and after lunch they set off.158 They crouched down and dashed in short bursts over open ground. The front was only a kilometre away. “Auntie” Fenya made them a bathroom in her warm home and filled two wooden barrels with water, warming one with hot stones from the stove. Their bath, with real soap and clean underwear issued by Sergeant Reznichenko, was something they never forgot.159 “Perhaps this will not be the last time we meet,” the old lady said when they parted.160 Alas, they were never able to wash in the village again. The next time they returned, the old lady was dead and, instead of a face, her white headscarf framed a hideous mess where it had been gnawed by rats.161
*
The men around them were forever suffering from a dearth of tobacco, while the girls hankered after sweet things. The only sweet thing they got, however, and that only rarely, was sugar. Sergeant Reznichenko issued it just twice a month, and the girls dipped their bread in it and gobbled it up immediately.162 They were generally very hungry in the catacombs, which made all the more memorable a New Year’s gift they received from Krasnodar.
The deputy platoon commander and Sergeant Reznichenko were invited to H.Q. to receive two parcels from the Krasnodar district committee of the Young Communist League. Throughout the war, gift parcels of this kind were sent to the front in large numbers from across the U.S.S.R. The initiative was widely promoted in newspapers and on the radio, and people in the rear sacrificed their last pennies, donating money for the war effort and sending clothes and food to the soldiers. “We put mittens, socks, cigarettes and warm clothes in the parcels. We even sent parcels of potatoes. I sacrificed my brand new felt boots and wrote a note: ‘For a young nurse, so she does not catch cold,’” Anisia Komaneva from Siberia recalled.163 Peasant Woman – a popular Soviet women’s magazine where articles on high-achieving women in agriculture and girls on the front line alternated with patterns, recipes and poems – wrote, “Every collective farm worker sends warm clothes to the army with love: her contribution to victory.”164 In the rear, food was issued on the basis of ration coupons, but people sent bread rusks, sweets, and even roast chickens or meat, to the front. In a cold climate, that was a practical possibility. Cured bacon fat was the most prized gift of all, it was delicious and essential, as they always lacked fat in their diet. These parcels were a wonderful morale-booster for soldiers at the front, as were letters written to them by girls they had never met. Many bachelors returned from the front to marry girls they knew only through correspondence.
The parcels the girl snipers received at H.Q. contained white bread, two rings of homemade sausage, knitted socks and mittens, undercollars, handkerchiefs and also, completely unbelievably, sweet homemade biscuits, face powder and perfume! The new year was still far off, but they all had a biscuit to try, and the bottle of perfume was passed from hand to hand.165 Shortly afterwards, the girls found a battered tin of “fascist” Nivea cream in a German trench. They couldn’t believe their luck!166 Katya Peredera and many of the others had never used face cream before. They made the jar last for a month, all of them rubbing in just a tiny bit at a time.
Katya also remembered that new year for the fact that she wished a happy one to the Germans she had recently been shooting at. An enquiry came round to see whether anyone had learned German, and Katya immediately said yes. She had studied it at school and come top of the class. Even in the lower grades she had peered over her older sisters’ shoulders when they were reading, and had memorised words. She wasn’t good at speaking it, but was certainly capable of reading a leaflet into a megaphone. The girls were indignant at the arrogance of the Germans, who dropped propaganda leaflets and shouted, “Surrender, you all kaput!” The Russians gave as good as they got. Katya quickly forgot the text she had had to read out, but it was along the lines of, “Kaput yourselves! Surrender!” And “Happy New Year!”167
*
The new year of 1944 started dreadfully for Katya Peredera’s platoon. An attempted offensive on 10 January failed. Height 33.3 changed hands three times and when, on the third day of fighting, the Germans brought tanks into the battle, the advance came to a halt.168 169 The sniper platoon, joining the attack alongside the infantry, lost six of its members: Anya Pechyonkina and Nina Krivulyak, both from Kropotkin, were killed and Galya Koldeyeva, Klava Kaleganova, Valya Pustobrikova and Shura Khomenko were seriously wounded.170 The rest were still in the catacombs, greatly saddened by the deaths and injuries of their comrades. The place felt empty. They just wanted to attack, to get away from their claustrophobic, sinister quarters once and for all, to drink as much water as they wanted, to be properly fed. And to avenge their dead friends.
The Young Communist League organiser assured them that an offensive was imminent. During her talks she told them about the situation at the fronts, the military operations of the Allies, and the deeds of Soviet heroes. She told them the tale of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and read them an article about Natasha Kovshova and Masha Polivanova, and Katya remembered their names.
The decree awarding them the title of Hero of the Soviet Union had been published only on 14 February 1943, six months after their deaths. It appeared thanks to the efforts of Klavdia Nikolaeva, an old Bolshevik and the wife of Yemelian Yaroslavsky, the main Soviet propagandist. Klavdia Nikolaeva had “adopted” the division in which Natasha and Masha fought, and on a visit in late 1942 was told the story of the heroic deaths of these two girl snipers.
The girls had been fighting since 1941 in 3 Moscow Communist Division, where they had enlisted as volunteers. Natasha came from a family of revolutionaries. A fanatical member of the Young Communist League, she did not think twice about volunteering for the front. Masha, a simple country girl and, according to those who knew her, not very educated, admired Natasha and followed her in all things, including going to the front.
The girls repeatedly tried to volunteer at the army enlistment office, and were accepted in July 1941 when, recognised as being among the best Osoaviakhim sharpshooters, they were selected for training at sniper school. Nina Aralovets, Natasha Kovshova’s mother, saw her daughter off to the front on 16 October, a day when the Germans had advanced very close to Moscow. Their column left that same afternoon.171 It included two other girls who were soon to become a sniper pair at the front: Nina Solovey and Ziba Ganieva. Nina joined the volunteer battalion along with 300 boys and girls from her aircraft factory. Nina and her friend, Katya Budanova, were active members of their factory’s ski team, and also of a flying club. She wanted not only to build planes but also to fly them (Katya, as an experienced pilot, was enlisted at the beginning of the war in a fighter regiment. She was killed in summer 1943). Nina became a nurse, because that was the only profession the call-up committee would agree to enlist her in. Fearless, energetic, and with great physical stamina, she was an ideal volunteer. She mastered the art of sniping after arriving at the front. Ziba Ganieva was a beauty, “slim as a wraith and with the face of Nefertiti”, and she had been studying ballet at drama college. In autumn 1941 she was sent to the front as a nurse.172
Their brigade was on the North-Western Front and participated in the offensive of November–December 1941 that forced the Germans back from Moscow. Natasha Kovshova and Masha Polivanova gained a reputation as skilled snipers, Natasha being seen as brave to the point of recklessness. She was a particularly accurate markswoman, able to hit an enemy soldier in the head at 300 metres. Her comrades were greatly impressed by the corpse of a German Natasha had killed, which they were able to inspect after their unit took a village. The bullet had hit him precisely on the bridge of his nose.173
Fighting continued for six months in the same district near Demyansk, where troops of the North-Western Front succeeded for the first time in the war in encircling six German divisions, although they were unable to force the Germans to surrender. By May 1942, the encirclement failed, and the troops made repeated attempts to close the ring again in the face of German counter-attacks. Bouts of fighting alternated with periods of respite, and during these lulls the two girls spent weeks doing the real work of a sniper, “hunting the enemy”, which took place far behind the front line. In the summer Natasha wrote to her mother that they were living in a shelter with a sign reading “Dacha No. 13”, among birch trees, as if they were holidaying in the countryside surrounded by an abundance of berries and mushrooms.174
Nina Aralovets received her daughter’s last letter on 13 August. Natasha wrote, “We have made a major move, about 115 kilometres, and are now attacking in a different place and with another army. It is very swampy here and we are in mud up to our knees.” Responding to her mother, who was embarrassed that Natasha was sending her money, she added, “As it’s possible for you to buy something, and something so delicious too, it’s better if you have the money rather than me. I won’t need it till after the war, and then I’d like to buy a really nice dress!”175
Natasha Kovshova and Masha Polivanova died on 14 August near the village of Sutoki in Novgorod Province. It is not known exactly what happened. The girls and a male sniper, Novikov, were covering a group of riflemen holding back German counter-attacks. At some point, all three of them found themselves wounded and on their own: either the riflemen had retreated and they had not had time to do so themselves, or all the men had been killed. Novikov was shot in the stomach and the Germans took him for dead. That night he crawled back to the Soviet lines and told them that when the Germans approached the girls had blown up themselves and several of the enemy with a grenade. One of the girls’ friends, Nurse Sonya Naidyonova, wrote to tell their families what had happened.176
Natasha and Masha’s fellow hunters, Ziba Ganieva and Nina Solovey, had been put out of action even before this. Ziba was carried, seriously wounded, from the battlefield by three comrades. She left hospital disabled and, realising there could be no return to drama school, became an academic (though this did not prevent her from securing a role on one occasion in a movie).177
Nina Solovey, recovering from severe wounds, declared her willingness to return to the front. She was sent to the Women’s Sniper School in Podolsk. On arrival she was instructed to prepare the next cohort of female snipers for the front, of which she had first-hand knowledge, and then go with them into combat as their commander.