In mid-March 1944, the day finally came when the second cohort was ready to be sent to the front. Some of the top brass delivered speeches to the departing corporals – the rank to which they had all been promoted – who now stood in dress uniform in perfect ranks like real soldiers, and in addition Commissar Nikiforova spoke, as always from the heart, words they were long to remember.
A couple of days after this official farewell, Anya Mulatova’s company was lined up with their full complement of equipment: new sniper rifles slung over their shoulders, kitbags, entrenching tools, and a cartridge pouch on their belts. Gas masks were issued later, at the front, but very soon discarded and their convenient containers used for all sorts of more useful things. (The soldiers joked that when the sergeant asked, “What does a gas mask consist of?” he was answered, “A packet of tobacco, a chunk of bread, spare leg wrappings . . .”)178
They marched in rank to the station, past the grey wooden huts in which almost all the residents of Podolsk then lived, before being loaded on to a troop train in total darkness – the whole operation was being carried out under conditions of strict secrecy. The officer from the sniper school who had been accompanying them handed a package to the commandant of the train. The girls were bundled into a goods wagon and were soon on their way. They fuelled up the iron stove with bits of wood that someone had left for them in the wagon, warmed themselves, and fell asleep in the bunks.179
They travelled for several days, and were fed the standard army fare – it was time to get used to it – millet porridge and dried bread rusks. Some of the girls, however, shared some very rare treats with their friends: American sausage, corned beef, and an unfamiliar kind of hard biscuit. Those who had come top in the final tests at the school were awarded special rations of US products that had begun to arrive under the Lend-Lease Act. Klava Panteleyeva split her “American present” 50/50 with her sniper partner, Marusya Chigvintseva. If Klava had been a Communist Party member, she would have been presented with a specially engraved rifle, but even so she was very pleased with the gift, the recognition of her excellence and, of course, the delicacies.180
Klava, who was not a tall girl, had a round, sweet, serious face and beautiful grey eyes, and had volunteered for the army the moment she turned seventeen. She went to the military-training-for-all classes at a gas mask factory in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, where she worked from the age of fifteen in order to get the worker’s ration card of 700 grams of bread per day.
Klava and other girls were told in the factory’s Young Communist League committee about the sniper school in Podolsk, which was selecting its second cohort, and asked whether they wanted to volunteer. Many, including Klava, did. They agreed to send her there when she said she would shortly be eighteen.
Her mother was not at home when Klava left. Like all the women around them, she had gone into the countryside to exchange clothes for bread. Her father knew he could not stop Klava, the youngest of eleven children in a working-class family, from going to war, even though she was only seventeen. His parting words to her were, “Klava, I beg you, don’t take up smoking there!” Later, Klava recognised he had not only been referring to smoking: in those days it was considered a terrible disgrace to lose your virginity before you were married, but that was too shameful to mention.
Some time later, her mother came to visit Klava at the sniper school. Her most valuable gift to her daughter was Psalm 90, “A Living Refuge”, written out by hand.181 This prayer was believed to afford powerful protection. Klava’s father was an old communist. He had joined the Party while serving in the imperial army in 1914, but her mother remained deeply religious and all their children were baptised. Young Communist League member Klava believed in God, and saw nothing incongruous in that. That is how she had been raised, by her father with his faith in communism, and by her mother with her faith in Christ. In Klava’s heart the two allegiances co-existed in perfect harmony. Throughout the war, Klava carried a piece of paper with a prayer in her breast pocket, and believed that Psalm 90 saved her life on at least three occasions. During the conflict, such prayers, copied by a mother’s hand, or small icons, were carried in their breast pockets by many communists and Young Communist League members: after twenty-five years of communism, the Orthodox faith and its related traditions were alive and well.
Klava, the youngest in the company, applied herself very diligently to her studies, but her shooting was decidedly indifferent. She kept missing the target, and was even threatened with expulsion. At this, Barantseva, the section commander, took matters in hand and decided to give her individual lessons, with the result that Klava became one of the best at shooting, both while standing and lying prone on the ground.
Klava remembered her American present later. There had also been sausage and cheese, biscuits and chocolate. She and Masha shared it, just as they shared everything at sniper school. While they were there, Marusya fell ill and Klava went to visit her. Her friend came out to her bearing a very, very small piece of white bread, something given only to patients. How long it was since Klava had last seen that. She tried to refuse, of course, but Marusya was having none of it.
*
Not everyone in the second cohort went to the front immediately. As with the other units that had been trained previously, some were kept behind to become squad commanders, and the best markswomen were sent to be trained in the instructors’ company so they could be deployed to the front three months later as sergeants. Klava Loginova was very upset, because this meant she was parted from her sniper partner, Valya Volokhova. It had never occurred to them that they might not go to the front together. Klava’s feelings were shared by most of the girls in the instructors’ company, the best sharpshooters of the second cohort. It was the spring of 1944, the war situation had changed radically, and victory seemed within striking distance. What if they missed out on dealing the death blow to the Germans?
On the pages of Peasant Woman, celebrity sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko called on women on the collective farms to work harder. “Every day we hear of new victories of the Red Army against the German occupiers. Our troops have raised the Siege of Leningrad, destroyed the enemy’s armies at Stalingrad and, rapidly advancing, the Red Army has liberated Nalchik, Stavropol, Pyatigorsk, Armavir, Krasnodar, Kursk, Rostov-on-Don, Voroshilovgrad, many other towns and thousands of villages . . . The enemy has been severely wounded and is bleeding heavily, but is not yet finished.”182
Pavlichenko suggested that women working in agriculture in place of their menfolk should keep the same sort of tally of their victories against the enemy as the soldiers were doing – by counting up the work targets they met during the spring sowing. Nineteen forty-four must be the year in which the Germans were totally driven off Soviet territory. Already the Caucasus had been liberated and an offensive was under way in Crimea, the Siege of Leningrad had been lifted, parts of Byelorussia had been freed and two thirds of the occupied territories had been cleared of Germans. Any day now, the Allies would be opening a second front. The mood across the country, despite all the hardships, was now quite different from what it had been a year before.
There were, of course, some who were in no great hurry to put their lives at risk: not every trainee sniper in the second cohort longed to be sent into battle. There was a parting of the ways for two friends in Anya Mulatova’s company, both Ritas. Rita Moskva was placed in the instructors’ company along with Klava Loginova. Rita Barkova, however, as tall as Rita Moskva, a beautiful girl with a beautiful voice who always led the singing in their company, was retained at the school. All the girls in her platoon knew and, of course, gossipped among themselves, about the fact that Rita Barkova was now the mistress of one of the important generals involved with the school, who would turn up for the shooting practice and reviews. “All rather sordid,” Anya thought to herself.183
The girls were still very young, and it never crossed the minds of most of them that in this war they would have to “fight on two fronts”; that they would be the object of continual attentions from men, often obnoxious; that when they arrived at the front, some platoons could expect humiliating “parades” (they were told to stand in a line so that, as they would learn later, the staff officers could inspect them and select the prettiest ones to work at staff headquarters, so that the officers would be advantageously positioned to start an affair). The girls would have been in less of a hurry to get to the front if they had known that some of them would be raped not by Germans but by their own side – many would decide the lesser evil was to embark on an intimate relationship with one of the commanders so as to be shielded from all the others.
Masha Maximova was disturbed by hints in the letters she received from her fiancé, Vanya. In almost every letter he repeated that the front was no place for her, or, indeed, any other girl. “You cannot imagine how bad and downright unpleasant you would find it here,” he wrote; any more than that would have been erased by the censor. Masha was not stupid and had seen quite enough in her poor, working-class district of Kaluga to have a fair idea of what he was talking about. She simply did not believe the women who came from the front to the school to tell the trainees how great it was there, and so was not at all upset when she heard she would be staying behind as a squad leader for the next, third, cohort.184
By the third year of the war, however, a majority of the girls had not only patriotic motives but also personal scores to settle with the Germans. Some had lived in occupied territory and seen the enemy at close quarters; some had had to leave their families behind; others had lost people close to them; while some, like Lida Bakieva, had had no letters from their husbands at the front for an ominously long time.
Lida, a slim, athletic girl with dark skin and black hair, went to the front from Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. In 1944, she was just nineteen years old. At seventeen she had married a kind, cheery orphan, a cook only a couple of years older than herself. His name was Satai Bakiev but his friends called him Volodya. Lida was able to live only a few months with her husband before war broke out and he was immediately conscripted. Would she have gone to the front if Volodya had not preceded her? Of course. Lida, an energetic Young Communist League member, could not picture herself refusing to come to the aid of her country in its titanic struggle. She was particularly pleased, though, that after sniper school she was sent to the Second Byelorussian Front, the very combat theatre from which she had received her first, and last, letter from Volodya. It had been sent long ago, but then . . . nothing. Perhaps he was wounded, and she would find him in a hospital? If he had been killed, she would make the Germans pay for it and bring victory closer.
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Commissar Yekaterina Nikiforova escorted the first cohort to the front, but sent the second on their way only with words of encouragement. Former trainees often recalled the consideration this calm, firm woman had shown them; they remembered the talks she had given them, about being a sniper, about war, politics, life, and about Zoya.
The story of an unknown girl, who told her German interrogators her name was Tanya, was related to Pyotr Lidov, a reporter, by a peasant in a liberated village in Volokolamsk District in Moscow Province. He lost no time in writing about her. “Tanya” was captured in the village of Petrishchevo and tortured. The Germans demanded that she should betray the other members of her group of saboteurs and her leaders. The partisan was stripped and lashed, paraded about for several hours barefoot and in only her underwear in the biting frost. Her nails were pulled out, but she admitted nothing and betrayed nobody. Lidov wrote that when the girl was being led to the gallows, she urged the assembled villagers to fight, and shouted at the Germans, “No matter how many of us you hang, you can’t hang us all!” After Lidov’s report was published, those words resounded throughout the U.S.S.R.
“Tanya” was the first Soviet girl saint, an iconic figure whom the ideologists urged other girls to emulate. Listening to Young Communist League political meetings taking an oath in the presence of their comrades to be as dauntless as “Tanya”, young girls devoted to their Motherland and the ideals of communism measured themselves against this blood-curdling role model, and wondered whether they would be brave enough to withstand torture and not betray their comrades; whether, like Tanya, they would be capable of threatening the Germans as they faced the gallows. It was a question which kept them awake at night, tainted their lives, and to which there could be no answer.
It was soon discovered that Tanya’s real name was Zoya Kosmodemianskaya and that she was just eighteen years old. Lidov wrote a more detailed article, accompanied by photographs of Zoya’s execution, which had been found on a dead German soldier. All the newspapers wrote about her, and penned editorials calling for Zoya to be avenged. Everybody knew what she looked like, because all the press printed a pre-war portrait photograph, always the same one, which had been chosen by Zoya’s mother, a schoolteacher. In reality the story was more complicated, with any elements that contradicted the propaganda story omitted.
Zoya was an anxious, romantic, very vulnerable girl, a teenager who had spent a month in a clinic for nervous illnesses after a conflict with her classmates. She was a fanatical Young Communist League member and, at the outbreak of war, felt an overwhelming desire to go and fight the Germans. Her wish was granted on 31 October 1941 when, with a number of other volunteers, she was enlisted in a sabotage and reconnaissance group. They were given just a couple of days’ training and then, on 4 November, deployed in the vicinity of Volokolamsk, near Moscow. There they laid mines on the roads and gathered intelligence, but their main mission was something different. On 17 November, Order No. 428 was issued by Supreme Command Headquarters, instructing the army to deprive the German army “of the ability to find accommodation in villages or towns, to drive the German invaders out of all centres of population into the cold of the open countryside, to smoke them out of all premises and warm places of shelter and force them to freeze to death in the open”. To achieve this, the army was to “burn and destroy all centres of population for a distance of 40–60 kilometres behind the German front lines and for a distance of 20–30 kilometres to the right and left of roads”. The total inhumanity of this order is extraordinary.
Winter that year was exceptionally severe, with frosts of about minus 40 degrees. The villages near the front were by now inhabited only by old men, women, and children who had seen soldiers, first Soviet and then German, take all their stores of food, requisition their horses, slaughter their cows and eat their chickens, not leaving them even seeds to sow the following spring. They were now also, at the beginning of this fearsome winter, to be deprived of their homes.
Without the slightest qualms about the reasonableness of the order, the members of Zoya’s group, armed with bottles of inflammable liquid and pistols, made a start on 27 November 1941 by burning down three houses in the village of Petrishchevo. Their instructions were to completely gut ten villages within a week. One member of the group decided not to wait at the agreed rendezvous for his companions and returned safely, but a second was captured. Zoya, finding herself alone, decided to go back to the village and continue the arson. By now, however, both the Germans and the local people, who were not in favour of the Supreme Command’s decision to destroy their houses, were on the lookout. When Zoya attempted the following evening to set fire to a barn belonging to a peasant called Sviridov, he summoned the Germans, who captured the partisan and tortured her at length. The two peasants whose homes she had burned down were eager to join in the torture. Even the next day, as Zoya was being led to her execution with a sign round her neck proclaiming “Arsonist of homes”, Smirnova, one of these women, beat her legs with a stick and shouted, “Who were you harming? You burned my house down and did nothing to the Germans!” After the village was liberated, both victims of the sabotage and Sviridov were shot. Vasiliy Klubkov, the only member of Zoya’s group to have got back alive, was also shot. Before that he had been beaten into confessing that he had betrayed Zoya. The intention was to include this detail in the propaganda account of her death, but in the event it was not used, the authors having changed their minds.
One of the witnesses gave this description of Zoya Kosmodemianskaya’s execution:
They led her to the gallows, pinioning her arms. She walked steadily with her head held high, silent and proud. They brought her to the gallows where there were a lot of Germans and villagers. She was led there and they ordered people to move back, to make the circle round the gallows bigger, and started photographing her. They put a bag of [the incendiary] bottles near her. She shouted, “Citizens! Do not stand there! Do not watch! You need to help us to fight! This is my death. This is my achievement!” One officer punched her and others shouted at her. Then she said, “Comrades, victory will be ours. German soldiers, surrender before it is too late.” She said all this while she was being photographed. Then they put a box there. Without any command she got up on the box herself. A German came and started putting the noose on her. She shouted at that time: “No matter how many of us you hang, you can’t hang us all. There are 170 million of us. For me, my comrades will take revenge on you.” She said that when she already had the noose round her neck. She was going to say something more but at this moment they took the box from under her feet and she was left hanging. She took hold of the rope but a German hit her hands. After that, everybody went away.
Kosmodemianskaya’s body was left hanging on the gallows for about a month, and was repeatedly desecrated by German soldiers passing through the village. At New Year 1942, drunk Germans tore the clothes off the corpse and further defiled it, stabbing it and cutting off the breasts. The next day the Germans gave the order to remove the gallows, and the body was buried by local people outside the village. It rested there only temporarily, and was later reburied in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.