The wounded soldier brought in during the night to the regimental doctor’s dugout was no longer in need of help. The body in its bloodsoaked greatcoat was left at the entrance until morning. When Anya Mulatova came out of a neighbouring dugout during the night for a pee, she saw it, already rigid, the bloody coat frozen stiff. Anya, who had had a horror of blood ever since she was little, felt sick.185
In the morning, when the millet porridge was being served for breakfast, she found she could not eat it. As soon as she put a spoonful in her mouth she imagined it was full of warm blood. The same thing happened the following day and the next. Anya’s partner, Tasya Pegeshova, took matters into her own hands and told the doctor, who soon found a cure.186 He rolled a cigarette and told Anya, who had never smoked before and never did afterwards, to take a deep drag. The strong tobacco made her cough terribly and she “evacuated through every orifice”. The tobacco trumped her aversion to food, and a year later Anya had no problem bayoneting a bloated German corpse “to let the gas out”.187
It seems you can get used to anything, even to corpses in varying states of decomposition, which at first seem completely hideous. In those March days of 1944, somewhere near Anya in Byelorussia, Zoya Alexandrova, a young nurse, took advantage of a lull in the fighting to move a little away from the front and into the woods. She found herself in a place where there had been a battle long before. All around, powdered with snow, were the frozen corpses of Soviet soldiers. They did not disturb her in the least, and indeed few things could have prevented her at that moment from relieving herself. “I would have done it even if there had been shrapnel flying everywhere,” she recalled many years later. She took off her quilted jacket and other clothing, exposing her body, which, as if covered in pepper, was “burning from the bites of innumerable lice”.188 She did not try to squash them but just scraped them off her clothes with her nails and threw them into the snow. At that moment, nothing in the world seemed more urgent.
The dead soldiers that lay around Zoya had been here since since the first, failed, offensive here in the winter. Klava Panteleeva’s platoon arrived at the 3rd Byelorussian Front at a time when the opposing armies were occupying stable defensive positions. This is when snipers become indispensable. Their work constantly undermines the enemy’s nerves, creating a relentless tension.
*
March was coming to an end, but the snow was still on the ground in Smolensk Province. Slowly moving in the direction of Byelorussia, Klava Panteleyeva and her comrades saw snow-covered woods and snowdrifts through the train windows. When the platoon got off the train, a long way from the front as it transpired, and was loaded on to a truck, a terrible blizzard started. There was so much snow! The truck was no match for it and for most of the way they had to push it.189 How long did they “ride” like that? A day? Two? Endlessly, it seemed to Klava.
They finally reached their regiment, by now close to the front line, and were allocated dugouts, a new form of accommodation they found distinctly unpleasant. The dugouts were dark and damp, dank, in fact. The girls did not lose heart, but lit a fire, lay down on their “bunks”, which consisted of two long pieces of wood with sticks nailed across them and fir branches laid on top. That night they slept the sleep of the just.
Two days later, with the snowstorm subsiding, it was time to familiarise themselves with the German front line. They were issued white camouflage suits, and bandages to wrap round their rifles so they did not show black against the snow. They were given breakfast early in the morning: bread and porridge, and an open sandwich with a slice of American sausage for lunch.190 “Not over-generous,” the girls decided, but it was only recently that this American lend-lease sausage had appeared. How many people were to remember it ruefully in the hungry post-war years! Before that, anyone who could not get their lunch from the field kitchen had to make do with bread, dried rusks, a frozen food bar you had to gnaw at, or nothing.
The German positions, it was explained to Klava and her companions (one squad of twelve snipers), were only 300 metres or so away. They would have to crawl to their trenches on their bellies, but where exactly were they? Everything was deep in snow. Nadya Loginova crawled by mistake in the direction of the Germans, on to no-man’s-land, which was mined. What should they do? They were afraid to shout, scared of everything on this first day. Someone did, nevertheless, call loudly, “Nadya! Nadya! This way!” Nadya came back and they all finally made it to their snow-covered trench.191
Something similar happened in another sniper platoon, but ended tragically. Two pairs, Serafima Vasina and Nadya Selyanina, Lena Milko and Valya Shchelkanova, were ordered, immediately after arriving at the front, to monitor the forward position of the German defences. They stood in the trench all day, peering through the sights of their rifles and, when darkness fell, headed back home. Serafima recalled, we “were so tired we lost our sense of direction and headed in completely the wrong direction, straight towards the fascist trenches”.192 Why there was no one more senior to guide them is unclear. Where was the platoon commander? Many girl snipers recall it was uncommon to see a platoon commander on the front line.
Serafima remembers, “We were walking quietly, not speaking, and suddenly there was a terrible explosion under Valya Shchelkanova’s feet.” She had stepped on a mine. Flares hung in the air above their heads and the Germans opened fire with mortars. The girls bound up what was left of Valya’s leg and “pressed ourselves to the ground, not knowing whether there were more mines nearby”. The wounded Valya was groaning and the others urged her to keep quiet in order not to reveal their position, which would be fatal. She fell silent, having evidently lost consciousness. The girls lay there terrified, not daring to crawl back. Suddenly they heard a voice, “Okay, lassies, we’ve come to take you home.” Several reconnaissance soldiers had come to the rescue. They took Valya and carried her very quietly back. The rest followed in their footsteps. When Valya came to, she begged them to shoot her. She did not want to live without a leg. Then she lost consciousness again.
*
That first day, as the girls in Klava Panteleyeva’s platoon later regretfully recalled, “we could easily have killed a dozen Germans.”193 After several days of snow there were drifts everywhere, and the Germans, completely unafraid, were calmly clearing snow in broad daylight. But shooting a person for the first time is not as easy as shooting at a target on the firing range. Standing at one arm’s length from each another, Klava and Marusya only observed the Germans through their sights. Neither could bring themselves to pull the trigger.
Zina Gavrilova and Tanya Fyodorova, however, opened their tally that first day. These girls were older: Zina had come to the school from a partisan group, and Tanya was the platoon’s Young Communist League organiser. They had not been scared. They related how “Zina’s German” had come out in just his underpants that morning to wash. After Zina’s shot killed him, he lay there all day in full view of everyone. The Germans waited until after dark to remove his body.
That evening, when everyone was exchanging their experiences in the dugout, Klava and Marusya had nothing to say. They cursed themselves: “What cowards! What did we come to the front for anyway?” Why had others opened their tally and they had failed to? The next time they were taken back to the trench from which they always operated, they knew they were not just there to wait and observe. You see one, you shoot him! The first German Klava got in her sights was a soldier clearing the snow away from a machine-gun point. She saw an embrasure in the German parapet and a machine-gun mount, and then the German rose up into sight to clear away snow. Klava fired and he fell on to the parapet. He was immediately pulled back down by the legs. That day Marusya too opened her tally, as did many others. The Germans stopped clearing snow during the day, as did the Soviet soldiers. In any case, it soon melted.
The liberation of Byelorussia was hastened by the work of a huge army of partisans. By 1944, 143,000 people were said to be fighting in numerous companies (although, as this is a Soviet estimate, it may be inflated). Half the territory of Byelorussia was under partisan control. They blew up tens of thousands of railway tracks, causing major disruption to German lines of transportation. Without waiting for the arrival of the regular Red Army they liberated villages and hamlets and dozens of district centres.
Women and children fought alongside the men. In addition to women from the surrounding villages (many of whom had no other option), the partisans included women who were Young Communist League or Party workers in Byelorussia. Hundreds of Young Communist League girls were parachuted in as radio operators to help the partisans. Many were dropped off-target or suffered injuries and fell into the hands of the Germans. Almost none of them had any training in parachute jumping, which did nothing to improve the success rate. Twenty-year-old Klava Romashova was one of the luckier ones.
When, in autumn 1942, she was parachuted into Bryansk Province, all she knew was how to fold a parachute. She was helped to jump from the plane by the simple expedient of a shove in the back, and her main parachute opened automatically. It occurred to her later that if anything had gone wrong with it, she would have died because nobody had told her how to operate the emergency parachute. She drifted – weighed down by an assault rifle, three magazines for it, a walkie-talkie radio and power source, and a greatcoat – towards bonfires lit by the partisans, but before she could descend on to her target, her parachute snagged on a pine tree. Cutting through the risers, Klava climbed down and crawled to one side, blissfully unaware what an easy target the parachute hanging in the tree above would have made her for any Germans in the area. Fortunately, she was greeted only by the partisans, who saw her parachute and began calling, “Radio operator! Radio operator!”
Klava remained silent, fearing that these might be Byelorussian collaborators working for the Germans, but in the end one of them tripped over her and shouted, “Here she is!” The twenty-year-old was offered “partisan grapes”, a bunch of frozen rowanberries. This berry, normally unbearably bitter-tasting, becomes quite palatable after it has been frosted. A few hours later, Klava made contact with Moscow for the first time.
Talking about it many decades later, Klava Romashova who, before the war, had been a Young Communist League secretary in Perm, was surprised how brave she and her comrades had been when they were young. When asked at the end of their radio operator’s course whether any of them would like to stay on to work as instructors instead of flying behind enemy lines, they all turned the offer down, except for one girl whose name, Klava remembered, was Bolshakova.
At first, everything in the partisan company was very strange to a city girl like herself: the people, the food, the living conditions.194 On top of the still-warm ashes of a big bonfire they would spread fir branches, and erect tents on them in which they could sleep warmly even during that particularly cold winter. Out on a mission with the commander, she spent one night in a peasant hut and contracted typhoid fever. She was still very weak when the Germans launched an operation against the partisans and they had to move elsewhere. They put her on a horse (for the first and last time in her life), and she felt it was a miracle she managed to stay in the saddle. Her trials did not end there. The Germans drove the partisans back to a marsh and they only managed to escape with the help of local villagers who guided them. They put their feet in the villagers’ footprints, each of whom was testing the way with a stick. At the end of that crossing, Klava suffered concussion that left her deaf for a time, and although she got some of her hearing back later, she was no longer able to work as a radio operator. In 1944, after the partisans merged with regular army units and began advancing with them, she was sent to the rear.
*
In mid-March 1944, a Soviet offensive on the Vitebsk–Orsha line was called off. The army was saving its strength for a major operation, subsequently named “Bagration”. For the time being, both sides were occupying defensive positions, which meant the snipers were much in demand. The day after they arrived in the village of Krasnoye, near Orsha, their platoon commander, Senior Lieutenant Rakityansky, took the twelve girls in Anya Mulatova’s squad out to familiarise them with the front line of defence. Their commander, a short, skinny lad with typically Jewish features, seemed very mature, although, at twenty-two or twenty-three, he was only a few years older than they were themselves. At their first meeting, when Rakityansky came from the regiment to collect them from the school, this already seasoned senior lieutenant seemed to them a battle-scarred front-line fighter. There was a huge gap between an officer and them, mere corporals. Rakityansky treated his subordinates confidently, politely but firmly.195 He was not a sniper and had gone to the front immediately after infantry college, but he taught them a lot.
On their first day at the front, the girls got up long before dawn. The sky was still starry, and all around was a “solemn stillness”, as if the enemy must be very far away. The snow crunched; the path meandered down into a hollow, then up again. In a dell Rakityansky suddenly whispered, “We need to take this next stretch at the double, crouching down. It is exposed to fire.” They ran across, and continued along communication trenches that were about one and a half metres deep. Rakityansky brought them to the observation post of the commander of the infantry company on whose territory their platoon would be working.196
His dugout was solidly constructed, with four layers of logs in the roof and a tarpaulin serving as a door. Though it was cosy and had a stove heating it, they did not stay there long.197 After checking the passwords with the company commander, Rakityansky took the girls on to the embrasures in the trenches. This was where they would be “hunting” from. Anya’s partner, Tasya Pegeshova, wanted to get a better view of the German positions than she could through the embrasure and stuck her head above the parapet. Rakityansky was alert and immediately tugged her greatcoat to get her head down. He reminded her that the enemy was observing them too.198
Anya stood at an embrasure a few metres from Tasya so they would not need to shout to each other, and peered through the scope. Everything looked different, not at all as it had at the school. Immediately before them was no-man’s-land, then, about 200 metres further on, the first line of the German defences: several rows of barbed-wire entanglements with “Bruno Spirals”* between them. Beyond that was the dark edge of a forest, a slight haze just above the ground, and nothing else.
They peered out until their eyes hurt, or until they had to take a walk along the trench to warm up. It was still very cold. They had not been able to dry their boots, damp from yesterday, and these froze stiff. Their index fingers, pressed all the time on the trigger, grew numb with cold.199 They stood there till dusk without a making a kill and, exhausted, frozen and hungry, went back to their dugout. Sitting themselves down with the other girls around the stove, they took off their boots and white camouflage suits and laid them out to dry for the next shift, who would be on duty again tomorrow. They took off their greatcoats, ate their dinner and, without undressing, collapsed on to their bunks. When one of the girls began monotonously snoring, Anya, warming up, felt herself also rapidly drifting off into sleep.
Anya and Tasya opened their tallies the next day they went hunting – simultaneously and from a considerable distance. No sooner had they started watching at dawn than they saw two German soldiers in the distance carrying a box or a large jar with handles. At first the soldiers were far away, just two black dots, and the girls decided to wait. The Germans disappeared into a communication trench and Anya concluded that the moment had passed. Then, however, the pair reappeared out of a hollow, walking fully upright. They were now about 600 metres away and within range. Anya and Tasya fired at the same time, and both Germans fell as if they had been scythed down. Tasya had a clean kill with “her fascist”, but Anya’s was writhing in pain on the ground. They needed now to move to a different embrasure, because they had been taught that you could only shoot once from a particular spot if you did not want to be hunted down yourself.200
Anya realised later that the first time she shot a German had been relatively easy, because of the distance. “As if it was just target practice,” she recalled. She was feeling on top of the world at having made a start. Killing people at a distance is easier on your conscience; shooting at 200 metres, a sniper can clearly see their victim’s face in the telescopic sight. Just two months later, Anya had to shoot a German at five metres, and afterwards was tormented by the thought of him, and even dreamed about him.
*
For those of Anya’s classmates from sniper school who had a clear sight of the face of their first German, killing or wounding that person was deeply upsetting. Firing a “good shot” at a human being was not, the sniper suddenly realised, anything like the hundreds of other shots they had fired during training. This human figure, this head or chest, was not a target but someone just as alive as you were yourself. Soviet propaganda, which dehumanised the invaders, repeatedly emphasising the terrible crimes they’d committed against the Russia people, was highly effective. It played a hugely important part in defeating the Germans, and it called on Russians to kill and kill again. Even if you killed only a single German, you would bring victory closer and save the lives of Soviet people. Ilya Ehrenburg’s devastating, passionate articles told soldiers repeatedly that the quickest way to victory, to liberate their native land and rescue its people, was to physically destroy the enemy, and the more the better.
*
Tonya Makhlyagina, a slim, fair-haired, pretty girl from the Urals, looked as if she was the sister of her sniper partner, Tosya Bratishcheva, except that Tosya was dark. They were similar in character too, both cheery optimists. Neither was immediately able to open their tally, and both were upset. Other girls already had, but they were afraid to pull the trigger and, in the evenings, after a day’s stalking, they cursed themselves. Finally, success! Tonya Makhlyagina shot a German who appeared above the parapet and she saw him fall. Her delight took her breath away. She had hit the target! But she was immediately crushed by a terrible thought: “That was somebody’s father, and I have killed him!”201 She had noticed the German had a moustache and was middle-aged. Tonya, an orphan who had been brought up by her grandmother, suddenly realised that her shot might have just orphaned other children. Yes, he was the enemy, but he had not fired first: she had. He should still be alive, she thought, and burst into tears.202
*
Spring had finally arrived. On the Second Byelorussian Front the snow was melting, and revealing terrible sights. After battles, whole fields of the dead lay unburied, mostly Russians because, while the Germans made an effort to bury their soldiers, the Russians did not care as much about the fate of their corpses. More and more “cemeteries” of unburied bodies appeared. One night in March 1944, Sniper Lida Bakieva was working her way through just such a field, entirely alone.
That night Lida had been unable to sleep for thinking about what might have become of her husband, Volodya. He had been fighting on this front, but for a long time now she had had no news of him. Lida’s heart rebelled against this crushed, obedient waiting. She was used to being active. In a fit of desperation, she went out of the dugout and made for a field where there had recently been a battle. She walked among the dead Russian and German soldiers, looking into the faces of the Russians, somehow sure she was about to find her husband. It was beginning to freeze. In the moonlight, the faces of the dead seemed alive. She walked on and on, turning over those who were lying face downwards.203
Lida Bakieva never remarried, and for many years searched for news of her husband, who vanished without trace on the Second Byelorussian Front and who, for her, was forever just twenty years old. She never did find out what happened to him.
*
When it is not just someone you read about in a newspaper who has died at the hands of the enemy, or even just someone you knew, but a person who is near and dear to you, your hand will not tremble as you squeeze the trigger: you want revenge. At the front, the first death of a comrade from a German bullet or shrapnel fragment was just as shocking as it would be in the civilian world and, after it, shooting Germans suddenly became easy.
Many girl snipers were killed in their first days at the front, before they had learnt the need for caution. Anya Mulatova witnessed the death of a friend while they were still at Orsha. Tanya Moshkina was killed soon after they arrived, but Anya had not been there to see it. Masha Vasiliskova, though, was killed in front of her. That day, Anya was not with Tasya. She was having her period, so was exempted from hunting. The trench Commander Rakityansky was leading several of them along had been dug in zigzags, and as the German positions were on higher ground, they evidently had sight of the far side of some of the zigzags. Rakityansky was in front of them and, as the girls were negotiating one of the trench’s sharp bends, Anya heard a crack and saw Masha fall. “Oh my God, why has Masha fallen down?” she wondered, not yet realising what had happened. Klava Lavrentieva was immediately behind Masha, and the next bullet hit her in the shoulder. Anya was next in line. She immediately fell to the ground and crawled towards her wounded comrades. Blood was spurting from Masha’s neck, but she was still conscious and asked for water. They bandaged her up somehow and pulled her away, but she soon died.204 This was Anya’s first encounter with an enemy sniper who, just like her, had spotted “heads” bobbing along a trench through his telescopic sight.
They gave Masha a proper funeral, unlike all the other snipers in Anya’s platoon who were killed subsequently. They made her a real coffin, decorated it with bandage gauze, and made artificial paper flowers. The funeral was photographed, and all the girls cried and cried. Friends who died later were mourned with considerably less ceremony. Later on they were seldom in a position to give their dead comrades a proper funeral, and in any case death gradually ceased to make a big impression on them.
*
It was spring, the snow melted, the trees came into leaf and the first flowers appeared. The front was not moving, and Klava Panteleyeva’s platoon developed its own routine, replacing the infantry in the trenches and hunting while it was light, sleeping at night. It was just the same that day. There was no sign of movement from the Germans, and Klava and Marusya left their rifles in the embrasures and took it in turns to observe. You could not watch all the time because your eyes would get too tired. “My turn now,” Marusya said. She went to her rifle and must have moved it so that the lens reflected the sun. It was just what a German sniper was waiting for. A shot rang out and Marusya fell. She died instantly, and Klava screamed and wailed terribly. The soldiers around her woke up and ran to her, begging her to keep quiet because the Germans were only 200 metres away. “Quiet, quiet, or they’ll open up with mortar fire!” Klava just could not calm down. She stayed with Marusya’s corpse until evening. When finally night fell, the soldiers helped her carry her friend’s body on a groundsheet. Klava wanted to change Marusya’s clothes, but she was buried in her blood-stained uniform, the grim spectacle relieved only by the first spring flowers, which they picked for her. Later Klava was given a new partner, Marusya Gulyakina, a Muscovite who had worked before the war as a domestic servant. Marusya was older than Klava, already a woman. She had a kind, pockmarked face and treated Klava like a younger sister, braiding her plaits (many of the girls had grown their hair long again at the front) with ribbons made from bandage gauze. But soon she too was killed.205
*
“Nowhere do you need close friendship and comradely relations more than in war. Even a soldier’s mess tin is designed to hold two servings of soup. A greatcoat can cover two of you, and a cape-groundsheet also has room for two. If you are lying wounded, a friend can drag you to shelter, bring you food and drink. A friend in war means survival.” These sentiments, which Vasiliy Selin, a mortar gunner, recorded in his memoirs, will probably be recognised by anybody who has survived combat.206
And if this friend on whom they rely so profoundly is killed, the surviving partner grieves for them for a lifetime. In psychology this is called “survivor guilt”: why my friend but not me? The girls in a sniper pair ate together, slept on one of their greatcoats while covering themselves with the other’s, went on missions together, shared secrets and fears, and dreamed together about the future. If one was killed, the other felt as if they would never be the same person again. “Marusya was killed, and today I am still living for her,” Klava Panteleyeva reminisced many, many years later.207
Masha Shvarts, the partner of Kalya Petrova, died at the very beginning of their time at the front. She was half-Jewish, a pretty young woman with black hair and dark eyes, a little older than Kalya and very clever – a good friend to talk to. Kalya respected and imitated her.
On the day Masha died it was very cold, and the girls took turns to run and warm up in the dugout. Masha went off but did not return, and a soldier came and told Kalya she had been killed. She was shot by a sniper on a stretch where a trench had yet to be dug, meaning that you had to run across it on the surface. Kalya had crossed that terrain a few times herself that same day, but it was Masha who had been killed. At night, her body was brought back to the platoon on a drag and Kalya and her friends buried her.208
Kalya was not found another partner and, in any case, they shortly began an offensive, where, because snipers took part in them as ordinary soldiers, they did not need to be paired up. On her own now, Kalya became friendly with Roza Shanina and Sasha Yekimova, and they became known as “the troika”. “Our battle troika”, Roza called them in her diary. Roza was uneducated and rather coarse, and Sasha was a bit full of herself, so Kalya was never as close to them as she had been to Masha, but she greatly respected their bravery.
* The Bruno Spiral was concertinaed barbed wire, an anti-personnel obstacle in the form of a cylindrical spiral 70–130 centimetres in diametre and 25 metres long. It consisted of several intersecting strands of barbed or ordinary wire stretched on stakes.