The instructors’ company, sent to the front three months after the snipers of the second cohort, were bedevilled by misfortune. Their troubles began even before they reached the battle lines, though at first everything had gone splendidly. They arrived at 152 Fortified District near Vilno on 2 August, and above them they could see a dogfight unfolding. Klava Loginova’s platoon of thirty-three girls was billeted with a reserve regiment in a barn at a paper mill.253 The commander at first made no attempt to hide his scepticism about their abilities, and the minute they arrived he gave them a test. He set up jars and bottles, ordered them to shoot, and within minutes was proud of his “girlies”; after that he held them up as an example to the rest of the men.
They were informed that they would be transferred from this reserve regiment to the front in a couple of weeks’ time, but even so they were taken hunting. Preparing them for combat consisted here, as at school, of marching, digging trenches, shooting, and more shooting. As sniper record books were issued only on active duty, kills while back at headquarters were recorded on a sheet of paper headed “Official Document”. These unique records were signed by the company commander, the sniper platoon commander, and several other people, and registered the first kills of Klava and her companions. For instance: “On this day 2 Sniper Squad operating on the defence perimeter of 1 Company killed: 3 German soldiers, including: 1 by Sergeant Lukicheva, A.F. – 1 . . .”254 Klava Loginova, as Young Communist League organiser of the sniper section, also signed it.
Tragedy struck during shooting practice on 4 August. Klava and her sniper partner, Katya Makoveyeva, a likeable young girl from Vologda, as unpretentious as Klava, were on duty that day. They tidied the living quarters, brought food from the kitchen, fetched water and stoked the stove. When lunch arrived, one of them had to take it to their comrades on the firing range, where that day the company was being trained to fire machine guns. Klava was about to go, but Katya said she would make the journey instead. Klava never saw her again.
After lunch, the girls, including Katya, were wandering over the meadow picking flowers. God only knows what impelled Nonna Orlova, a rustic, sturdily built Siberian, to lie down behind a machine gun and pull the trigger. There was a burst of fire and four girls were hit. The wounds of two were not fatal, but Rita Moskva was killed instantly and Katya Makoveyeva, severely wounded in the stomach, died some hours later in hospital. It was claimed later that the gun did not have its safety catch engaged, but perhaps Nonna had released it. She and the instructor of the reserve regiment were arrested immediately, and it became known that they had been sent to serve in a penal company. Klava’s friends told her Nonna was in a state of shock and shrieking, “Kill me! Shoot me, I don’t want to live!”
Klava had no clear memory of that day, and could not even remember who had told her of the disaster or where, as if her mind had rejected the memory. She had only a vague recollection of the funerals of Katya and Rita Moskva.255
“Picking flowers? Hardly!” was Anya Mulatova’s reaction when she heard this appalling story. She found it a strange suggestion that girls could have found flowers during the war. She had no memory of any at the front at all. She also commented that, as she played at being a machine-gunner, Nonna must have aimed deliberately, turning the gun and pointing it directly at people, because otherwise how could she have hit the target from such a considerable distance?256
As fate would have it, her former comrades met up again with Nonna long after the war, in the 1960s, at the first reunion of girls who graduated from the Podolsk sniper school. Nonna Orlova turned up there covered in medals, but the snipers refused to let her in the door and shouted at her to clear off. Neither Klava Loginova nor Anya found that in the least surprising. Why on earth had Orlova gone there? There was much discussion of how Nonna could have come by so many medals after being in a penal company. None of them, though they had also been continuously at the front, had anything like so many. They never heard another word about Nonna Orlova.257
*
Anya Mulatova’s reminiscences of Vasiliy Slavnov, the commander of 123 Infantry Regiment, add a certain amount of colour to his own memoirs, which he published in the Soviet era. One night an unknown officer appeared in the snipers’ dugout. Nobody had any idea who this man, wearing a quilted jacket and a fur hat with earflaps, could be. They had all had an exhausting day, some were already in bed, and this stranger appeared at the door and began railing at them. “What are you all lying about for? Are you not going to tidy up the place you live in? Where’s the Soldier’s Newsletter? How are you going to know how the Germans are behaving, which stretch of the front is more active?” He concluded his monologue with, “So, you have no shortage of work to do,” and departed. It was only the next day that the girls learned who their visitor had been.258
Slavnov’s own description of the episode is more restrained. “I went in to see the girl snipers. The day was nearly over, they were back from their hunting and tired. I had had no opportunity to visit them up till then. ‘We’ll soon have been here a week and there’s been no sign of the regimental commander,’ one of them said reproachfully. ‘What do you need him for?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean? It’s his regiment we’re working for. And anyway, we want to see what sort of man he is.’” Without revealing his identity, Slavnov made some critical comments: “‘You don’t have a wall newspaper,’ I said to the Young Communist League organiser, Klavdia Chistyakova. ‘You haven’t nominated anyone for outstanding service. Evidently no one has been good enough!’”259
Their commander’s interest in their work, if rather stern, was beneficial. Young Communist League Organiser Klava Chistyakova, who in peacetime had been a student in the literature faculty at Yaroslavl Teacher Training College, soon came to see Slavnov with some suggestions. Klava was also the person who maintained order in the dugout. She was the oldest and most serious-minded girl in the platoon, and was well liked and respected. Soon the girls tidied up Slavnov’s own quarters, washing the wooden floor and cleaning his window, and put a bunch of wild flowers picked by Klava and Anya Mulatova on his table.260 The commander found this “simple little bouquet of flowers” very touching, reminding him of “a different, peaceful way of life”. When, very soon afterwards, it was time to leave the dugout and go on the offensive, he decided to leave the flowers on the table, “as if I were only leaving them, and the girls, for a short while”.261
The Third Byelorussian Front was advancing with great speed. At dawn on 6 June, having passed through Minsk during the night, 123 Regiment of 62 Infantry Division reached the River Svislach by the village of Mikhanovichy. The official history of 31 Army dryly records that during the ensuing days 62 Division undertook a forced march of some 500 kilometres – a journey that took two weeks.262
The girls in the sniper platoon made the same march, on foot, carrying the same weight as the men, only with a rather heavier rifle because of the telescopic sight. They put behind them dozens of kilometres a day, and sometimes even walked at night. “These gruelling marches took the last of their strength from the fighters. Everybody was abandoning helmets, gas masks, entrenching tools because, covering such distances, even a needle seemed to weigh a ton. It is difficult to find words to convey the sense of exhaustion.”263
Happily, knapsacks could occasionally go forward on a baggage cart, but would sometimes disappear from it, causing major trouble for their owners. The commander would try to give everyone a brief respite on the march. “He might find a ditch and get us to lie in it with our heads down and our feet up,” Klava Panteleyeva recalls.264 These rest breaks would last no more than half an hour, and then they would be on their feet again. The regimental accordionist would play something rousing to wake and cheer them up.
The regiment Klava’s platoon was marching with stopped for the night at an empty house in Lithuania. After all the kilometres they had travelled, they all just collapsed on to the floor, men and women together, and fell asleep. Klava was slow off the mark and, when she went into the house, found there was not a single free spot on the floor. There was no space for her “short of lying on top of someone”. She noticed a little trough of a kind used for chopping cabbage in and, huddling up, climbed into it and fell asleep. The minute she moved a leg or an arm out of the trough in her sleep, she would get it shoved back in. Suffering all through the night, Klava saw someone going out to relieve himself at dawn and immediately occupied his place, but no sooner had she fallen asleep than she heard the order, “Rise and shine!” It was time to get back on the march. One time they came upon a bathhouse. They fired it up, and the commander gallantly sent the girls in first. Not realising they had to open the damper, they got carbon monoxide poisoning and, as soon as they emerged, “collapsed on the ground”. It took a long while for them to live that down.265
“We marched and slept.” “We fell asleep on the go.” Many of the girl snipers recalled genuinely falling asleep as they were marching. In 1944–5 it became common for soldiers to march like that. They were pursuing the enemy and might cover thirty kilometres in a day. Many of them found they had dozed off for a few seconds. You would be walking along, your feet somehow moving as required but with your mind switched off. The comrades alongside would not let you wander away from the column or get lost. Anya Mulatova almost found herself in deep trouble when she fell asleep after she had been separated from the column.266
How she came to go off into the bushes alone she could not afterwards explain, because they were not allowed to do that. Instead of hastening to catch up with the others, she fell asleep on her haunches as she pissed. Moreover, she must have been asleep for a good fifteen minutes because, when she ran back to the road, the whole column had passed and disappeared into the darkness. Before she had time to get really worried, she heard the clatter of a horse’s hooves. When word passed along the column that she had been left behind, Mitya Kuznetsov, the adjutant of the regimental commander, had been sent back with orders to find her. Anya was very relieved, but it turned out that Kuznetsov’s intentions were not entirely honourable.
“Come on, let’s go over there,” he urged, trying to put his arms round her and navigate her towards the bushes. Anya pushed him away. A brief, heated exchange ensued, at the end of which Kuznetsov threatened to shoot her. “Come on, or you’ll be lying here for the rest of time.” Anya was confident he would not dare to shoot her and risk facing a lot of trouble. “Shoot me then, and they’ll send you to a penal company,” she said calmly, but decided nevertheless it was best not to get on the wrong side of the adjutant and assured him his dreams would come true, only first they should catch up with the regiment. Sitting behind him on the horse, Anya held on firmly to the belt of a young man who had just threatened to kill her. Once they caught up with the others, of course, nothing happened. When Mitya complained to the commander that Anya was refusing to be his mistress, he was advised to try it on with a different Anya, a signaller who was more suited to him. “She was already a woman.” Mitya Kuznetsov found love with that Anya, but Anya Mulatova was to face a similar situation when a man called Volodya from the artillery tried to rape her. That was later, though, at Suwałki in Poland.
Regimental Commander Slavnov had a “front-line wife” himself, but Asya Akimova, a machine-gunner, was more than a match for him.267 They later married, apparently while still at the front, and lived a long life together.
Asya was brought to the regiment by Shura Okuneva, who had been fighting alongside Slavnov since 1941. Shura was in charge of a platoon of machine-gunners, and by the time of her death was a celebrity. A lot was written about her in both the front-line and national press. Mikhail Svetlov, a famous Soviet poet and, during the war, correspondent for the army’s Red Star newspaper, came specially to interview her and Fyodor Chistyakov, another machine-gunner who was later killed.268 Shura died in 1943 in the fighting for the village of Potapovka near Yelnya in Byelorussia. She fired at the peephole of an approaching tank and was killed by a shell from the tank.
Asya was a friend of Shura’s before the war, and her turning up in 123 Regiment was unusual: Shura just brought her back after going on leave to Moscow.269 Asya, later Anastasia Slavnova, described in her memoirs how Shura, when she arrived in Moscow, came to visit her in her anti-aircraft battalion. Asya and she enjoyed Moscow together, and Asya came to the station to see her off on the train. They were lost in conversation when the train pulled out, taking Asya with it to the front. She had her Young Communist League membership card and a leave warrant in her bag, so that, luckily, her documents were in order.270
Slavnov was angry about this and told Asya to go back to Moscow. Shura assured him that she had been in an anti-aircraft battalion, so was already virtually a machine-gunner. Though he was not convinced that fire-watching duty on a rooftop was relevant, he was impressed by Shura’s confidence that she could train Asya to be a machine-gunner within a couple of days and that she would make a good soldier. Asya remained in the regiment as a machine-gunner until March 1944, when she was concussed in battle and suffered multiple injuries to her head, belly and left arm. She was determined to return to her regiment when she got out of hospital, and in August was back. Her state of health ruled out returning to work as a machine-gunner, and when the girl snipers met her she had begun working as a clerk at H.Q. “She is having an affair with the regimental commander,” Anya Mulatova was told shortly after Asya’s reappearance. “Well, he’s a good man,” Anya said with a shrug, not in the habit of passing judgement on people.271
Crossing the border into Lithuania, they marched on and on, repelling intermittent German counter-attacks. Not infrequently, they overtook their baggage train with the field kitchen and went hungry. Would it arrive in time? Would the cook find them and have food ready? Klava Panteleyeva often looked back nostalgically in those months to the three meals a day they had received at sniper school. If you were still hungry there, you could fill up with bread. She was grateful now to the commanders at the school for training them to eat quickly. That skill proved very useful at the front. And yet they never did learn to squirrel away even as much as a piece of bread; they ate everything they were given immediately.
One time, the cook, bringing them food during an offensive – in a metal vacuum flask strapped to his shoulders – suspected something was wrong but did not realise that the flask had a bullet hole in it and almost everything had leaked out. The girls went hungry, without even a crust of stale bread between them. Soon after that there was another catastrophe. It took the same middle-aged cook so long to crawl up to them under fire that all the food went bad in the July heat. The commander tried it, said it was off, and ordered it poured away. Some of the girls might have been willing to eat the bad porridge, but you could not risk diarrhoea during an attack. Klava’s platoon, like many other soldiers, were rescued by Karasenko, their Ukrainian quartermaster, who occasionally caught a piglet running around near a village, or brought a cow that those girls who knew how to could milk, or even sliced the meat off a horse that had been killed. It was almost impossible to chew the horsemeat, which made your gums hurt terribly, especially if the unfortunate horse was old.272
That field kitchen flask with its bullet hole, which meant there would be no hot food for them that day, was associated in Anya Mulatova’s mind with another painful memory. A halt on their exhausting travels, a long-awaited rest and meal could suddenly turn into something quite different.
After a week’s rest at the little Jewish village of Leipalingis (abandoned, its former inhabitants long since exterminated) in Lithuania, 123 Regiment moved on again on 29 July, following a tortuous route along the Lithuanian–Polish border. You had to watch your step in this region of lakes. At Lake Šlavantas they again found themselves caught up in fighting. Slavnov’s regiment had halted to rest at the lake, which they thought had the strange name of Salopirogi (“pork fat pie”). Their lunch, a keg of porridge, was to be brought to them by horse. At this halt beside a beautiful stretch of water, the girls wandered off in all directions. Some took their boots off, rolled up their trousers, and paddled without their tunics, just wearing men’s undershirts. Anya and Tasya had no sooner gone off into the bushes than they heard a whine they were only too familiar with. A shell! The Germans had just been waiting for the Soviet soldiers to crowd on to the isthmus between two lakes before they struck.273
“Run for it!” Anya thought, but where to? Nearby they saw someone had excavated little trenches, really big enough only for one person. There was no time to think; a heavy bombardment opened up. Tasya jumped in and Anya followed. They squeezed tightly together. A young cook jumped in on top of Anya, almost on her head. In this situation the three of them waited for the shelling to end. At last everything was quiet again and they could get up and count their numbers. The horse that had brought the food was lying wounded in its harness, blood gushing from a wound. Porridge was oozing out of the damaged flask. The other girls were all there and uninjured, but there was no sign of Young Communist League organiser Klava Chistyakova. They began searching for her, and someone spotted a white shirt in the lake blown up like a bubble: Klava was lying face down in the water, with shrapnel in her heart. They buried her there, by the lake where their “rest had ended so badly”.
They did, nevertheless, eat the porridge, although there was shrapnel in it that gave it a metallic taste. Soon the order was given, “Everybody up!” and they had to be on their way again.
*
While they were in Lithuania, Klava Panteleyeva’s regiment received reinforcements, on this occasion Uzbeks who were “pretty rum soldiers”. At first the girls in Klava’s platoon felt sorry for them. They quite clearly understood very little. They were feeling the cold terribly, knew absolutely nothing about fighting in a war, and many of them were by no means young. The Uzbeks constantly complained, “We cannot march, bum all chafed, kursak [stomach] very sore.” At first, the girls even carried their belongings and rifles for them in addition to their own. (Their knapsacks were being transported in a cart.) However, the marches were getting longer and everybody got fed up with the Uzbeks. Eventually, Panchenko, the company commander, suggested to Young Communist League organiser Shpak that it was time to teach them a lesson. They did so in the spirit of the times, and even the girls saw nothing cruel in it. “He lined them up in front of a barn and said he was going to shoot them.” The Uzbeks promised to behave themselves in future. “Bum not chafed, kursak not hurting,” the girls taunted them.274
A complement of Uzbeks was seen as a blow to the combat readiness of any unit. One war veteran who witnessed the impact of such reinforcements, also in Lithuania, recalled how “a three-man NKVD tribunal sentenced two Uzbeks to death for deserting the battlefield. The sentence was read out, and the two of them stood there, already completely detached from this world. They were no longer with us. It was a bad thing to see, but, to be completely honest, the Uzbeks were useless fighters.”275
As soon as they crossed the border into Lithuania, the situation changed. In the ruined Byelorussian villages, ragged peasants greeted the Soviet soldiers as family and gave them potatoes to eat, if indeed they still had any. In Lithuania the neat farmsteads with their orchards and vegetable gardens were largely deserted. The people were hiding in the woods. Such local people as the soldiers did meet had difficulty concealing their hostility to the Soviets. In Lithuania, which only a few years earlier had “joined the united family of Soviet peoples”, a considerable proportion of the population had been happier to see the Germans than the Russians.
At one farmstead, a boy about twelve years old came to the soldiers of Lida Larionova’s regiment. He denounced his mother, saying that when the Germans were here she had lived with one of them. He pointed out a barn to them where the Germans had stashed armaments. The soldiers shot his mother and took the boy with them as their regimental mascot.276
Girls from Klava Panteleyeva’s platoon were once offered fresh milk at a farm their unit was passing through. An elderly husband and wife carried a whole bucket of it to the roadside, still warm, and a metal mug to scoop it with. The girls were afraid it might be poisoned. They had been taught to expect anything in Lithuania, and their commanders were constantly warning them not to consume any of the food or drink offered them. The wife, however, beckoned Klava, nodding to her. She had probably taken a liking to her sweet face. Klava drank a complete mugful and concluded it was safe. Then all the other girls drank it too. Their hosts gestured to them and said something in an amalgam of Lithuanian and Polish, but it was impossible to understand.
Soon Klava’s squad lost another sniper in combat, Zina Gavrilova, who was seriously wounded in the knee. The girls carried her on a stretcher they improvised from Zina’s overcoat and Zina and Klava’s disassembled rifles. Klava did not get her rifle back and was instead left with Zina’s, which she carried for the remainder of the war. She was terribly afraid someone might find out: losing a rifle could bring you before a tribunal (the Soviet equivalent of a court martial). Katya Puchkova was also wounded. Marusya Gulyakina did not come back to them after her spell in hospital, so Klava now had no partner. She was certain that she had survived uninjured, apart from her concussion, because she was protected by the prayer “A Living Refuge”, which her mother had copied out for her.277
Now and again someone would be killed right in front of Klava. At Volkovysk in south-west Byelorussia they spent a night in a one-storey house with two exits. Someone before them had dug trenches in front of it. In the morning, shelling started and everyone ran to take shelter in them. There was nowhere else to hide, with open ground all around. Klava was just too late: there was absolutely no space for her in the trenches. As the Germans began to find their range, the bombardment drew closer. A shell hit the house, and then a blank fell next to Klava. She ran back into the half-ruined house as there was nowhere else to shelter. The air was thick with dust from the collapsing bricks. At that moment a shell slammed directly into the trench where the soldiers were lying and where Klava had just been looking for a place. There had been living people there and now there were none. A few days later, a shell hit the field kitchen Klava had left just moments before. Nothing remained of the horses and barrels from which they had been dishing out lentil soup with stewed meat. Klava spent a great deal of time pondering this. Your comrade died but you lived, a shell hit the place where you had just been sitting. Why? Some believed in fate, some in God, and probably it was all the same thing.
*
“We lay down and started observing. I spotted a German climbing out of a trench. I shot and he fell. I started trembling all over; I could hear my teeth chattering. I started to cry. When I had been firing at targets there was no problem, but now I was a murderer! I had killed someone I had never met. I knew nothing about him and I had just killed him.”278 This description of how Klava Loginova first killed a German in the summer of 1944 found its way into Svetlana Alexievich’s book, War’s Unwomanly Face, the first and almost the only Soviet book to talk about what it was actually like being a woman in the army in the Second World War.
Shortly after killing this German in Lithuania, Klava and her division reached the River Neman and saw a still-smoking hut burned down by the retreating Germans. Regimental commander Bulavko showed the snipers charred human remains in the hut. “Look, they burned our soldiers alive.” The twisted and blackened insignia and black stars that survived almost intact told them that some ten Soviet soldiers and one officer had been burned. When they had taken up defensive positions by the Neman, the girls returned and buried the remains, the soldiers in one grave and the officer in another. After that, Klava recalled, she “really started killing them”.279
In her appearance and personality, Klava Loginova resembled her mother, a notably kind woman. Would anybody who was not kind have married a widower with eight children, each born less than a year apart? She had a daughter of her own, and another eight children were born in the second marriage, making a total of seventeen (Klava was fifteenth in the family). The older children, who were almost all girls, got married and moved away, and new babies were born. There were never fewer than twelve people at table in their house.
Her mother was endlessly altering clothes to keep them all decently dressed, and she altered clothes for other people too, to earn a little money. She could neither read nor write, never having been to school, but she made sure the children did, even though life was hard and they were all hungry.
When she was still very little, Klava planted rye and potatoes with the rest of the family. They also brought in the harvest together, from the oldest to the youngest. In 1927, when she was just four years old, Klava badly cut her finger with a sickle while she was helping in the fields. Her father worked on the railway. The family had two cows, some sheep, chickens and pigs. In 1921–3, the years of famine, they were all eaten, her mother only refusing to allow the last cow to be slaughtered: “When the children are hungry I’ll give them milk and they will stay alive.” Then things improved a little, and when her father had to retire in 1929 they took a whole farmyard of animals, cows, horses, chickens and sheep, and went to live with Klava’s eldest sister. All they left behind were the pigs. It took them ages to reach the Urals, all the time in a wagon that railway officials had allocated to her father: the animals were on one side, and their family on the other. In the middle was an iron burzhuyka stove, whose chimney her father directed through the roof. When the wagon was in a siding the children would run to collect odd bits of wood and rubbish that could be used to light a fire and cook a meal.
Her father, mother and seven of her brothers and sisters settled in a basement room in her sister’s house in the town of Satka in Chelyabinsk Province. Klava was taken at the age of nine by one of her brothers to look after his children. Later she stayed with another sister and, after school, helped with her children; they all joined together to plant the vegetable plot. After this Klava moved to Kazakhstan with her sister’s family (her husband was in the army), which is where she was when the war broke out.
This short, slender girl with grey eyes, fair hair and a ruddy complexion could cope with almost anything by the time she was seventeen: she could sow seed and reap, sew clothes, chop wood, build a house on her own, and ride a horse bareback. After completing her schooling and legal training at a law college, she worked in Dzhambul in Kazakhstan as a secretary in the prosecutor’s office, which meant that she was not liable for conscription. Her whole class, however, went to the enlistment office and she joined them. From childhood she had been accustomed to work tirelessly, without respite, and now, in the war, her job was shooting people: shooting unemotionally, focused, controlling her breathing because, if you are agitated, you are sure to miss. Yudin, their rigorous instructor at sniper school, had told them nervous people were no good as snipers. This job, like all the other jobs in her life, Klava did conscientiously.