“Beyond the mountains and the forests, far across the mighty main, but not in heaven, here on earth . . .” Zhenya Rudneva recited in a thin, singsong voice. Yershov’s “Little Humpbacked Horse” was one of those tales everyone loved but which was just too long to learn by heart. Except that Zhenya had. They whiled away their long train journey singing songs and telling stories. Many joined in. Valya Krasnoshchyokova recited Pushkin’s “Tale of Tsar Saltan”:
But it was Zhenya who knew the most, treating them to an inexhaustible repertoire of tales, myths and poems. Whether the train’s wheels drummed on the tracks, or were silent as they stood in sidings, day after day Zhenya told them stories of knights and damsels fair; legends about the constellations; recited poetry; and recounted what she had read in many books. They could not believe one head could contain so many things. Her new friends gathered round, listening intently, gazing at her in admiration. Zhenya was not like other people, as everyone could see.
“Not quite of this world,” was Valya’s first impression.26 Zhenya had large, pale blue eyes and a long, tightly braided plait encircling her head. She was not tall, had a slender neck, and a slow, awkward way of moving. Gray-blue eyes shone with intelligence and kindness.
Zhenya had been eager to get to the front from the first days of the war. Her simple, sensitive heart was full of the ideals inculcated in her generation by Soviet ideologists. While still at school, after watching the film “Lenin in October,” she noted in her diary:
I know very well that, if the hour should come, I shall lay down my life in the cause of my people, as those unknown heroes did in this wonderful film!
I want to dedicate my life to science, and I shall. Soviet Power has provided all the conditions necessary to enable everyone to realize their dreams, no matter how ambitious, but I am a member of the Komsomol and the common cause is dearer to me than my own career. That is how I look on my profession, and if the Party and the working class require it, I shall set astronomy aside for as long as necessary and become a soldier, or an orderly, or nurse the casualties of gas warfare.27
That hour did come and Zhenya, one of the brightest students in her year at Moscow University, gave up her intended career in astronomy to become a soldier. She was the only daughter of well-educated parents. Her father had been ill and, as she left for Engels, she felt unable to tell them the truth. She said she was going to train militia volunteers to fire machine guns. Her parents were astonished, and wondered if there was really no one else who could have done the job.
By Soviet standards Zhenya’s parents were not poor, so this was the first time she had traveled in a goods truck. For many of the other girls, those from impoverished working-class families or the countryside, this mode of transport was nothing new.
Nowadays few people have any idea what such a truck was like, but in the first half of the twentieth century no explanation was needed. Ordinary goods wagons like these were constructed from wooden planks but with a double layer of insulation, an iron stove and bunks. Millions of Russians traveled the length and breadth of their vast country in them, and even lived in them. Before the revolution peasants were transported in goods wagons to cultivate new lands. After the revolution they were used to take young people to Komsomol construction projects; exiles to their place of deportation; and, of course, millions of prisoners destined to build new cities and fell lumber in the forests of Siberia were transported in them, often deprived for days of food or even water. Strong young soldiers were taken to the front in these wagons, and the wagons brought back the sick and wounded. The common people invented a word for them, the kindly-sounding “teplushka.” Derived from the word for “warm,” it also suggests gratitude for that warmth, for the insulated walls and the stove blazing in the middle, without which life would have been that much harder for the travelers.
Warm as they may have been, they did nevertheless lack a toilet. To relieve yourself, you had to ask your friends to hold your hands while you shoved the appropriate part of your body out through the open door. Valya Krasnoshchyokova never forgot the time Tanya Sumarokova’s foot slipped and they almost lost their grip on her. When they got over their fright, Tanya hooted with laughter with the rest of them. Their journey went on and on but none of them would have dreamed of complaining. They were soldiers now, and soldiers do not expect to travel first class.
Most, like Valya Petrochenkova, a future fighter pilot, had grown up in penury. Valya was a pretty girl with dark, bright eyes, curly black hair and dimples on her cheeks. In the summer of 1941 she applied to fight in the war but was turned down on the grounds that she would be better employed using what she had learned at her flying club to train pilots for the front. As she left for her new job, she had had a few hours to look in at the room in Moscow into which her parents were crowded with their younger children. The only gift Valya’s mother could give her eighteen-year-old daughter, as she embarked on adult life and a dangerous career, was kind words. She could give no blouse, no pillow or towel, only a few dry crusts. Valya had a uniform from her flying club, so left her only dress to her younger sister. She was the eldest of the children and hoped soon to be in a position to help support her family.
When she arrived at her new workplace, she found everything in a state of chaos. Valya was instructing thirty young men whom she was to train as paratroopers. Some were her age, others older. Nearly all the male instructors had left for the front and the flying club’s future was uncertain as it had been allocated no funding by the government. For a month and a half, while things were being sorted out, she had to fend for herself, with little to eat, sleeping at night on a straw mattress in a lean-to attached to a barn. She had no blankets, pillows, sheets, or towels, and no clothes other than those she was wearing. Valya scrubbed them with a wet cloth, and tried to dry her underwear overnight by sleeping on top of it. She put it on still damp in the morning. Valya couldn’t even wash herself properly: she was first issued soap two weeks after arriving.28 She stayed at this flying club for two years training male cadets, and little by little life became better, although it remained hard and hungry. In 1943 she was called up and joined the women’s fighter regiment as one of the many reinforcements they needed after suffering so many losses.
For the girls of Raskova’s unit, the main thing was to get their training over quickly and start fighting. Like Raskova herself, they had only the vaguest idea of what the front would actually be like, and although the Germans were at the gates of Moscow, they were worried that the war might be over before they could get started. Whenever their train stopped at a station, Raskova would immediately set off to find the military commandant and demand that they should be allowed to proceed as soon as possible. Her face was highly recognizable (and prettier than it looked in the photographs), and her confident demeanor had an instant effect. Invariably the commandant would promise to send them forward just as quickly as he could.
It was not always a simple matter to reach the station building in the first place if their train was on some faraway track. What were you to do if, as was common at Soviet railway junctions at the time, there were no recognized crossings over a dozen tracks, all of which were occupied by seemingly endless trains? Militsa Kazarinova, Raskova’s chief of staff, recalled the night the two of them climbed down and asked the track inspector how to reach the station. “Count a dozen or so tracks under the wagons and that’ll be the station,” he replied.
Raskova immediately set off under the wagons. Kazarinova, scurrying after her, counted: one train, two, three . . . before losing count. Some of the trains were being moved and they had to wait. When the commandant saw Raskova he asked in surprise how they had managed to reach him. “We crawled under the trains,” Raskova said, laughing. The commandant shook his head. Raskova knew very well that the trains might at any moment have started moving and crushed her, but she had long grown used to risking her own and other people’s lives. “We are in a hurry to reach the front.” No further explanation was needed.29
For all that, they often had to wait, their train standing interminably in sidings, allowing other, even more urgent, trains to take priority. The whole country was on the move, in different directions but in the same teplushka wagons. Ceaselessly the troop trains moved westward, while trains carrying the wounded and evacuees went east. Entire factories were being evacuated with all their machinery.
The food issued on the train journey was exactly what they would receive throughout the war up until the opening of the Second Front by the Western Allies: gray bread, herring, and millet porridge. Instead of tea there was boiling water, but they took that in their stride. Many were familiar enough, if not with starvation, then with living hand to mouth.
There was, of course, no opportunity to wash on the journey or to launder what few items of clothing they had brought with them. Although it was not forbidden to bring civilian clothing, few had brought anything other than a change of underwear (which quickly became dirty). What would be the point? It would hardly be needed at the front, so it made better sense to leave it for a younger sister, or for their mother to sell if times got really hard. In any case, Communist ideology condemned excessive attachment to material goods, seeing it as a symptom of bourgeois mentality. Good Communists had no business treasuring pretty clothes.
Valya Abankina was accepted into Marina Raskova’s group for training as an aircraft mechanic, and she too left behind a large family and a minimal wardrobe of clothes. When she was asked to write a résumé of her life she replied that she had not yet had a life: what was there to list? She had been born, attended school, and then gone to work in a motorcycle factory. Now, however, in her as yet short biography, as in those of all Raskova’s young warriors, there was about to be inscribed the most testing, but also the most vivid and memorable, chapter of their entire lives.
That first day, before they had got to know each other, the future mechanics and armorers kept to themselves: the girls from the motorcycle factory, from the aircraft factory, from teacher training college, from Moscow University. Besides Zhenya Rudneva, sixteen other girls from Moscow University had presented themselves at Raskova’s rallying point. They were undergraduate and postgraduate students from the faculties of mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography and history.
Of them all, Sasha Makunina was the eldest—she was five or six years older than the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who formed the majority of the unit. The outbreak of war had found her on a geological expedition in the Urals, in a place so remote that it was three days before she heard of the German invasion. Sasha was a short girl with big eyes.30 She could fly a glider and jump with a parachute, and she had chosen to study geography at university because that profession held out the promise of travel, discovery, and adventure. The war, however, looked to be more of an adventure than any expedition and, as Sasha was returning from the Urals, her only thought was to get back to Moscow as quickly as possible. Like most young people brought up on Soviet propaganda, she was sure any war would last no more than two weeks. It would be fought wholly on German territory, and the enemy would not hold out for long. For her too, the main thing was to get to fight in the war before it was over.
By October it was becoming clear that victory was still some way off, but that did not change Sasha’s sense of urgency: she wanted to be part of the war effort as soon as possible and in any capacity. On October 10 her friend Irina Rakobolskaya called her away from teaching her students to say, “They are enlisting volunteers. Be as quick as you can. Enrollment is at six.”31 Sasha’s mother had already been evacuated. Her father was, of course, distraught but could hardly oppose his daughter’s decision and only said quietly, “So, they are taking even young girls?” The neighbors in their shared apartment gave Sasha a send-off as if she were their own daughter. They wept, and put together an artless kitbag, the usual parting gift for those heading for the front. They dried bread for her to take and ironed her underwear.
On their long journey the girls talked endlessly about the families they had left behind, the factories where they worked, the universities where they studied. They talked also about what they would do when the war was over, but with most animation they talked about the fact that they would surely fly with Raskova. They had heard there were real, professional female pilots on the train with them who only needed now to be taught how to fly military aircraft. These were evidently in a different wagon, and everyone was intrigued as to what they must be like. The young girls who only yesterday had still been students imagined them to be very special beings, much older, immeasurably more experienced and braver, cleverer and more educated than they were. If Raskova was a goddess, these women must be demi-goddesses at least.
In reality, the pilots were much more down-to-earth than the students. Very few had finished even secondary school. Most, like Katya Budanova, had joined flying clubs from working in factories and workshops. Katya was a simple village girl, very energetic and intelligent, but she had had a grim childhood. Her father died when she was young and her mother, unable to feed a large family, sent her out to work from the age of nine, minding other people’s children. Her only respite from work was when she was at school. After seven years of village education, Katya was packed off to an older sister in Moscow. She got a job as a mechanic in an aircraft factory, and was eventually able to start realizing her dreams when she joined a flying club. This was followed by flying school, where she went on to become an instructor. She performed at air shows and notched up a respectable number of parachute jumps. Flying changed her life beyond all recognition.
Katya became the proud owner of a long leather raglan coat whose flaps could be buttoned round the legs so it could be worn while parachuting. A raglan was what every pilot aspired to, but a separate room in Moscow’s convenient Sivtsev Vrazhek street, which Katya was also awarded, was the height of luxury and beyond most people’s wildest dreams. According to her friends, she now developed a certain attitude and arrogance which had not been there before. The village girl, the factory worker, had become a pilot.
“High in the clouds, intrepidly . . .” Katya would sing in her low, melodious voice, and the others on the train bound for Engels would take up the song. When her friends reminisced about her, they recalled that fine, strong voice and the songs she loved to sing, her dense, wavy hair and dazzling smile.
While they were still on the train, many had been struck by the appearance of a small, slender girl who, despite her male soldier’s uniform, could never have been mistaken for a boy. She had light-brown curls, green eyes, an elegant figure, and a pleasing, self-possessed way of moving. Her name was Lidia but she introduced herself as Lilya. She too was a pilot, although nobody knew that. Who was she to compete with Yevgenia Prokhorova’s famous aerobatic quintet who, it was said, were also on their way to join Raskova’s unit? Those girls were nationally renowned as a result of the air shows held each year on August 18, Aviation Day, at the Tushino Aerodrome.
“We present the women pilots, Popova, Belyaeva, Khomyakova, and Glukhovtseva. Their leader is Yevgenia Prokhorova, world record holder in gliding,” the announcer declared. “These five daring women will now demonstrate their skill.” Five small planes in tight triangular formation began to execute advanced aerobatic stunts, looping loops without for a second losing the perfection of their formation. “As if a single person were flying five aircraft,” the announcer exclaimed rapturously.32
The public too was enraptured. From the stand of the Central Flying Club of Moscow, the Government, who had duly arrived in their black GAZ-M1s, looked on. They were all wearing white: white civilian suits, or white military tunics with white caps; even their shoes were white. Only Stalin wore his inevitable khaki tunic, standing right in the middle and noticeably shorter than everybody else. Everyone was talking about the flying, gesticulating, imitating the way the aircraft flew. Valentina Grizodubova was there in a light-colored dress and with a fashionable hairstyle. A head shorter than her was Raskova in her signature military uniform and beret. They talked animatedly and laughed when they noticed they were being filmed. Like everybody else that day, they were agreeably excited.
On the ground and the hills around the aerodrome huge numbers of spectators were sitting in places allotted them by tickets they had gone to great lengths to secure. The grass was divided into squares by white ropes. The public had reached the remote airfield on trams packed with people inside and festooned with people outside, or in the back of trucks, and even on foot.
Planes wrote in the sky, “Glory to Stalin!” Huge flags were raised aloft showing Stalin’s face to best advantage, in three-quarters profile. The announcer talked bombastically of Stalin’s Falcons and declared that, “In the name of Stalin, at the first call of the Party and Government, Soviet pilots will swoop into battle like flights of eagles to defend the Soviet borders, and the enemy will be annihilated on its own territory.”
Yevgenia, more often called just Zhenya, Prokhorova, a regular participant in such air shows, went to defend her country just as described, “at the first call of the Party and Government.” Her quintet split up: only Raisa Belyaeva and Lera Khomyakova joined Zhenya on the journey to Engels. All three were to perish.
Despite Raskova’s best efforts, the 800-kilometer journey to Engels took a full ten days. She soon recognized that she would need a lot of time to turn her charges into real combatants. Even before they embarked on the train Kazarinova had gone to inspect the sentries guarding Air Group 122’s property as it was waiting to be loaded. It was Katya Budanova’s duty to see to the change of guards, but she was lying on a table in a cold shed, fast asleep. As Kazarinova marched her to where the crates, bags and mattresses that comprised the group’s property were piled up, she saw no sentries at their posts. There was an air raid, and when it was over and the anti-aircraft guns had fallen silent, Budanova’s shouts finally got through to her sentries, whose sleepy heads appeared from a pile of mattresses in which, as they explained, they had been hiding from the cold. Kazarinova reported the delinquent sentries to Raskova but she just laughed and said, “My dear Captain, you want them to become soldiers in an instant but it will not be that simple.”33
In the course of the journey Raskova had time to arrive at a number of momentous decisions in respect of her soldiers. One was that they were not to braid their hair.
She had noticed two girls in uniform jump out at one of the stops and run along the side of the train. When they saw Raskova and Kazarinova they stopped to ask permission to post letters. This Raskova granted and, holding hands, they ran on their way. Long curls, matted from the journey, crowned their young heads. Kazarinova remarked that she would not want them to be seen bare-headed like that by the station commandant and, in any case, she considered long hair impermissible in a military unit. With a sigh, Raskova instructed her to draft an order that upon arrival in Engels all personnel were to have their hair cropped.34
The other girls also sent letters home when the train stopped, to the civilian life they had left behind only a few days before. As they hurried back to their wagon, they asked people on the platform for news. What was happening at the front? Was Moscow holding out?35