In the days immediately after Raskova’s departure, the Germans were driven back from the city, but soon re-launched their advance. On October 19, 1941, a state of siege was declared. The decree of the State Defense Committee stated, “Anyone guilty of disorder is to be charged without delay and their case referred to the Military Tribunal. Spies and other enemy agents inciting disorder are to be summarily shot.”36
On October 20 units of the Bryansk Front, some 380 kilometers southwest of Moscow, surrendered after being cut off by the advance of German tanks. The pitiful appearance of the Soviet prisoners of war shocked even Field Marshal von Bock who was in command of the advance. He wrote, “The sight of tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war dragging themselves, almost without guards, toward Smolensk makes a dreadful impression. Endless columns of these unfortunates wandered exhausted and starving along the road past my motor car. Some collapsed and died right there on the highway from wounds they had suffered in battle.”37
Toward the end of October the German advance was slowed by heavy rains that made many roads impassable. Soon afterward, severe winter cold arrived to sap the morale of troops unaccustomed to such conditions. Nevertheless, even on November 7 (the date on which, after reform of the old calendar, the Revolution of October 25 was now celebrated) fresh Soviet units went straight from the Red Square parade marking the anniversary of the Revolution into battle to defend Moscow. Along with them went a Muscovite volunteer militia of people not conscripted into the regular army, either because they were too old, in poor health, or in reserved professions important to the functioning of the country. Some were in military uniform, often far from new, others in quilted jackets or civilian coats, some with fur hats, some in peaked caps, some just wearing an ordinary hat. Most were going to their deaths. It is difficult to be entirely confident about the figures, but it is believed that of 120,000 members of the Moscow volunteer militia 100,000 were killed.
The possibility that Moscow might fall was seen as a catastrophe almost tantamount to losing the war. Anna Yegorova could not imagine the consequences, though she had already been watching the collapse of Russia’s defenses in disbelief. After the German Army Groups South and Center had succeeded in September 1941 in encircling, southeast of Kiev, the main forces of the Soviet Southwestern Front, which lost more than 600,000 men dead, missing or, even more disastrously, taken prisoner, the Germans launched an offensive in the autumn on the Donetsk coal-basin.38 Taking the Donbas was a key priority in Hitler’s pre-war planning. It produced 60 percent of the Soviet Union’s coal, 40 percent of its iron, and 23 percent of its steel. Hitler believed the outcome of the conflict would be decided by the conquest of this territory between the Sea of Azov, the lower reaches of the Don, and the lower and middle reaches of the River Seversky Donets. He was certain that if the Soviet side could be deprived of Donbas coal it would be unable to carry on fighting.39
Anna Yegorova had found herself in Stalino (formerly and subsequently Donetsk) shortly before its surrender. She could not believe that a city with that name could fall to the enemy, but on October 16 it did. Advancing on their major objective, Rostov-on-Don, on October 8 the Germans had suddenly captured the major Russian port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and, after a skirmish with Soviet troops, on October 17, took Taganrog, another important port. The advance faltered after this because the rains of autumn reduced the roads to quagmires and the Germans were also short of fuel, but Hitler insisted on pressing forward with the offensive.
Even while she was at the front, in Stalino, Anna’s thoughts kept turning to Moscow, where she had helped to build the first stations of the Metro, and which she regarded as her second home.
Anna had come to stay with her older brother in Moscow as a long-legged teenager wearing a faded Young Pioneer scarf and elastic-sided boots her uncle had made for her. She found life in the capital amazing: intense and challenging, and very different from her experiences in the village among the pine forests of Tver. Her mother allowed her to leave the village on condition that she studied in college, but the Komsomol summoned her to work on a construction project, and for every Muscovite the main project in the pre-war years was the Metro.
Stalin had decided the Moscow Metro was to be completely unlike the utilitarian systems in other European capitals, where colorless stations with their economical decor were indistinguishable from each other. The Moscow Metro was to be the most technically advanced and beautiful in the world. What did it matter that people in villages were living in primitive log huts, and even in Moscow were crammed into overcrowded barracks without water or toilets, or into communal apartments with ten people living in a single room? The Metro would belong to the people, its stations in no way inferior in beauty and sumptuousness to the palaces of the former nobility, and anyone entering it would be happy and proud of their state and take a pride in themselves.
The building and designing of the Metro attracted the best architects, sculptors and artists of the time. There was no stinting on marble—which was transported thousands of miles—on crystal, or gilding. Soviet ideologues calculated that these underground palaces would be a substitute for the churches destroyed by the Soviet order, simultaneously exalting and crushing the human spirit and instilling a sense of awe. The new deity, however, was a pockmarked little man with a withered arm.
Of all Stalin’s megalomaniac projects, the Metro was the only one that did not exploit the labor of prisoners of the Gulag. Instead it was built by people like the boys and girls of the Komsomol.
At that time all occupations were open to women, and Anna Yegorova became a steel reinforcement fitter at the construction site of the Krasnye Vorota Metro station. Like other girls she lugged the steel reinforcement bars on her shoulders, bent double under the weight of her burden. No one complained, as they proudly demonstrated that girls could cope with any work a man could do. As the project advanced Anna, like almost everyone else, mastered new trades. Later, when tilers and plasterers were needed they turned their hands to these skills too, eager to build their own Metro station from start to finish. When the two red carriages of the Metro’s first train ran down the line in October 1934, Anna and her friends ran after them, dancing and hugging each other. On February 6, 1935, the builders of the Metro sped through thirteen of the stations they had built, the first stops of a Soviet underground railway.40
At the age of sixteen Anna had joined a flying club, and as she toiled in the shafts of the deepest Metro stations she dreamed endlessly of flying. After training on gliders and U-2 trainer planes and making her first parachute jumps, she decided to enroll at a flying school. She passed the entrance exams with distinction, survived the close scrutiny of a medical panel and became a cadet, only for her studies to come to an abrupt end when the authorities learned that her elder brother had been arrested by the secret police. She was expelled from the school that same day.
Despite this setback, she did graduate from flying school with the help of good people, but had to travel to Kherson in the Ukraine to do so. From then until the war Anna Yegorova worked as an instructor at a flying club in Kalinin, near her mother and the village where she was born. On Sunday, June 2, 1941, she was sitting with friends on the bank of the Volga when she heard from the radio of a passing ship that the Soviet Union was at war. She decided instantly to do everything she could to be a pilot at the front. This was how she could best help a Motherland that had given her so much. In combat she would be able to show the skill she had acquired during her years as a student and instructor.
At the military recruitment office Anna heard the same story as other women pilots: there will be time enough for you to fly combat missions later. For the present what was needed was to train male pilots for the front. She was directed to work as a flying instructor in Stalino but even before she got there she heard that the flying club, together with factories, institutions, and people, had been evacuated. Stalino, the capital of Russia’s coal industry, was on the verge of falling into enemy hands.
Arriving in Stalino, Anna walked through the deserted flying club and, with nothing else to do, went to the opera house’s last performance. A day before being evacuated the theater was performing “Carmen,” but Anna felt she was watching it “through glass,” and was unmoved by its tale of love and death. The next day she fortuitously encountered a lieutenant from a flying squadron who was scouting for pilots at the flying club and in the hospital. She offered herself as a candidate, much to his surprise, but eventually she and others were accepted into the Signals Squadron of the Southern Front. The decision was taken reluctantly, but in the chaos of retreat in the early days of the war there was no time to look for male pilots. By the time the Germans were threatening Moscow, Anna had already been flying for a month close to the front line, carrying orders to the retreating troops, transporting liaison officers, and establishing the location of army units. She was flying a U-2, the same plane in which she had learned to fly and in which she had taught her students.
The U-2 was an insubstantial little biplane that was designed in the late 1920s, and all the heroes and heroines in this book learned to fly in it. The plane had two cockpits, one for the student and one for the instructor, both of whom could control the aircraft. When the instructor felt the student was ready to fly solo, he was replaced in the rear cabin by a sandbag, universally known as Ivan Ivanovich, which was used as ballast. The U-2 was a small, lightweight, low-speed aircraft made from plywood and percale, a finely woven cotton fabric, so it was very cheap to manufacture. Nobody had any complaints about it before the war and when, with the outbreak of hostilities, the flying clubs’ U-2s were requisitioned for the front, the “crop duster,” “the duck” or, as the Germans came to call it, “the Plywood Russ,” was recognized as an irreplaceable little workhorse. It transported the wounded, was used for communications, dropped supplies to encircled units and partisans, and was even adapted to carry bombs under its wings and function as a night bomber. It could take off from a small forest clearing and land on a roadway.
Nikolai Polikarpov, the designer of this immensely useful small plane, was rewarded in a peculiarly Soviet manner. He was the first of the Soviet aircraft designers arrested in 1929, probably not helped by the fact that his father was a priest.41 He designed his next several aircraft in prison, a location which the N.K.V.D. leaders believed would make him and his fellow designers far more productive, since they would have nothing but their work to focus on. “Only in a militarized environment can such specialists work effectively, as opposed to the corrosive environment of civilian institutions,” Genrikh Yagoda, one of the initiators of the repressions of the Stalin period, wrote in a letter to Molotov.42 Polikarpov was fortunate because the I-5 fighter, designed under his leadership, was demonstrated to Stalin by test pilot Valeriy Chkalov, a favorite of the public and authorities, and he was pardoned. Two other aircraft designers, Andrey Tupolev and Vladimir Petlyakov, spent much longer in prison, while Sergey Korolyov, the creator of the spacecraft which took Yury Gagarin into space, would have died in the Gulag had he not been transferred to work in an N.K.V.D. prison facility.
To Anna Yegorova, flying close to the front line, the small, nimble U-2 seemed completely defenseless. At any moment you might meet a German fighter, and the U-2 could be shot down even with a rifle. It was not fast enough to escape a German fighter plane and the only chance of escape in daylight was to dive and fly as close to the ground as possible.
On September 19, 1941, the Germans occupied Kiev. The Soviet troops retreating through the Ukraine hardly resembled an army. The units Anna Yegorova was sent out to find were not marching in columns but in bedraggled groups. Ragged, exhausted and starving, they could barely walk as they dragged their weapons and the wounded with them. Given new hope by the sight of the little plane with its red star, the soldiers waved their hands, caps and helmets. Several times she had to land in villages in imminent danger of capture, but the U-2 never failed, sometimes taking off with bullet holes in its wings.
When she found she was bringing orders to retreat, Anna always wondered why they were necessary since the army had already been retreating for a long time. On one occasion she flew to the headquarters of the Southwestern Front at the Kharkov aerodrome to find everything in chaos, and discovered that in wartime a plane can be rustled as easily as a horse.
A pilot from her squadron had previously flown to Kharkov with secret correspondence, but when it was time to go back his plane was nowhere to be seen on the apron. A lot of “horseless” pilots were wandering around. Some had lost their planes in battle and others because the Germans had bombed huge numbers of aircraft on the ground. Anna and her colleague were sent to look for the missing plane but found nothing. Returning via the airfield at Chuguev, where she failed to get anything to eat at the canteen, Anna went back to her U-2 and, to her surprise, found a major sitting in the cockpit shouting, “Contact!” A second airman, also a major, was turning the propeller by hand to help start the engine. Surprise turned to rage and, forgetting her subordinate rank, she jumped onto the wing of her plane and set about the major with her fists, shouting “Stop thief! You bandit! Have you no conscience?”
The major took this calmly. He turned to face her and said, “Why are you yelling like that? This is not the bazaar! Just tell us politely this is your plane and we will go and look for one which is stray.” As the two majors walked off, one striding manfully and the other trotting behind him, Anna even felt sorry for them.
When a U-2 pilot who survived the war was describing his adventures at the front, his wife, who spent the whole conflict with ground units, would tell him he had not seen the worst of it, as he flew from one airfield to another with his pilot’s ration of special Cola chocolate.43 On October 24, 1941, Kharkov fell. The filth and horror of a war with nothing remotely romantic about it was something the soldiers of the retreating units, which Anna Yegorova viewed from above, saw only too clearly.
Among these crushed, exhausted people retreating from Kharkov was Anya Skorobogatova, tramping with them in boots too large for her. She was just eighteen years old, a slip of a girl with a straight nose, thick black hair and lively eyes as blue as forget-me-nots. Since she was a child Anya had dreamed of being a pilot, and went on to complete a course at a flying club.44 At the outbreak of war she reported to the recruitment center but was told they were not at present taking on girls as pilots, but she could enroll on a course for radio operators with airborne units. She settled for that, hoping to see combat and imagining the time might come when her flying experience would be needed.
Anya Skorobogatova had begun her course in Kharkov but these were disconcerting times. The streets of this beautiful city were already full of military hardware, the local hospitals full to overflowing with wounded people, while day and night a distant thunder, “the voice of war,” was audible. Soviet troops were retreating to Stalingrad, and it was this time of retreat, not the fighting, that many eyewitnesses remember as the most desperate days of the war. The retreating soldiers were hungry and exhausted and many were totally dejected. Vladimir Pivovarov, commanding a reconnaissance squad, recalls the day he and his comrades found a beehive by the roadway, instantly tore the honeycomb apart and ate their fill of the honey. This made them even thirstier. At just the wrong moment they heard the shout, “Communists and Komsomol members, forward with your weapons!” The Germans were nearby, but as the Russians advanced they spotted a small pond ahead, ignored their commanding officers and the threat from the enemy, and rushed to drink, hopelessly muddying the water.45
Anya’s course for radio operators also retreated. She was dismayed when she heard they were being ordered to evacuate to Rossosh, a town in the steppe between Kharkov and Stalingrad. It meant moving further away from her parents, whom she had to leave behind in a village near Taganrog. Very young and now with no one to turn to for support, she was precipitated into adulthood.
Anya struck up a close friendship on the course with three girls: Frida Katz from Gomel, Anya Stobova from Poltava, and Lena Bachul from Moldavia. They were immediately nicknamed “The Four Sisters” and swore never to be parted for the rest of their lives. Only Anya survived the war.
The would-be radio operators were each given a rusty rifle but no ammunition. That did not matter much, because nobody had yet taught them how to shoot. They were issued with oversized boots and greatcoats “to grow into,” and told to put what they would need in kitbags. Before leaving Kharkov, Anya sent her mother a letter, not knowing whether it would ever reach her. Its message was in verse, banal, emotional, and heartfelt and ended, “And so, farewell, I shall return—victorious!” Their group of about a hundred boys and girls covered the 250 kilometers to Rossosh on foot. To start with they marched by day, which was terrifying. Enemy aircraft with crosses on their wings flew low overhead. In the villages they passed through, the local women gave them boiled sweetcorn to eat, but wailed, “Children, who are you leaving us to?” They shared the roads with refugees burdened with their pitiful possessions, pulling children along and driving their cows ahead of them. It started raining and for a day they were soaked through. Then the officers decided it was too dangerous to proceed like that and they spent the daytime sheltering in sheds and moved on only after dark. They found it difficult, and would fall asleep on their feet. All the time they were accompanied by the lamentation of the village women crying, “Why are you leaving us, children?”
When finally they reached Rossosh, which had been far to the rear, they found it was now no distance at all from the front line. The Germans too had been on the move. It was a day’s march to Stalingrad, with only the River Don barring the way.
They again settled down to learn to transmit and receive radio messages and to use Morse code.46 Anya calculated how much longer the training would take her and determined to make sure she was attached to an aviation unit. She had not given up hope of flying.