It was night when Raskova’s Air Group 122 finally arrived in Engels and there was not a soul on the platform. It was raining and foggy and, in the absence of any lights, Raskova was far from certain that they were actually in the right place.47 Blundering around in the dark, she eventually came upon the military garrison’s duty officer and was assured that they were expected. The officer showed them to their quarters, the sports hall of the officers’ club where, as in their railway wagon, the girls would be sleeping on two-tiered bunks. A comfortable room had been prepared for Raskova with a large bed and a carpet. She caustically dubbed it a boudoir, ordered that the carpet should be removed, and had the bed replaced by two narrow bunks for herself and her chief of staff.
After the endless packed meals on the train the girls were glad to be served hot “blondie”—millet porridge—in the garrison canteen. They began settling in. The men in other flying units stationed there were “greatly entertained” by their arrival.48 An all-female unit, and an airborne one at that, seemed simply unbelievable. The men immediately nicknamed Raskova’s girls “Dollies.” When the Dollies’ Komsomol administrator, earnest, chubby-faced Nina Ivakina, told their instructor, a senior lieutenant, that she was their political officer his eyes “grew wide with astonishment and he exclaimed, ‘What? You even have political officers, like in a real regiment?’” When Vera Lomako, a famous Soviet pilot who, like Raskova, set records in long-distance flights, heard that the male trainees at the Engels military flying school, who looked down pityingly on the girls, were calling them the Death Battalion, she encouraged the girls to treat the men with a withering condescension of their own. Raskova smiled, confident that when the time came her wards would show they were the equals of men.49
At the time they arrived, Engels was still far behind the front lines. The Germans were already close to the Volga further upriver, but that was a good thousand kilometers away. In this backwater, as the women pilots immediately disparagingly described it, there were the usual privations of life in wartime: men were being seen off to the front, and just to survive involved an unremitting struggle. Food was in short supply, and the mothers of young children were only too glad to cook and do the laundry of the service personnel billeted on them, in return for even a very small amount of the semolina in their rations.50 The little town that bore the name of one of the founders of communism was, the airwomen generally agreed, “a hole.” “The squalid little houses were made of clay and had their heads bowed to one side from age,” Nina Ivakina wrote in her diary. The walls of most of them were made of the clay mentioned by Nina, mixed with straw and brushwood. There were four stone buildings in the town center: the N.K.V.D. headquarters, the headquarters of the town’s Party Committee, the Young Pioneers Palace, and the Motherland Cinema. Engels’ shops were single-story stone hovels full of the usual village bric-a-brac, each one identical to the rest and unlikely to satisfy the fashion sense of even the most undemanding and provincial of the girls.51 The town was also full of exceptionally cowardly stray dogs.
But in most other respects, Engels was an ideal location for training pilots. The dry steppe surrounding it was as flat as a pancake: it was effectively one enormous airfield on which you could land wherever you pleased. In the winter there was also the immensity of the iced-over Volga, another possible landing strip. There were many more days of flying weather than in Central Russia and, for the time being, the front was far away.
The girls’ new home was a barracks where each had their place on wooden planking, a gray flannel blanket, and a straw mattress. They were all accommodated in a single large hall. For a small number of the new recruits, of course, these conditions were almost intolerable, but few of the rest of the girls were accustomed to anything much better. Girls from peasant families had grown up in houses without any furniture beyond a wooden table and benches. Needless to say, no one had a room of their own, although the parents might live behind a curtain or in the separate “guest” part of the hut. Everyone else slept on the stove, on the benches or on the floor. Nobody had sheets or pillowcases. Everybody ate communally with wooden spoons from a large bowl, drinking their soup in turn. Meat, when there was any, was shared out by the head of the family.
When peasants left the countryside to work in factories in the cities, they would be accommodated in workers’ barracks, where many people lived in a shared room without amenities. Even those who succeeded in finding a place to live in an apartment usually had the whole family living in a single room. In the communal kitchen each family had its own table and cupboard and cooked on a large stove. There was one toilet shared by everyone, and a single sink with water. They went to the bathhouse to wash because the apartments had no bathroom. Before the war many Soviet citizens had known real hunger.
The first thing Raskova did when they all arrived in Engels was to send the girls off for a bath and a haircut. The order drawn up by her chief of staff specifying that their hair was to be no longer than halfway down their ears was read out almost before they left the station platform. An elderly barber duly snipped away, and gradually the floor was carpeted with long tresses, light-colored and dark, straight and curly.
When the barber finished snipping and stepped back from the mirror, Natasha Meklin, a future navigator, saw a boy looking straight out at her. “That just could not be me. Someone completely different was clutching the arms of the chair and staring at me in surprise and alarm.”52 The boy had a funny tuft of hair sticking up on the back of his head that Natasha could not get to lie down. “Nothing to worry about,” the barber assured her. “It’s because it’s a new style. That will soon settle. Next!”
Next in the chair was Zhenya Rudneva. She took her time unwinding a long, tight, blonde plait before shaking her head. Golden hair cascaded down over her shoulders. Everybody froze. Was this too destined to end up on the floor? The barber looked at Zhenya and hesitantly opened and closed drawers for a time in silence, before asking, “All off?” Zhenya looked up in surprise and nodded.53
Most of the girls parted with their plaits just as serenely as Zhenya, but some were in tears, either at the fate of their own hair or someone else’s. They could keep a plait only with Raskova’s personal permission, and very few had the temerity to bother her over such a trivial matter. Most, even if they regretted the loss of their tresses, were well aware after ten days in the goods wagon that plaits were not a good idea in wartime.
That autumn hundreds of thousands of Soviet women bade farewell to their plaits, exchanging the saying that “a woman’s hair is her crowning glory” for the stern reminder that “If the head is cut off you don’t weep for the hair.” As they departed for the front, nurses, signalers and radio operators, telephonists, clerks and anti-aircraft gunners parted with their tresses. Shura Vinogradova in all her eighteen years had never cut her hair, but the day came when she begged for a pair of scissors to get rid of it. She had just started teaching at a village school when her call-up notice arrived. She had no wish to go to the war, leaving her school without a teacher and her family to look after themselves, but you could not argue with the enlistment commission. In defiance of the truth, her documents stated she had volunteered for the front. It took an interminable time to reach her posting on the Leningrad Front. Within ten days she had lice, and two weeks later her plait was teeming with them. In desperation she walked down a column of trucks in search of a pair of scissors. Eventually a driver cut it off for her and hastily threw it under a bush. “I’ll grow it back when the war is over,” she consoled herself but, of course, never did—like the rest of the girls, her waist-length hair had taken almost twenty years to grow. Neither, though, did she forget that long blonde plait, discarded under a bush in Malaya Vishera.54
Having settled her troops in the hall of the officers’ club, Raskova immediately got down to business: aircraft, engines, armaments, aeronautical studies, and drill. At her first meeting with Badaev, the commander of the air garrison, she was told he had received an order giving the titles of three regiments she was to command. These were 586 Fighter Regiment, 587 Bomber Regiment, and 588 Night Bomber Regiment. At present they existed only on paper and she needed to allocate personnel to them. She also needed to decide who, among those with flying experience, would be a pilot and who a navigator, and to determine whether those without flying experience should be trained up as navigators or mechanics. These decisions were taken jointly by Raskova and Vera Lomako and created much disgruntlement, but Raskova had not only great personal authority but was also a skilled communicator, capable of persuading anyone to do almost anything.
All her new servicewomen wanted to fly, if not as pilots then at least as navigators. All the navigators wanted to be pilots. All the pilots wanted to be fighter pilots. Raskova listened to everyone who was aggrieved and brave enough to approach her with a request for a transfer. She talked to each in a serious and respectful manner. Galya Dokutovich wanted to be a pilot, but Raskova explained how greatly the bomber regiment needed navigators with flying experience. To forceful, chubby Faina Pleshivtseva she explained that, even though she had graduated from her flying club, the country presently had a pressing need of her detailed understanding of the mechanical aspects of aircraft. Pleshivtseva had joined Raskova from her fourth year at aviation institute but was talked round, although she still hoped eventually to fly. Raskova did not dash that hope, and even encouraged it. The hopes of armorers and mechanics that one day they would take to the sky were often realized. There was a war on and, in the night bomber regiment at least, the ground crew were often retrained as navigators, and navigators retrained as pilots to replace senior colleagues lost through illness, injury, or death.
Almost all the professional pilots with many flying hours who had come to Raskova from civil aviation or had been flying club instructors were drafted into the heavy bomber regiment. Those with less experience became pilots in the night bomber regiment or navigators. Only the very best, competitive pilots with extensive experience had any prospect of being accepted into the fighter regiment. Everything was decided on the basis of test flights. Although Raskova had little flying experience herself, she had great intuition and was an excellent judge of character. She believed a real fighter pilot could be recognized immediately from the boldness of her “signature” in the air, the skill with which she maneuvered the aircraft and controlled its speed. She was assisted in these decisions by Vera Lomako, a professional aviatrix who had been one of the pilots on the first non-stop flight from the Black Sea to the White Sea, on which Raskova had been the navigator.
Although she did not remain in the regiment for long because a recent crash had undermined her health, everybody well remembered the colorful figure she cut. Lomako was tall but thickset, wore a leather raglan coat and boots, and a flying helmet with earflaps and lined with gray astrakhan. Her most memorable feature, however, was her face: the girls thought she looked like a real warrior, with the unflinching gaze of her hazel-brown eyes and the gauze bandages on her nose and eyebrow. People found Lomako so intimidating that on one occasion Valya Krasnoshchyokova, nervously reporting that she had safely delivered a package to Lomako’s husband, Major Bashmakov (a pilot also stationed at that time in Engels, whose surname means “shoes” in Russian), accidentally called him “Major Boots,” incurring Lomako’s wrath.55 Few dared to question Vera Lomako’s judgments. Those who made it into the fighter regiment were women in whom she and Raskova detected lightning-fast reactions, an ability to improvise (which could save the pilot’s life in an unanticipated situation), and tremendous courage. By temperament a fighter pilot must always be a leader. She is alone in the cockpit with no one other than herself to rely on and no one to follow. In a dogfight decisions have to be taken and implemented in a fraction of a second, and there is a high price to pay if they are wrong.
The decisions of Raskova and Lomako could be unexpected: Lyuba Gubina, an experienced instructor, was not accepted for the fighter regiment. She was told that, with her flying hours, she would be capable of piloting “our most sophisticated aircraft, the heavy bomber.” She was disappointed to be drafted into 587 Regiment, feeling there could be no comparison between flying even the most advanced bomber and the kind of aerobatic skill required of a fighter pilot. Valya Kravchenko, with thousands of flying hours, was also dispatched to the bomber regiment, while Larisa Rozanova, an experienced flying instructor, even ended up in the night bomber regiment. To those who were disappointed Raskova explained that the other regiments too needed experienced pilots. With the Motherland under threat, personal preferences had to be put aside in order to do what had to be done.
By November 27 the fighter regiment had almost been formed and the pilots assigned to their squadrons, but many of the pilots allocated to the bomber regiment were still unhappy. If we can rely on the testimony of Nina Ivakina, the Komsomol administrator whose jobs included reporting to her seniors on political attitudes amongst the recruits, pilots Makarova, Tarmosina and Gvozdikova were indignant that their aerobatic skills had not been considered sufficient to include them as fighter pilots.56 Valya Gvozdikova, an instructor at the Moscow Flying Club, “a bright, statuesque, cheerful girl,” was one of the first pilots to be assigned to Raskova. Together with Anya Demchenko and Larisa Rozanova she had needed to get to Moscow from the village in Ryazan Province to which the club had been evacuated. When they received the summons they dashed to the club treasurer for their fare, but found there was a total of only 60 rubles 80 kopecks in the kitty. This was not enough to hire a horse and cart to get them to the station. Nothing daunted, they walked the twenty-five kilo-meters to the station, reaching Air Group 122 before anyone else. Had not Raskova herself told her chief of staff, Militsa Kazarinova, that Katya Budanova, Valya Gvozdikova, and Tamara Pamyatnykh would make great fighter pilots, and now Gvozdikova was being asked to pilot a bomber? Valya was “so upset she decided she did not want to fly anything.” She refused to move out of the accommodation allocated to the fighter pilots, and was “prepared to ram the leading bomber pilot if she was moved.” Passions were further inflamed when Raskova unhesitatingly selected Gvozdikova’s friend from the Kherson flying school, Lilya Litvyak, even after it was discovered she had contrived to add 100 flying hours to her record in order to be assigned to Raskova—her real experience being barely enough to qualify her for inclusion in the night bomber regiment. When Gvozdikova’s behavior came to Raskova’s attention she just laughed. She respected women as stubborn as herself, and gave permission for Gvozdikova to stay with the fighter pilots.57
The girls from Zhenya Prokhorova’s renowned aerobatic team were eagerly expected and were to provide the nucleus of the fighter regiment. They were very late for the test flights since Lera Khomyakova and other instructors from the Moscow Central Flying Club had to make their own way to Engels, which proved a very slow business. The club had been evacuated to Vladimirovka, a village near Stalingrad. The instructors had been allowed to take their families with them, and Lera had insisted on taking all her immediate family: her ill father, her mother, and her sister with her three small children. When they had transferred all the planes and evacuated their families, several of the instructors, including Lera, received papers drafting them to the front. Their families stayed in Vladimirovka, and from then until she was killed Lera wrote fifty letters, each beginning, “My dear family, whom I love so much.”58
Reinforcements were arriving throughout November, but in addition a steady stream of young Komsomol girls who had completed courses at flying clubs and also those who had no training of any sort made their way, on their own initiative, to Raskova in the hope she would find them a place in the ranks of her little army. Most came from Saratov, a city only separated from Engels by the two-kilometer-wide expanse of the Volga.
Lena Lukina, a student at the Saratov Agricultural Institute, returned to the city after helping with the harvest to find that her college had been closed and its building now housed an evacuated war production factory. Her mother said officials had already been round to enlist her to dig trenches, but who wanted to dig trenches when people around her were doing far more interesting and heroic things? Boys she knew were going off to fight at the front, girls were going there as nurses. The quickest way to find out all that was happening was to talk to her friend Irina Dryagina, who was the Party secretary of her faculty. Irina was always in the thick of everything, knew how to shoot, tie bandages properly, and had even trained at the flying club herself. Irina’s mother, an emotional Ukrainian woman, told her Irina was not at home. “She’s run off to sign up with Raskova!” she said crossly.
Irina, hearing from friends at the flying club that Raskova was forming air regiments across the river, had impulsively set off for Engels. There was no bridge across the Volga but, already in November, people were crossing on the still thin ice. The guard at the flying school on the other side told Irina her documents were insufficient, so she had to go back over the ice to Saratov and from there back again to Engels. Raskova and her commissar Yeliseyeva did their best to persuade Irina and other students to return to their studies, but Irina was having none of it. She asked whether, if she could not be taken on as a pilot, she could at least be an armorer (a possibility she had heard about from girls in the queue). Yeliseyeva pointed out that Irina, as a Party member, would be just right for the post of commissar of the Night Bomber Squadron. Irina kept her head and retorted, “It is important for a commissar to fly!” Raskova laughed and promised that she would.
After hearing all this, Lena Lukina also went to find Raskova. If her mother had known the truth she would never have let her go. Already her father and brother were at the front, and Lena had little brothers and sisters at home. She was her mother’s only help. Lena told her she would go and work on the garrison’s farm and be part paid in vegetables, which even before the war had been in short supply for their poor family. Her mother agreed.
Lena was familiar with the flying school in Engels and had been to dances there with her friends. She was very jealous when she arrived to find Irina Dryagina already wearing a military greatcoat. Irina brought her to Raskova, who was reluctant to take her away from her family responsibilities, but here too Yeliseyeva intervened, pointing out that they needed a Komsomol administrator in the heavy bomber regiment. Like Irina, she was required to supply the right documentation, so Lena went back home across the ice, telling her mother as she was leaving that she would only be away for a week. After ten days had passed her mother guessed what was going on and went to see Irina’s mother. “They’re flying!” she exclaimed. Lena’s mother threw up her hands. Only a week ago her daughter had known not the first thing about flying. “Where are they flying?” she could only ask. “With Raskova, of course!” Irina’s mother retorted.59
Olga Golubeva now also turned up in Engels. She was a talented, seventeen-year-old daredevil who dreamed of becoming an actress, despite the fact that she was no great beauty. Her vivacity and self-confidence more than made up for what she lacked in looks. Her priority was to get back to life in peacetime just as quickly as possible by defending her homeland, and she wanted to do that from the clouds.
She had already joined the war effort in the summer, completing a nursing course and applying to work on a hospital train heading for the front. Her mother cried and upbraided her father, “Why aren’t you saying anything? You’ve let the girl get completely out of hand. Just look at the way she’s behaving!” Her father, however, was a committed Communist who had fought in the Red Army back in the Civil War period, and only said to his young daughter, “Do what you think is right.” He was a member of the mobilization commission and would have had little difficulty ensuring that neither Olga nor her brothers ended up at the front, but Olga was sure that thought never crossed his mind.60
The young nurse enjoyed working in the hospital carriage. It had that unmistakable smell of trains and railway stations. The train had red crosses painted on the tops of the carriages and an old doctor told her the Germans would not bomb those crosses. He was wrong: they were bombed constantly.
On the first day they were bombed Olga met Sasha, a friend from her school in Siberia. He was a sergeant now, and was just about to tell her something when the train suddenly braked and stopped. Olga jumped out, shouting back to him, “Tell me about it afterward, Sasha!” She wanted to look up at the aircraft in the sky and wish them luck, sure that they were Soviet planes. The aircraft, however, wheeled round and came back to bomb them, red crosses or no red crosses.
Olga had no idea how long the attack lasted. Through a blanket that muted all sound she clearly heard the ground cracking beneath her into a thousand tiny pieces. She heard people shouting, “Nu-urse!” Her colleagues were already rushing around helping the wounded but she stood there, rooted to the spot. Someone touched her on the shoulder and said, “Help us.” She looked up and saw a middle-aged soldier was asking her to help a man writhing in agony. The injured man was screaming dreadfully and Olga found herself breaking out in a cold sweat. She leaned over him and started trying to bandage him but he would not lie still. Her hands were shaking and she was ashamed and in despair at doing everything so clumsily. She heard a gurgling in the wounded man’s throat and he stopped thrashing about and lay still, as if her bandaging really had helped. She relaxed a little, but when the old soldier stood up and took off his cap Olga realized what had happened. She wailed out loud. “She’s just a young girl, hasn’t seen people die,” one person said, but someone else yelled at her, “Shut it, will you?” The raid continued for some time longer, and when the German bombers finally left and Olga looked around, the station was unrecognizable: carriages were on fire, buildings collapsing, dead and wounded people were being dragged out of the rubble. Sasha was lying next to the train. His face was intact and for a moment Olga thought he was alive but, running over, she saw his legs were missing and he was dead. Wiping away her helpless tears with hands wet with blood, Olga kept repeating what she had said such a short time ago in a different life: “Tell me about it afterward, Sasha.”
The train continued on its way. Her chief, a fat man with a huge nose like the old witch Baba Yaga, had eyed Olga lustfully her first day on the train and said he would promote her to be the train’s dietician. He summoned her one day to his compartment and told her a sob story about a daughter who was just like Olga only he did not know where she was now and his whole family had disappeared. As he told the tragic tale he caressed her hand before groping her leg. Olga fled and, for her insubordination, was demoted to the rank of orderly. She was not unduly upset.
The train made one trip after another. She was working in a wagon for the less seriously wounded, but this proved more trying than working with the severely injured. Those lay, “poor fellows, in their hammocks and were mostly silent.”61 None of them visited the other carriages or climbed down in their shorts at the stations to buy potatoes and vodka. The less seriously wounded, while they were in pain, grunted and groaned, but as soon as they recovered a little started telling tall tales, flirting with the nurses, and singing songs. They had not a care in the world, having left the horrors of the front behind, if only for a time, and with life at the rear to look forward to. They had paid for this good fortune with only a slight wound. Time would show, however, that their sense of relief was premature and that it was the seriously wounded who had the better prospect of surviving the war if, when their treatment was over, they were declared unfit for further military service and not returned to the front. They comprised a significant proportion of the few Soviet young men who survived the war. According to some sources, only 3 percent of men born in 1923 made it beyond 1945.62
The less seriously wounded behaved uproariously and generally made such a racket that the whole wagon shook. “Comrades, it isn’t decent to go out onto the platform in your underwear!” Olga shouted after them, but they only laughed. It was pointless to remind them that home-distilled vodka was bad for them. They only quieted down while Olga recited her favorite poetry to them.
Time passed and the immensity of Russia passed by the windows of the train, its fields and forests, its gray villages. She became inured to the hard work, the smell of unwashed bodies, urine and medicines, the groans of the wounded and the sleepless nights. She would probably have stayed doing that job until the war was over if she had not heard from a wounded pilot that Marina Raskova was recruiting women’s regiments. That was where she ought to be! Her chance came when another nurse, Lida, who had flying experience, was sent to Raskova. Olga, obtaining leave to see her off, ran away. She never went back to the train.
By the time she arrived in Engels her travel warrant had expired. Raskova frowned, but Olga claimed to have deserted because of the unwelcome attentions of her boss on the train. That did the trick and Raskova, telling everyone to keep quiet about Olga’s escape, took her on as an electrician. It was better than nothing and, for someone as tenacious as Olga Golubeva, it was only ever going to be the first step on her way to flying.
Dispatched from Baranov’s 296 Fighter Regiment, Masha Dolina arrived at the Engels military school in a dreadful state of mind. “I felt I had literally been sent down from heaven to earth with my hands tied behind my back.” She was in the very prepossessing uniform of a fighter pilot, wearing a dark blue greatcoat with light blue tabs and a light blue pilotka cap which really suited her. The girls marching in front of her on the parade ground, however, were wearing ungainly canvas boots and gray, ill-fitting greatcoats. Masha was terribly hurt. Who on earth had decided to pluck her, an experienced front-line pilot, from the thick of the action and plunk her down at a school desk with these greenhorns? Well, she was not going to put up with it. She would run away. She knew, of course, that under military law her act could be construed as desertion, but hoped that when she got back to Baranov’s regiment he might be persuaded to hush it up. It seemed unlikely that, in the universal chaos prevailing at the time, anyone would be much bothered about what she had done.
She was out of luck, however, and was picked up by a patrol the instant she arrived at Engels railway station. An angry Raskova handed her over to the Political Section, who gave her a thorough dressing-down and threatened to have her court-martialed as a deserter. There was nothing for it. She put on a gray overcoat the wrong size for her petite figure and turned up in the classroom.
In the heavy bomber regiment, which Raskova decided to command herself, there were now two battle-hardened pilots who had been at the front in men’s regiments, both of them dauntless, outgoing women with a mannish fearlessness. Nadezhda Fedutenko left her regiment after being wounded and, when she recovered, was sent to Raskova. She was unhappy about the transfer but, respectful of army discipline, kept her feelings to herself. Masha Dolina, however, remained conspicuously angry.