On February 18, Komsomol Administrator Ivakina noted in her diary that she and Party Administrator Klava Kasatkina had “found” some pages in the diary of Nina Slovokhotova, the regiment’s chief of staff, and a letter to her sister. She had written “a lot of muck” in them about the regiment and there were “outrageous things said about the officers, the other ranks, and regimental matters.”109 Ivakina and Kasatkina passed both the diary and the letter to “the competent authorities” (Ivakina’s italics), fully aware of how dire the consequences might be for Slovokhotova.
Most Soviet citizens, however, carried on believing that to read other people’s diaries and letters was beneath contempt. Keeping a diary was considered beneficial for developing your personality and was widely practiced. They were not, needless to say, intended to be read by anybodyelse.
Those who found themselves at the front usually had to give up diary writing. There was no official ban on it, but in almost every unit the political instructors and officers would explain to their subordinates that a diary could be damaging if it fell into enemy hands. In reality, the Germans were not the only enemy; it could equally well prove to be the person immediately next to you.
In 1942 Daniil Fibikh, a war correspondent, made a fateful entry in his diary about the commander of the army in which he was embedded: “Our little army commander readily spills Soviet blood.” Shortly afterward, unaware that anything was amiss, he was summoned to see the commander in question.110 Besides the commander there were a number of N.K.V.D. officers in attendance. A summary closed court martial was held at which the diary was the primary exhibit, and provided sufficient grounds for him to be dispatched for many years to Stalin’s labor camps. Only later did Fibikh come to realize that this violation of his privacy and the denunciation that followed were common practice at the time.
“Just as soon as I want to get something clear or query something someone barks at me, ‘As you were!’ Where do they find such narrow-minded disciplinarians? They do not see us as human beings,” Olga Golubeva wrote in her diary.111 She had always loved writing and now, finding herself in the army, could not resist writing about this new life that was so different from her old existence, and about all the impressions with which she was brimming. Before long, however, her diary, “accidentally” read by someone else and soon in the hands of many others with the power to decide her fate, brought her “a whole lot of trouble.” It goes without saying that there was nothing accidental about its being read. One or other of the colleagues with whom Olga would soon be risking her life at the front had said “Yes” when asked by a political instructor to spy on her friends. People did this for a variety of reasons. Someone whose relatives had been arrested might fear for themselves. Another might collaborate for ideological reasons. They were, after all, only twenty years old. The same newspapers that wrote of records broken and the all-conquering power of socialism, of heroic pilots and Stakhanovites who achieved exceptional productivity, also called for vigilance, denunciation of the wiles of saboteurs, spies and wreckers. How could you not believe them when they were printing the confessions of enemies of the people, uncovering arsonists who set fire to the grain of collective farms, slaughtered livestock, and blew up factories?112 Most believed, trusting the authorities even when an old, ailing German teacher was arrested as a spy; even when it was claimed that a polite, intellectual friend of the family had been unmasked as a dangerous Trotskyite.
If a political instructor, a person older and more experienced than you, endowed with authority, gave you a lecture on the need for vigilance, you might involuntarily find yourself beginning to believe that the girl in the bunk next to yours, a patriotic member of the Komsomol with whom you shared a blanket, might be a covert enemy. And if you were asked in the name of revolutionary vigilance to find and look through your friend’s diary, what right would you have to refuse?
The political instructors believed, mistakenly, that they themselves could keep a diary without any problem, as there was no one to check up on them. Komsomol Administrator Nina Ivakina, for example, confident that nobody would read her diary, wrote incessantly, describing in detail the work she was doing and her other experiences. With the arrival in mid-January 1942 of a new cohort of Komsomol members from Saratov her work became even more demanding.
When it became evident that Engels could not supply the needs of her three regiments for technical staff, Raskova turned to the Saratov Komsomol Committee. The girls, mostly students but also some factory workers, rushed to her aid. From early morning the narrow corridor was crowded with applicants queueing to be interviewed. All eyes were on the door behind which the interview panel was in session. As the candidates came out they were mobbed by eager questioners. The girls were very young and many just did not look mature enough to serve in the army. “What are you thinking of, little one? This is not a kindergarten,” Commissar Rachkevich said to one of them.113 Students from the flying clubs appeared confident, intimidated only by Raskova who was instantly recognizable. “She had a high forehead, smooth dark hair parted in the middle, and that gold star on her chest.” She looked closely at the girls, asking a lot of questions about their education, their family and work, trying to figure out whether they were suitable to be part of her unit. Her steady, benevolent voice gave them confidence. Roughly half the girls were taken on.
The Komsomol members, mainly students from a number of colleges in Saratov, were accommodated in one large room, which became very noisy and crowded. On the whole they did well, even almost illiterate Masha Makarova who made up for her lack of education because, having worked as a truck and tractor driver, she instantly grasped what was what in the engine of a Yak. The new girls brought new headaches in terms of discipline. They would run away from the airfield to warm themselves, be late for roll call, bring kittens back to the barracks, and flirt enthusiastically with the men in the garrison.
Fedotova, a Komsomol member, was caught by the garrison guards on stairs near the attic in the company of a lieutenant who “fled ignominiously.”114 The disheveled Fedotova gave a false name and regiment, but pilot Malkova and mechanic Favorskaya of the Fighter Regiment, who witnessed the incident, considered it their duty, blushing, to obtain all the details of her offense from the guard and pass them on to the competent authorities, in this case Ivakina and her superiors.
Donetskaya, who was not a Komsomol member, was often nowhere to be found on the aerodrome, ignored orders, and then committed an act so terrible that Ivakina could not bring herself to write it down in her diary and veterans of the regiment refused to talk about it even years later. Her misconduct was so grave that she was escorted away from the regiment under guard. There was great controversy over how to deal with girls like Fedotova and Donetskaya at the regiment’s Communist Party Meeting. Mechanic Osipova said the Red Army was a home from home and that it had a responsibility to re-educate miscreants, but many others felt that, with a war on, they should waste no time on the likes of Donetskaya, and the sooner they were kicked out of the regiment and ceased to damage its reputation the better.115 The political instructors thought there were few bad eggs in the regiment, not least because everybody was so busy working from early morning until late at night that they had little time to get up to any mischief. Their observations suggested that such “squalid affairs” were mostly confined to girls doing administrative and office work. They had been secretaries of government bigwigs in the past and were continuing to behave as frivolously as they had in civilian life. The instructors felt it was important to deal severely with individuals such as Fedotova and Donetskaya, but the situation was complicated by the fact that even the pilots, in theory the most mature and educated people in the regiments, often showed a woeful lack of political consciousness in the way they conducted themselves.
The ground would be invisible, lost in the murk below. The horizon too would have been erased. “We needed a special knack, a special flair to work out where we were from places where the darkness seemed blacker, faint outlines, and paler areas. Sometimes a stray light could tell us a great deal and act as a life-saving lighthouse in the ocean of darkness,” one of Bershanskaya’s pilots said of flying at night.116 It is difficult to gain a real sense from descriptions of just what night flying with rudimentary instruments was like. Only if you had experienced it yourself could you really understand the highly specialized skills it demanded. The pilots and navigators of the night bomber regiment learned to see in the dark and totally restructured their lives around living at night.
Aircraft designer Nikolai Polikarpov had suddenly had the bright idea of using U-2 trainer aircraft as light night-bombers, and this proved amazingly successful. His aircraft (which were renamed the Polikarpov Po-2 in his honor after his death in 1944) could carry a payload of 200–300 kilograms of light bombs and, although they could inflict only relatively minor damage on the enemy (heavy bombers carried a payload dozens of times greater), they nevertheless served a very important purpose. “They carried out bombing missions at low altitude, particularly at night, in order to harass the enemy, to deprive him of sleep and rest, to wear him down, destroy his aircraft on his own airfields, his fuel depots, his munitions and food supplies, disrupting transport movements, hindering the work of his headquarters and such like.”117 The Germans really hated them.
The night bomber regiment switched to living its strange, wearing nocturnal life immediately the new aircraft were delivered, and its routine remained unaltered until the end of the war. Upon returning at dawn from their nighttime missions, the pilots and navigators had breakfast in the canteen and went straight to bed. Of course, they did not get enough sleep: the sounds of the world awakening around them saw to that. When exactly the mechanics and armorers slept is unclear. They had to wait up to service their aircraft all night and then to repair them during the day. It was possible to snatch a few hours of sleep at the dormitory and the odd hour in warmer weather under the wing of the aircraft, but the ground crew remained constantly tired and hungry.
Training consisted of following a prearranged route at night, and flying over the parade ground for night bombing practice. They worked on the precision of their bombing by first dropping a “chandelier,” an aerial flare bomb, and then trying to hit it with a concrete training bomb. The flight took about an hour, which was as long as the fuel lasted.
As soon as a U-2 landed it was immediately refueled, armed, and was again ready to fly. Every night until dawn Major Bershanskaya was at the start to see off the little planes setting out one by one into the night, and she was there to meet them when they landed at an area marked out by a glowing letter “T.” She hid her fears for her cadets behind a barrier of severity and a stern, impassive expression.
Bershanskaya herself had many thousands of hours of flying experience, both daytime and nighttime, and was used to flying blind by instruments. At the Bataisk Aviation College she had been the commander of a flight of women pilots. She worked there for some years as an instructor, later becoming a pilot on civil airlines. Her path to becoming a pilot had been as thorny as those of most of her cadets. Bershanskaya was twenty-eight years old in 1941 and had grown up in the terrible era of the Russian Civil War. Once as a little girl she had to sit all night next to the corpse of her mother, comforting her little brother. They were lucky that, a few days later, her uncle appeared and took them back to his family where they grew up in great hardship but surrounded by love. One day when the little girl was running around the school playground with other children she heard a high-pitched young voice shout, “Look, it’s an airplane!” The plane flew over the village, and began to descend precipitately. When the children, completely out of breath, reached the aircraft, a young freckled boy who looked exactly like any villager was standing next to it, stretching his stiff legs, squatting and jumping up and down. As she gazed at him, the young Yevdokia suddenly realized that the mystery of flight was open even for completely ordinary people. She decided there and then that she too would be a pilot. There was no talking her out of it. Yevdokia graduated from a flying club, then the Bataisk Aviation College.
Raskova had long been acquainted with Bershanskaya, and she was one of the first women to be invited to join 122 Air Group. Needless to say, when she turned up Bershanskaya demanded to be retrained as a fighter pilot, and was upset to be told she would be in command of the night bomber regiment. She would have much preferred to be a fighter pilot, but when she received the order she set to work without protest. Her little son from a failed marriage to a pilot called Bershansky stayed in the rear with his grandmother. By the end of the war she was married to Bocharov, the colonel in charge of a U-2 regiment alongside which the women’s night-bomber regiment spent the entire war.
Bershanskaya was not the only person meeting the planes and debriefing the crew after they landed on that glowing letter “T.” She was accompanied by Irina Rakobolskaya, who had been appointed her chief of staff, a slender, brown-eyed, dark-haired woman of average height. For the pilots and navigators she was in quite a different category from Major Bershanskaya, who seemed to them to be much older than they were, a professional aviator and a real officer, an unfathomable, remote figure who inspired respect and humility. Irina was simply a friend who had been elevated to officer rank. Hardly any time ago she had been a student at the Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University. Unlike Bershanskaya, Commissar Rachkevich, or the regiment’s chief engineer, Ozerkova, who were superiors and whom they tried to steer clear of, Irina, although an officer, was one of them, with the same intellectual interests and the same love of books, as the other ex-students. In the barracks they called her Irina, in a formal setting “Comrade Lieutenant.” Irina, a girl with a remarkable intellect that shone through in her mischievous brown eyes, was the link connecting the regiment’s officers to everybody else.118
Irina Rakobolskaya was perplexed about how best to build a relationship with her regimental commander, who was older and had a background very different from this former Moscow University student.119 Irina had to write out all the speeches for her to deliver at various gatherings, and Bershanskaya would read them, never taking her eyes off the text. Irina never felt close to Bershanskaya, who seemed to be made of sterner stuff, but for some reason her superior chose her as a confidante, unilaterally deciding that Irina was the person closest to her in the regiment. She would share many personal details which Irina really had no wish to know. Yevdokia would talk to her about her son, and even share intimate details about life with her pilot husband, wholly unconcerned that Irina was still a virgin and often had no idea what she was talking about. As time passed, however, Irina came increasingly to like Yevdokia Bershanskaya. She admired her determination and decency, her reliability, the fact that she was an excellent pilot, her austere but tireless concern for those in her care, and her ability to keep on learning and developing. Without Irina’s noticing, no doubt because they were together all the time, Bershanskaya raised her level of education. By the end of the war she was writing her own speeches.
“You ask how we drop bombs?” Zhenya Rudneva wrote to a friend in Moscow. “You point your plane at the target and press the bomb release catch. The bomb is released and lands on the heads of the damnable Germans. God, how I hate them!”120
It was only now that she told her parents she was in an airborne unit and about to be sent to the front. “My dear father,” she wrote, “so much effort, money and, most importantly of all, knowledge have been invested in me that I and the others are of considerable value to the front. I will be sure to come back home to you after the war but, if anything happens, the Germans will pay dearly for my life, because I have outstanding technology at my disposal.” Zhenya was awkward, slow moving and looked ridiculous in military uniform, but was already the regiment’s chief navigator. She had come a very long way. Early on in their training in Engels they were told that every item of a navigator’s equipment must be tied down so as not to blow away. The following day Zhenya appeared festooned with all the appurtenances of her profession neatly tied to the buttons on her uniform. She was subjected to good-natured laughter but, obsessed with mastering her job to perfection, paid no attention. “I feel I am doing the only right thing,” she wrote to her family. “I am doing what it is my duty to do.”121 She was constantly working on self-improvement, but continued to struggle to get into the cockpit quickly. Her pilot, Dina Nikulina, did not spare her feelings and coached her at great length, obliging Zhenya to climb in and out of the plane over and over again in her hot, bulky flying suit and fur boots. Others felt this was almost humiliating, but Zhenya was invariably grateful for the lesson. “I really do like flying with Dina most of all, because now I know I am competent, and that it is safe for people to fly with me. Dina is the only person who points out my mistakes. Every time I fly with her I learn something new.”122 In any theory class, after the instructor had finished and asked whether there were any questions, Zhenya could be relied on to pipe up, “What is this formula for? How is it derived?” The instructor would have to think about it and explain how it was arrived at, venturing into the realms of higher mathematics. Not a day passed when Zhenya did not ask “Why?” She wanted to know everything. That was how she believed in studying, certain that all the theory and practice would soon prove useful on the front line.