Major Tamara Kazarinova was posted to 586 Fighter Regiment at the end of February 1942. Like her sister, Militsa, the chief of staff of Raskova’s heavy bomber regiment, she was a career army pilot whom Raskova had known since before the war. Nobody warned the regiment she was coming; Kazarinova’s arrival was an unpleasant surprise. For all Zhenya Prokhorova’s popularity, the senior staff had never contemplated appointing her as commander. She was a brilliant pilot, but a sportswoman rather than a soldier and, most importantly, she was not a member of the Communist Party. That meant that whatever the circumstances, she had no prospect of ever rising higher than squadron leader. Bershanskaya, the commander of the night bomber regiment, had a civil aviation background and, unlike Zhenya, had graduated from a flying college, where she had been in command of a special women’s unit. But, most importantly, she was a long-standing Party member. Raskova, in command of the heavy bomber regiment, owed her army career to her service in the N.K.V.D. and record-breaking flights. As regards Major Tamara Kazarinova, she had an Order of Lenin, the second most prestigious Soviet medal after Hero of the Soviet Union, pinned to her chest. She had been awarded it in 1937, in a war the Soviet regime was waging against its own people, who were being dispatched in their hundreds of thousands to the Gulag.
For all that, initially Tamara Kazarinova made a favorable impression. “She is a likable and intelligent woman, clearly a strong-willed commander who will really teach us how to work instead of playing at soldiers,” was Nina Ivakina’s assessment.123 Kazarinova spoke well and had an educated accent. She had a handsome if impassive face and her military uniform fitted her faultlessly. That was how she first struck Alexander Gridnev, who could never have imagined that within a few months he would replace her as commander of a female fighter regiment. “A woman still young, with good deportment, shorter than average, a bit stocky. A frank expression and inflamed eyes with a hint of sadness. You detect independence of spirit and self-assertiveness in the way she looks at you and her general manner. When someone asked, not without irony, whether women pilots need assistance to fly a fighter plane, she froze them out and did not reply.”124
What really was surprising was that Kazarinova turned up in the fighter regiment with a walking stick and limping: she had broken her leg. It would never have occurred to most people that a person in that condition could be appointed to command a military unit shortly due to leave for the front. The only possible explanation seemed to be that she was expected to recover from her injury very quickly, and that in the meantime it would not prevent her from carrying out her duties. Everyone was eager to see what kind of “signature” she would have as a pilot when she started flying, and to improve their own skills by flying as a wingmate to a highly professional fighter regiment commander. The only way such an officer could establish their authority was by demonstrating their flying skills, firing at targets, and taking part in practice dogfights with other pilots. Weeks passed, however, and Tamara Kazarinova showed no inclination to climb into the cockpit.
“It’s simply wonderful! Imagine the speed!” Lilya wrote home to her mother.125 The fighter pilots were now fully familiar with their planes and were given permission to fly solo training flights in “the zone,” a defined airspace where pilots customarily awaited their turn to come in to land or make their approach to the airfield. Lilya boasted she had flown at an altitude of 5,000 meters without oxygen, a risky experiment she probably undertook without permission—which would have been entirely in character. At high altitudes the air is so thin that, without supplementary oxygen, pilots are liable to behave erratically. She wrote enthusiastically that, “for the first time I felt what it is like to fly without the wheels down.” Never one to spare her mother, she added that she had several times got into a spin, but had finally learned how to bank steeply. They were now training in earnest, not only practicing firing their weaponry, but also engaging in aerobatics and, of course, dogfights.
There was no shortage of fuel and the fighter pilots trained from morning to night, growing increasingly confident in their high-speed aircraft. “How our girls can fly!” Ivakina wrote. “Even those men who used to say we would only make a mess of everything today look up at our pilots in silent admiration.”
They had no time now for the blandishments of the officers’ club and were only able to meet up with the pilots they were friendly with in the canteen. All the same, as Lilya admitted in a letter, “the truth is that before we go there the girls spend half an hour powdering their faces.”126
In fact, only a small proportion of airwomen did actually powder their faces. Most girls had never used cosmetics. Powder, lipstick and eye shadow were on sale in big cities, but few women could afford them. If you lived in a small town or in the countryside, they were not even on offer. Women made artless cosmetics themselves and, if they were going to a dance, might shade their eyebrows with burned cork, or make lipstick by grating the lead of a red pencil and mixing it with fat.
Mascara, if you were lucky enough to have it, came in the form of a hard paste in a rectangular box. Before applying it, you needed to spit on it and give it a good stir with the brush. But quite apart from the absence of mascara and lipstick, in the 1940s there was no toothpaste or toilet paper in the U.S.S.R., and shampoo was yet to be heard of. They only appeared in Soviet shops in the 1960s.
With or without make-up, the girls always wanted to look pretty, even in war. Katya Peredera, a sniper who in 1943 was positioned along with the rest of her squad in quarries near Kerch, remembers using precious water that she would gladly have drunk to wash her face. “What are you doing that for? There is hardly any light here,” her friend, dark-eyed Zhenya Makeyeva, teased her.127 Their underground shelters were lit with dim lamps fashioned from shell cases. Nevertheless, Katya, Zhenya and the other girls in their squad did everything they could, in conditions where they could wash neither themselves nor their clothes, to remain attractive. They worried that they might not be invited to dance when parties were held, by the light of makeshift lamps and to the music of an accordion, in one of the more cavernous caves. They had never seen face cream and were delighted to find a battered tin of Nivea in an abandoned German trench. The smell was wonderful! They all rubbed in a tiny amount and eked it out for ages.
Lilya, as a Muscovite sophisticate, knew more about make-up than her virginal friends, but did not overdo it. She was proud, for example, that she did not yet need to use powder. However, although her hair was naturally light brown, Lilya thought she looked better as a blonde.128
There were some girls in Raskova’s care who, granted leave to go into the city, had their hair permed. This gave rise to much controversy, many taking the view that, like flirting, it was inappropriate in wartime. Of course, after six months in the army their ideas about many things had changed. Irina Rakobolskaya, as chief of staff of the night bombers, now took a different view from the one she had held during their first days in Engels. Then, at the very outset of their military careers, they had walked into the canteen accompanied by Bobik, a black dog that barked at every man they saw. One time the girls from Moscow University had met some of their former fellow students, and after lunch went off chatting with them instead of marching out in the line with the others. Irina and other comrades found that unacceptable. The offenders were told they had disgraced their university. They burst into tears and promised never to do it again.
The view then, Irina recalls, was that the war would soon be over and they should get through it by renouncing everything personal.129 As the months passed, however, they came to see that “the war was their life, and that there was nothing wrong about talking to a man.” Some, however, were less flexible, among them Galya Dokutovich. She fumed indignantly to her diary, “I am outraged!” The occasion of her ire was girls from her regiment having a perm. “All three of them have had permanent waving. There is no place in the army for the likes of these. These are not our Soviet girls, worthy of taking their place at the front . . . I do not care if they are offended. Before you know it they will be putting on lipstick, darkening their eyebrows, and gluing on beauty spots. After that they will only be fit to be sent to . . . well, I do not know where they could be sent to. To the Institute of Foreign Languages, perhaps, or some marriage market!”130
Many found Galya unreasonably hard, both on herself and on others. Even when her best friend, Polina Gelman, was going through a difficult time, she at first evoked Galya’s disapproval and only later her sympathy. Galya told her she should never have come to the front. When Polina accused Galya of being rude and unkind, she admitted that in many ways her friend was right. But then, what times these were! And was she any less demanding of herself than of others? In Galya’s opinion, only people like herself were fit for this kind of unforgiving existence.
Lilya Litvyak was always independently minded and took condemnation by other comrades in her stride. She had, in any case, many friends. Her personal appearance was as important to her as being a pilot. Lilya was upset that she had not thought to bring an attractive blue tunic from home, probably her flying club uniform.131 She also complained to her mother about her boots: they were too big, and one was shorter than the other. Hearing that the regiment’s chief engineer and the commissars periodically flew to Moscow, Lilya asked her mother to make up a parcel for her of a white helmet of stout material which would wash well, socks, gloves, and linen or silk handkerchiefs. In short, she closely resembled the kind of girl who, in Galya Dokutovich’s opinion, was fit only for “some marriage market.” On every training flight, however, she disproved Dokutovich’s claim that women who took so much interest in their appearance had no place at the front. In reply to her brother, Yury, who wrote to tell his sister how proud he was of her, Lilya wrote that she had not yet done anything to deserve that distinction. She had not finished her training nor won any victories over the enemy. She had, however, a good idea of what the job of a fighter pilot involved and was sure she would cope with it “admirably.” She was in a great mood, her training was interesting, and she was even being decently fed. Her only anxiety was for her family.
Lilya’s mother’s letters to her daughter which, in violation of military secrecy, she naively addressed to Pilot Litvyak, included little about how she and Yury were getting on. Lilya demanded that she should write more often and in greater detail, suspecting that life for her mother, which had not been easy before the war, was now very hard. Moscow was no longer in danger, the Germans having been driven back by the counter-attack that started on December 5, 1941 (the first, and to date only, significant Soviet victory). Now, in early March 1942, the fighting was some 200 kilometers away from the capital in the vicinity of Vyazma. However, the initial nation-wide euphoria at the rolling back of the immediate threat to Moscow had given way to fatigue and depression. Mere existence had become a struggle.132