“Rostov and Bataisk are being bombed constantly in the mornings, evenings and at night. Those bastards!” Galya Dokutovich noted on July 16. “The Germans are on the attack again,” she wrote the following day. “They have advanced from Izyum to Voroshilovgrad and on to Lisichansk, Millerovo and Morozovskaya.”163 Soviet troops were retreating from Rostov.
Alexander Fedyayev, a very young soldier when he retreated from Rostov with his unit, always found his eyes filling with tears when he recalled 1942. “The Nazi tanks were furiously pressing in on the city, and all our infantry had against them were rifles.” He could never forget the moment he and his friends were marching past a group of girls aged about fifteen. “They were all crying. They had already experienced one Nazi occupation and now a second was coming. Our soldiers were so shamefaced, because we had not the strength to protect them.”164
In the south of Russia, between the two great rivers of the Don and the Volga and as far as the Sea of Azov, there is another sea, pale green and rippling in May, parched and yellow in July—the boundless steppe. In the feather grass and sagebrush (and little else grows in these semi-arid lands) the hares and antelope hide from wolves. Once the Nogai nomads, clad in fur and high leather boots, herded here huge numbers of horses and camels, cows and sheep. After them came another tribe, the Kalmyks, a stocky people with narrow eyes and broad, flat faces. Then the Don Cossacks, brave warriors, explorers, famed for their hospitality, their singers and storytellers. For centuries, indeed millennia, invaders crossed the steppe on their way to the shores of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, intent on conquering the Caucasus: Scythians, the Tatar-Mongols, Russians. Finally in 1942, driving their armored columns over the steppe, Hitler’s troops advanced on the Caucasus. That summer you could see only too clearly from the air numerous black stripes of freshly-dug trenches and anti-tank ditches scarring the ocean of the steppe in an attempt to halt the German offensive against Rostov-on-Don.
By June 1942, the Soviet Southern Front had been weakened by the failure of the Kharkov spring offensive. On June 28, General Hoth’s tank army managed to break through between Kursk and Kharkov and to advance rapidly toward the River Don. On July 3, the Germans captured Voronezh and Soviet troops commanded by Marshal Timoshenko, defending the route to Rostov, found themselves under threat of encirclement from the north.
The German tanks advanced 200 kilometers in ten days, rapidly moving southward between the Rivers Donets and Don. Timoshenko lost 200,000 men taken prisoner alone. The armies of the Southern Front and 4 Air Army providing them with air cover were badly mauled.
Yevdokia Bershanskaya’s night bomber regiment, meanwhile, moved from airfield to airfield, following the flow of the retreating Soviet troops, but their morale remained high. Their own combat operations went well, with no new casualties. Zhenya Rudneva taught the navigators how to find their bearings in the steppe. It was no easy matter to find your way in a featureless landscape, particularly at night. The important thing was to find a fixed point, a road or railway, a village church, a grove of trees, a stream. On a clear night, of course, the stars and moon could help the navigator, and who better to describe them than Zhenya, the future astronomer? For her, the stars and constellations were familiar friends, and she enjoyed pointing them out to her pilot as they returned from a target. She would tell the legends of the stars to the rest of them on rainy evenings when they could not fly.
You cannot continuously live with the knowledge that you are risking your life every day, and that every sortie may be your last. You get used even to mortal danger as time goes by. “The situation at the front is different from our work in the classroom only in that sometimes you have anti-aircraft guns firing at you,” Zhenya wrote to her parents. “Just like you, I well remember the bombing of Moscow. It was really very difficult to shoot a plane down. If anything does happen, though, what of it? You will be proud that your daughter was an airwoman. Being up in the air really is such a joy!”165
As the regiment’s chief navigator, Zhenya Rudneva was not supposed to fly often but instead to supervise the pilots and navigators immediately prior to takeoff. In fact she was constantly flying, excusing herself by arguing that she needed to know the personal qualities of every pilot in the regiment. She would often take a navigator out of the cockpit and navigate herself. These were days and, for the night bombers, nights of intense activity.
Katya Ryabova, Galya Dokutovich’s pilot, was ill and Galya was flying with Nadya Popova, a slim, very beautiful, blue-eyed blonde. Galya liked flying with her because she was positive, flew confidently, and somehow was “very relaxed.”166 One night they succeeded in blowing up what was probably an ammunition dump, because the explosions down below were very powerful. They felt like birthday girls. Despite the fact that she was getting to fly a lot (the situation was so desperate that everybody was allowed into the air), despite the successful bombing and the posies that the armorer Anya would put in her cockpit, Galya sometimes felt she was living a nightmare. How had the Germans managed to advance so far?
From Olginskaya, where the night bomber regiment was now stationed, they could clearly see the German planes going to bomb Rostov, and even the bombs raining down from the aircraft. It was obvious the city would soon be abandoned, although for the time being no one was talking about it. The village people sat on benches outside their houses and looked toward Rostov. The old men talked quietly to each other, filling their pipes. The old women exclaimed and threw up their hands, but carried on selling their wares and cracking sunflower seeds. While they had the Army in the village they were sure nothing bad could happen.
When the regiment left, though, they stood silently at their gates, watching the aircraft moving out one after the other to a green field outside the village. The planes moved slowly and the girls just wanted to get away as quickly as they could, not to have to see that silent reproach, “those white headscarves of the women and the drooping mustaches of the old men.”167
It seemed at the time to Olga Golubeva that the earth had tilted and everything that could move was slowly sliding toward the east. Numberless people who dared not stop were walking along the highway, the dusty back roads, and newly trodden trails through the unharvested fields of grain. Women carried children “in arms numb from the strain; old women were bent under the weight of the bundles they were carrying; crying children ran to catch up with their mothers or, worn out, fell behind and got lost in the flood of people.” They all walked on, worn down by their own and others’ grief, by hunger, and a terrible sense of humiliation. Had they not been assured for years past that the war, if it broke out, would be short and victorious and the enemy would be beaten on his own territory? “Those who come to us with the sword, shall die by the sword!” No one had warned them they would have to leave behind everything they had gained at such cost and flee headlong from the enemy. Among the stream of refugees, farm carts trundled and unfed and unmilked cows lowed plaintively, cars crawled, and obedient, impassive horses pulled artillery pieces. Behind this motley procession soldiers straggled in tunics wet with sweat. They walked in silence, their eyes downcast.168
Olga had been sent with the chief engineer of her squadron to Rostov to collect new engines, but they arrived to find the storage facility had been destroyed by a heavy bombing raid that threatened to trap Golubeva and her companion too. They had to get out fast and escaped the burning city in a truck complete with driver. On the road and by the roadside, clinging to the verges, moved a steady stream of retreating troops with artillery, cars, carts, kitchens and infantry. Refugees stumbled along, the wounded from bombed-out hospitals and hospital trains hobbled on. The wounded raised their crutches, signaled with their arms, begging for a lift, but their driver did not stop. Olga could see there was no room in the truck and that they could pick up one wounded man only by leaving behind aircraft parts. She wept bitterly and urged the driver to take the wounded man instead of her. The veteran sergeant behind the wheel told her, not without a measure of sympathy, to pack it in. He added, “Looks like we’ve been caught with our pants down the way these fascists are screwing us. But we’ll beat them. We just have to not go soft.”169
A German plane appeared in the sky and the driver turned off under roadside trees. Running away from the truck “with somehow unbelievably long strides,” Olga stumbled over a dead woman and saw next to her a squalling, lacy parcel. Still very young, she had no idea how to calm a baby and in desperation called uselessly for help to her mother, before looking on as the hard-bitten truck driver scooped up the tiny child and hugged it to him. Who knows if that little girl survived the war, and if she did, what kind of life she had?
Olga Golubeva escaped back to her unit from near encirclement, but Sonya Ozerkova, the chief engineer in her regiment, was less fortunate. A regular servicewoman, intellectual, strict, she never allowed herself any show of familiarity toward her subordinates. Initially Sonya made herself unpopular in the regiment, where she was seen as too dry, but later came to be appreciated and admired. She worked well and knew her trade. She was demanding toward the mechanics, but cared deeply about them and took a lot of trouble over their welfare.
During one of their periodic emergency moves to a new airfield caused by the approach of German tanks, the regiment departed, leaving behind Sonya and Glafira Kashirina, a mechanic, with a damaged plane. When it became clear that the plane could not be quickly patched up they, following instructions, set fire to it and walked off the airfield.
After trekking all day along a road clogged with troops and refugees, the women spent the night in a haystack. Sonya woke up in the morning aware that someone was staring at her. A woman beside the haystack asked, “Are you lassies with the Army? You’d better get rid of those uniforms.”170 The woman warned them that German tanks had already gone by, although there were no Germans at the farm just then. She took the airwomen to her home and gave them food and some peasant clothes: long skirts and light-colored shawls. They left, short stocky Sonya and sylph-like Glafira, who was not physically strong and found the long slog more difficult by the day.
They encountered two German motorcyclists on the road. One was busy repairing his motorcycle and the other pointed at their bundles, where, he was guessing, there would be food. Glafira was distraught, and began very slowly to untie her load, at the bottom of which was a gun. While this was going on, Sonya pulled out her own pistol, shot the German, ran over to the other one and shot him twice at point-blank range. The women dashed into the bushes and ran away as fast as they could.
It was three weeks before they saw any Soviet soldiers. Glafira by then was in a very bad state. When they realized she had typhus, Sonya took her to a hospital and got a lift back to her regiment from a passing car. She saw the landing lights of the U-2s when she was still far away and thought they seemed wonderfully pretty. When they arrived, Sonya jumped out of the car and ran to her friends. It was all over.
In fact, however, her real trial was just about to begin. The regiment had an agent of Soviet military counter-intelligence, S.M.E.R.S.h., attached to it and he prevented Sonya from returning to work. She found herself being summoned to the Special Department of the division and questioned in detail, or rather, interrogated, as to how she had escaped the encirclement. Ozerkova had some experience of life and knew plenty about the pre-war purges. She realized she was in a very dangerous situation.
In the Soviet Union anyone who had been captured, or even just spent time in occupied territory, carried the stigma for the rest of their life, and even after death. Until the end of the Soviet state the questionnaires of personnel departments included the question, “Were you or any of your relatives in occupied territory?” Soldiers who managed to break out of encirclement or escaped from captivity might be beside themselves with joy to have finally made it back to their own side and eager to get back to fighting the Germans, only to find that, unbelievably, the Special Department agents were demanding in the course of interrogation that they should confess to having been recruited by the Germans. Particularly in the case of officers, if it was decided they were traitors the Military Tribunal could sentence them to be shot, or stripped of their rank and sent to a penal battalion. In such a battalion it was possible to “redeem your guilt” with blood and regain the rank of officer, but for that you had first to survive. They were thrown into the most hopeless situations and most of those in a penal battalion died in their first battle.
Even people who before the war supposed there was no smoke without fire, that if someone was innocent they would not have been arrested, could not believe that soldiers in their unit who managed to return from encirclement could be traitors. It simply did not make sense. The only exception to this treatment would be if the soldiers had returned to a unit that was in the thick of the fighting and in desperate need of some more cannon fodder. Only then would S.M.E.R.S.h. decide that they had other things to do, leaving them to shed their blood on equal terms with everyone else.
Quite how hopeless her situation was, Sonya realized only after several days of interrogation. Not only had she been in occupied territory where she might have been recruited by the Germans but, far worse, fearing she would be captured, she had destroyed her Party membership card. She was well aware that at that time the Party card was valued more highly than a human life, but at the time she had been confident the Party would forgive her in view of the circumstances. Now, as she was repeatedly asked about the circumstances in which she lost it, she knew it was equally impossible to lie or tell the truth. Suddenly she herself was not sure whether or not she had done the right thing, and submissively awaited her fate.
Sonya was sent before the Military Tribunal. She was expecting a serious punishment, but was shocked when she heard she was to be shot. She was stripped of her epaulets, her head was shaved, and she was taken to await execution. She was saved by the commissar of her battalion, who found out quite by chance what was going on when the driver he was with mentioned that: “The chief engineer of the women’s night bomber regiment has been sentenced to be shot.”171 The commissar had heard nothing about it and immediately sent a coded message to the Air Force headquarters of the front, which ordered a stay of execution while the case was reviewed. Sonya Ozerkova was acquitted, and reappeared shortly afterward in the regiment, bald as a coot and with a fixed, stony expression on her face. She would not speak about her experiences, and only after the war admitted to a comrade from the regiment, “If I am walking down the street and someone gives me a fixed stare, I shudder and my heart starts pounding.”
Sonya Ozerkova was not the first and would not be the last of Raskova’s wards to come to the attention of S.M.E.R.S.h., a powerful institution that trapped real traitors, but also unmasked as spies completely innocent people, in the best traditions of the Stalinist regime.