“I’ll bake a cake,” Nina Shebalina announced, a girl who had her priorities right even at Stalingrad.298 In their few weeks at the front with 9 Guards Regiment, Valya Krasnoshchyokova had become very close to Nina and felt she could trust her with her life. Nina was fairly hefty, had light brown hair and an agreeable, confident air. She had a great personality, an incisive intellect, a brave heart, and did not say things lightly. But a cake? Where on earth could they find the ingredients? “We’ll sort that out,” Nina assured Valya. “We absolutely must celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution on November 7.”
The Communists, when they came to power, abolished all “tsarist” holidays except New Year. New, Soviet, holidays soon appeared in their place: International Labor Day, observed on May 1; Young People’s Day; International Women’s Day, which was not very international because it was observed only in the U.S.S.R., on March 8; and, of course, the anniversary of the October Revolution of October 25, 1917. On this day, as on May Day, workers’ demonstrations were organized, marching in orderly columns with red flags, portraits of Stalin, and banners with slogans. Bands played, and solemn meetings and rallies were held. In the two decades of Soviet rule people forgot that demonstrations were supposed to be a spontaneous carnival of popular feeling. In the Soviet Union they were planned and attendance was obligatory. The atmosphere was cheerful, and when the official part was over people would go home to celebrate with their families. They would do their best to lay on a festive spread and get hold of vodka. People need holidays, and on November 7, 1942, most Soviet women, just like Nina Shebalina, were determined to bake a cake even if, like her, they lacked the ingredients.
A month previously Stalingrad had been such a hell that it would never have entered the heads of any of Raisa Belyaeva’s flight to throw a party but now, in Zhitkur, even though for most people everything was as difficult and chaotic as in any other front-line village, the days were less frenetic for the girls. For the rest of his life, Vladimir Lavrinenkov remembered “its little huts, its watermelons, its camels, and the boundless, open horizon there.”299
Seeing how hard life was for local civilians, especially evacuees, the girl mechanics did not grumble about their lot, although their work was still just as demanding, their living conditions unsatisfactory, the food bad and, to add insult to injury, there were lice which they just could not get rid of.300 The pilots were decently fed even here, but the mechanics subsisted on blondie, sometimes with machine oil poured over it. Only on very rare occasions were they given herring. The last time they had seen fresh meat was back in 437 Regiment. On that occasion, when they saw meat and bones on their plates, some guessed they were about to dine on Pashka, their she-camel who had carried water from the Volga. She was wounded during shelling and had to be put down, but provided them with a feast fit for a tsar.301
In Shestakov’s regiment, pilots they were on good terms with would sometimes slip them something from their own rations. Lilya Litvyak and Katya Budanova, when they were about to go out on a mission, would leave the mechanics bread on a nail in the wall.302 But nobody ever forgot the cake baked for November 7, 1942, which was the only one they ate in the course of the war. The girls, pilots and mechanics alike, worked together to collect the ingredients. Bread was in short supply locally and rationed, so by hoarding that and other products, the girls had something they could barter for eggs. These were hard to come by and had to be acquired one at a time. In the same way, they got hold of milk and sour cream. In the canteen they drank their tea unsweetened, and asked to be given the sugar separately. The pilots also hoarded the “hundred grams” (of vodka), issued to them daily at the front on the orders of Anastas Mikoyan, People’s Commissar of the Food Industry. They swapped the vodka for eggs, milk, and sugar until they had assembled all they needed. It was an all-girl celebration of the revolutionary anniversary: no men were invited. The field post had just delivered a batch of letters and those who had been sent one read it aloud, because those whose home towns and villages were in occupied territory could not receive any. News of their friends’ families was almost as important as news of their own. The cake turned out wonderfully and they celebrated the holiday in style.303 Around them too, the mood was changing. Although nothing had been announced, everyone knew a major Soviet offensive was in the offing. Troops were massing in Zhitkur.
Incredibly, one cold, overcast October day the Soviet St. George himself appeared to the girl mechanics. “Girls, on parade!” ordered somebody who ran up to the aircraft very out of breath. With no time to change, they ran straight from the airfield just as they were, “unkempt, in our quilted trousers and mechanics’ jackets.” They were lined up and “some character in a tall Astrakhan fur hat and with general’s epaulets passed along our ranks, twice.” The stranger departed without a word. They learned afterward that this had been none other than General Georgiy Zhukov, one of the most important figures in the war. As their superiors informed them, this representative of Supreme Command Headquarters had been unimpressed. “Are they young women or scarecrows from the vegetable patch?” he inquired. Their jackets were, as always, covered in grease, and there had been no time to run the several kilometers to their accommodation to freshen up, but evidently no one managed to explain that to him.304 It was said Zhukov ordered that they should be issued with greatcoats, dresses, and boots the right size, but by the time the requisite items were found, the girls had been transferred to a different regiment.
In peacetime, Zhukov was too dangerous a rival for the U.S.S.R.’s leaders and they kept him well away from power. When, however, the country was teetering on the brink of disaster, they suddenly brought him back, giving him all the powers he needed to save the situation. Something similar occurred after the war. In June 1953 it was Zhukov who was entrusted with arresting Lavrenty Beria, the instigator and executor of Stalin’s purges, in the middle of a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R.305 Zhukov was warned that Beria was dangerous, might be armed, and was a skilled practitioner of unarmed combat, but Zhukov already knew exactly who he was dealing with. The arrest of Stalin’s murderous executioner, who had kept the entire Soviet Union prostrate with terror, was Zhukov’s finest hour. A bell was rung, the agreed signal, and Zhukov burst into the meeting with several generals. He pointed his pistol at Beria and ordered him to put his hands up. Beria turned white as a sheet. Looking straight into his enemy’s frightened eyes, Zhukov said, with a fine sense of drama, “The game’s up, you bastard!”
Drawing on his experiences in the First World War, he spirited Beria out of the Kremlin gagged and lying on the floor of a car. He seated several generals well known to the Kremlin Guard in it to prevent any attempt at rescue by Beria’s supporters.306
On September 11, 1941, Zhukov was appointed commander of the Leningrad Front, but the situation there was already past saving and he was unable to prevent the Germans besieging the city, although he managed to stabilize the front line and ensure Leningrad held out. Moscow was under threat already, and Zhukov was transferred to the central sector. As commander of the Western Front, he succeeded, together with General Ivan Konev, in halting the Germans close to the capital itself. Next Zhukov conducted Soviet counter-attacks in the central sector, the Rzhev-Vyazma and Rzhev-Sychyovka offensives. Neither is well known because they failed, but a large proportion of the German forces was diverted from the assault on the capital and the danger to Moscow passed. His next campaign was the Battle of Stalingrad.
In late August 1942, Zhukov was appointed First Deputy People’s Commissar of Defense ready for the Soviet counter-offensive. There was good reason for his presence: failure at the Stalingrad Front in November 1942 would have been calamitous.
On one occasion, Dmitry Panov, Commissar of 85 Fighter Regiment, saw to his horror a scowling Georgian soldier outside the Zhitkur barracks, slowly tearing pages out of an already half-depleted copy of the Soviet equivalent of the Bible: A Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. He was using them as kindling for a campfire to cook some supplement to his meager rations. For such sacrilege, you could be shot, but Panov only bawled the soldier out. Completely unfazed, he replied that the Course was “not likely to be needed now, as the cause the Red Army was fighting for was doomed.” And indeed, nearly every soldier fated to be sent to Stalingrad really was doomed. Of General Rodimtsev’s 10,000-strong division, which played a huge part in the battle, only 320 soldiers survived.307 The German forces, however, were also melting away. Their divisions, already below strength when they embarked on the battle in the summer, were reduced at a disastrous rate and they had no reinforcements to call on.
Gradually pushing the Russians back to the River Volga, the German troops had at first advanced. In early October, Soviet troops attempted two counter-offensives, both of which failed. By the anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, only a narrow strip of the Volga’s western bank remained in Soviet hands, but a sudden sharp fall in the temperature sapped the morale of the German soldiers, most of whom had no winter clothing. However, the defenders of Stalingrad now faced additional problems as the Volga began to freeze, making it more difficult to deliver ammunition, food and reinforcements to the city. The surviving Soviet troops were split into two narrow encirclements, but resistance continued, mainly in factories in the northern part of the city and on Height 102.0, known to the townspeople as “Mamaev Kurgan” (Mamai’s Barrow). This was the highest hill in Stalingrad, and commanded a view over the whole city. Boris Yeremin, observing the Stuka bombers pulling so low out of their dives above the barrow he could see the heads of the German pilots, noticed an old woman dragging a goat along on a rope. He spotted she already had some of her belongings in a gap under the railway bridge.
“Where are you taking the goat, Grandma?”
“To that hole under the bridge, to save myself from these villains.”
“You should cross to the other side of the Volga,” he told her.
“How should I leave my home? I’m old. I’ll wait under the bridge for it to be over,” the old lady said, and perhaps she was right.308 What were the chances of her making it safely across the Volga and, if she did, what was there for her on the other side? Nobody had time to look after someone in her situation.
Boris Yeremin returned thirty-three years later to that blood-soaked hill where, it is said, after the fighting 38,000 Soviet soldiers were buried in mass graves.309 Heaven knows what had happened to the support of the bridge to which the old woman had been dragging her goat. Yeremin did not want to talk to anybody, but stood silently at the sun-drenched monument, remembering those days at the beginning of November 1942.
Recalling that time in his memoirs, Yeremin makes no mention of an article in the newspaper Stalin’s Falcons that he must have seen, and which must have been of importance to him. “Heroes of Stalingrad” appeared in a special edition marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Revolution, and lavished praise on, among other pilots, three of Yeremin’s protégés: Alexander Martynov, Ivan Zapryagaev, and Alexey Salomatin.310 After Stalingrad, all three were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. There were rumors later, when he was himself in command of a regiment, that Yeremin nominated pilots for awards only if he was also being nominated—it was as if he was jealous of other pilots’ success.311 Although Yeremin fought valiantly at Stalingrad, he was not made a Hero.
Stalin’s Falcons published a collage of photographs of pilots who had covered themselves in glory at the Battle of Stalingrad: Ivan Kleshchev, Mikhail Baranov, Ivan Izbinsky and ten others, including Zapryagaev and Martynov. There is no photo of Alexey Salomatin, either because of a lack of space, or because, out of superstition, he refused to be photographed. In the article, he has a long paragraph devoted to him. The reporter, S. Nagorny, writes that at Stalingrad Alexey gloriously continued the tradition of Yeremin’s renowned group. Salomatin had shot down ten aircraft on his own account and another nineteen jointly. He told the reporter that on one occasion, while pursuing a Messerschmitt, he was attacked from above by another. He went into a dive and pulled out “so close to the ground that the propeller almost sliced the bushes.” Wholly engrossed by his pursuit, the German pilot “did not notice he had almost no height left and had no time to level out.” He crashed into the ground and his plane exploded. “You see,” Salomatin explained with a crafty smile, “My dive was lengthwise along the ravine, while the silly idiot was flying across it. That did for him. Also, I was flying a Yak, which is a lot nippier than a Messer.”312
Often not even a tenth of what was written in articles about the exploits of Soviet pilots was true. The pilots liked to boast, the reporters to embellish, and editors welcomed that. When you read this paragraph, however, you feel you are hearing Alexey Salomatin’s words and that everything written here is true, save for a few forgivable exaggerations by the pilot himself. Nagorny has changed nothing in his not wholly grammatical but graphic description. Salomatin, fearless, a born fighter pilot, was quite capable of bringing his plane out of a dive at the last moment with the propeller “almost slicing the bushes.” He loved taking risks, even when there was no need. His death-defying aerobatics were to cost him his life only a few months later.